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Issue 224 Dec-Jan 2018/19

Exercising workers' control

Workers' control and workers' management

By Ted Mooney, 2018, £5

Available from Left Books

Reviewed by Bill Mullins

Ted Mooney’s short book goes into the experiences of Merseyside workers fighting factory closures during the 1970s. Ted was an engineering union (AUEW) shop steward who played a central role in these battles. The first part of his book gives a theoretical explanation of workers’ power, drawing on the example of the Russian revolution in 1917, particularly at the time of what Leon Trotsky called ‘dual power’. Tsarist rule had been overthrown, the weak capitalist class was in government but held in check by the rising working-class and mass movement which, in turn, was not strong enough to take and hold power.

In the months leading up to October it became increasingly clear that the Russian capitalists were trying to sabotage the revolution – for example, by locking out workers from the factories in Petrograd, despite them being crucial to the war effort. For the capitalist class it was more important to shut down the factories because they were becoming centres of the revolutionary workers’ movement. The workers cut across the sabotage by running the factories themselves, increasingly controlling the production process. This included linking up with workers in other factories to ensure the supply of parts so production in the main plants could continue without interruption.

In the 1970s, factory occupations to stop the bosses’ closure plans were also being discussed, and implemented to a certain extent. It gives some idea of what could happen under a Corbyn government, and how big business would attempt to undermine even the relatively limited reforms planned by the current Labour Party leadership. Workers’ control and management, therefore, will come back onto the agenda again.

Control is separate but indissolubly linked to management. It depends on the level of class struggle and the balance of forces between the shop floor and management at any particular time. Workers’ management comes into its own under a workers’ government carrying through the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy. This would require the full democratic accountability of those above through control by the working class from below. This would be accomplished, primarily, through free and democratic trade unions working with the government to manage the day-to-day running of the economy.

In the 1970s, the level of trade union organisation in Britain – expressed, in particular, through the growth of the shop stewards movement – became the main method of defending workers’ interests. At the time, capitalism was going through its first worldwide recession since the second world war. There were eight million workers in manufacturing, compared to just over two million now. The TUC represented over 50% of the workforce, with 13 million trade union members by the end of the 1970s.

In manufacturing, the percentage was much higher – around 90% in engineering, car assembly plants and component suppliers. There were over 350,000 shop stewards and they were, in general, subject to regular election and instant recall, under the democratic control of the mass of the organised working class. It was estimated that more than 1,000 factories had 2,000 or more workers – some had tens of thousands.

An academic study in the 1980s showed that the bigger the plant the more likely it was to have left-wing leaderships of the shop stewards committees. Above all, this was due to the specific weight of those who were most vocal in opposition to the bosses’ attacks and were prepared to give a lead in fighting back. Even the British Communist Party had influence throughout industry in the immediate post-war period, despite its relatively small size.

Other left groups grew their influence later, including Militant (forerunner of the Socialist Party). This was the case in the Land Rover/Rover car assembly plant in Solihull near Birmingham, where I was the senior steward. By the middle of the 1970s, it had 8,000 workers. Like many, it was a closed shop – you had to be in a trade union to keep your job. They were represented by over 400 shop stewards from eight different unions – mainly the Transport and General Workers Union (now part of Unite).

The battles led by the joint stewards committee often centred on what was called ‘mutuality’. That was shorthand for the reality that management could not implement any decision that affected our members without the ‘mutual agreement’ of the shop stewards. This was common across the heavy battalions of industry, to the eternal frustration of the bosses. They would complain that their ‘right to manage’ was being undermined. For instance, we would not let the company introduce time-and-motion studies onto the shop floor unless the shop stewards were present. And we limited their presence to no more than the time it took five cars to pass any one point on the assembly line, 15-20 minutes.

This did not come about through any written agreement between the unions and management. It grew over time as we used ‘custom and practice’ to enforce the point. From time to time, management tried to sneak engineers onto the shop floor behind the unions’ backs, but the workers invariably walked off the job and brought production to a halt until the offending ‘time-study men’ were removed.

It was an example of how ‘best practice’, from a trade union point of view, was enforced by the workers’ willingness to take action in union organised workplaces. Another decisive step was the gradual control won over who gets what job. Assembly line jobs are monotonous at the best of times, but workers knew which ones were best. So, when one of the better jobs became vacant, workers on ‘worse jobs’ wanted it. Typically, it would be the foreman who decided – the rate of pay was usually no different between these mainly semi-skilled jobs. Inevitably, he would give it to one of his ‘favourites’. Over time, however, the shop stewards took control.

It reached the level where they controlled the whole process on behalf of the shop floor. Rules were adopted at mass meetings on how the jobs would be allocated. Sometimes 20 or 30 workers could be involved in a reshuffle as, one by one, based only on the length of time they had worked in the factory, workers moved on to better jobs leaving their jobs open to someone else.

This was one of the biggest headaches for management who continually complained about it, although there was little they could do. It gives an indication of the level of workers’ control during this time. When the 1970s recession set in, the organised working class used its power to defend jobs and living standards. This is something that Ted Mooney goes into in the second part of his book, when the General English Electric Company’s Merseyside plant faced closures and redundancies.

Workers’ management only really existed for a short time in the first few years of the Soviet Union. The factory soviets (councils) became the bedrock of the whole workers’ management system after the 1917 revolution. They elected delegates to the district soviets, which elected delegates to the city soviet and, from there, on to the all-Russia supreme soviet.

It was by this means that workers’ management became the foundation of the attempt to organise the socialist transformation of society. However, this system began to break down as the advanced layers of the Russian working class were gradually consumed by the civil war which followed the revolution – or were exhausted by their Herculean efforts to rebuild the shattered economy. Over time, this allowed the rising bureaucracy, headed by Stalin, to consolidate its parasitic grip on the state.

As Ted Mooney points out, Lenin and Trotsky saw the October revolution as the first stage in a chain of worldwide revolutions – particularly by the massively organised German workers – in support of the soviet revolution. With the failure of the German revolution 1918-23, the Stalinist counter-revolution gradually came to the fore in Russia itself.

A workers’ government coming to power in any of the economically advanced industrial countries today would start off with the maximum workers’ democracy, based in the workplaces. Socialist planning, above all, means the involvement of the mass of the working class – through delegated and participatory democracy – in deciding what is produced and provided, as part of a socialist plan to develop the economy to meet the needs of the many and end the production of things for profit for the few.

On the Track: union struggles at British Leyland in the turbulent 1970s

By Bill Mullins, former TGWU senior shop steward

Published by Socialist Publications, 2016, £5


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