John Shepherd’s new account of the winter of discontent is a labour of love, exploring in detail the myriad strikes and disputes in both private and public sectors of that fateful winter of 1978-79.
Shepherd explains James Callaghan’s decision not to call a general election in autumn 1978 – believing that Labour would not in fact have won. Callaghan saw his duty to hang on until 1979 in the hope that polls might improve. Events derailed his strategy, but the idea that Thatcherism could have been averted simply by Callaghan having called an election in 1978 is an illusion.
Shepherd, author of an excellent biography of Labour’s 1932-35 leader George Lansbury and of an important account of the very first Labour government of 1924, has gone to great lengths to examine the different disputes (Ford, oil tanker drivers and road hauliers as well as the public sector strikes) and separate chapters relate the perspective of government, media, Conservative party and views from abroad.
He paints a vivid picture, quoting extensively the views of leading militant shop stewards, of the legitimacy they believed their actions to have: the Ford workers who believed that Ford had sufficient profits to afford a 30 per cent boost to workers’ pay; the Liverpool gravediggers and Oldham sewage workers who argued that their jobs were sufficiently unpleasant that they deserved higher pay in recompense. The detail is important – for Shepherd argues that it was local shop stewards and rank-and-file initiative that drove the chaotic momentum of the wave of strikes that broke across the nation.
But a comprehensive account must surely consider the perspective and role of members and leaders of trade unions who did not join the Winter of Discontent and who at the 1978 Labour conference and within the TUC had sought to prevent it. Shepherd argues that union leaders were largely powerless to restrain members from taking industrial action over issues that members believed to be legitimate, but does not explain the lack of industrial action by members of unions such as the railwaymen, post office and telecoms workers, shopworkers, electricians and plumbers, where, unlike in Alan Fisher’s NUPE, the leaders had not directly been urging their members to confront the government. At Labour’s 1978 conference immediately preceding the Winter of Discontent, unions, including the Union of Post Office Workers and National Union of Railwaymen, had backed Callaghan’s five per cent pay policy against the exhortations of NUPE and Clive Jenkins’ ASTMS to abandon pay policy and introduce a minimum wage at a level that would have entailed 40 per cent wage increases for many NUPE members, clearly in breach of the five per cent pay policy, and would have incited rivalrous claims from better paid skilled union members (like the car workers) keen to avoid the erosion of differentials. Some unions (such as the AUEW engineering union) opposed a national minimum wage for just this reason, and had overwhelmingly defeated Alan Fisher’s attempt at Labour’s 1973 conference to commit Labour to a minimum wage set at 80 per cent of average earnings.
For Shepherd the cause of the Winter of Discontent was low pay: ‘despite five years in office, the Labour government by and large did not possess a comprehensive strategy for remedying low pay in the British economy.’ Shepherd holds Callaghan culpable – ‘his dogmatism and inflexibility over the five per cent [pay rise] policy’ – characterising it as ‘unrealistic’, though given that many of the pay demands were for rises of more than 25 per cent (road haulage and tanker drivers), 30 per cent (water workers) and 40 per cent (local authority and health service manual workers), it is unclear how any viably counter-inflationary pay norm could have averted the disputes or of what alternative means of controlling inflation was available to Callaghan’s government given that it did not want to follow the Thatcher prescription of unemployment to cure inflation.
At that fateful 1978 Labour party conference rail union leader Sid Weighell had defended Callaghan’s five per cent and warned Fisher and the other union leaders who had fomented the Winter of Discontent in no uncertain terms:
‘But the five per cent is there because the trade union movement … abdicated its responsibilities. Because I was in 10 Downing Street when the prime minister said: “Can we reason this out together?” And he was told “Leave it to us — and trust us.” Joe [Gormley] said that, and others. There are 112 General Secretaries on the Executive Committee. If they were left to determine the pay policy, they would not know what the hell to do. (Laughter.) If you want to question the validity of that, look what is lining up now: 20 per cent, 35-hour week, a month’s holiday for Fords. Alan [Fisher] wants 40 per cent. This is what they call responsible collective bargaining. Responsible. Really? When I entered this movement — and I am the third generation into it — my union helped to create this party. The union that sponsored the conference that created the Labour party. I am not going to stand here and destroy it. But if you want the call to go out at this conference that the new philosophy is the Labour party, that you now believe in the philosophy of the pig trough — those with the biggest snout get the biggest share — (Applause.) — I reject it. My union rejects it. And if I am the only one standing here saying it, I will reject it until I drop down dead.’
The National Union of Railwaymen and several other unions did reject it, but the warning went unheeded by Fisher, Clive Jenkins and the TGWU’s Moss Evans. And it was the Labour government of 1979 which dropped down dead.
———————————————————
Greg Rosen is chair of the Labour History Group and author of Old Labour to New: The Dreams that Inspired, the Battles that Divided
———————————————————
Read more in the Progressives Reviews column here
———————————————————
Crisis? What Crisis? The Callaghan Government and the British ‘Winter of Discontent’
John Shepherd
Manchester University Press | 240pp | £70
My own union took part in industrial action in the spring of 1979 and might be considered part of the unrest that led to the fall of the Labour government, and I admit I felt a qualm at how my token two days of one-day strikes may added their pennyworth to the sense that Labour was not in control of events.
Since 1919, negotiations on pay and service conditions of civil servants had been conducted in the National Whitley Council. The Whitley Council brought together representatives of the ‘official’ side (dominated by Treasury officials) and the ‘staff’ side (representatives of the staff associations). If the National Whitley Council failed to reach agreement, either side could go to arbitration.
In 1967, pay and conditions of service for civil servants were formulated on a basis that had been set up since the Royal Commission on the Civil Service (1953-55) chaired b y Sir Raymond Priestley MC using a system of classification of staff. Most classes had a stated scale of pay and it was normal for staff to proceed by annual increments from the point of entry to the maximum. This progression was subject to reviews, and members of staff receiving an adverse report had their increment withheld. The Priestley Royal Commission had recommended that certain criteria be used to enable fair comparison of pay to be made with staff outside the service employed on broadly comparable work. In 1967, Civil Service pay scales were still determined largely on the basis of comparisons made using these criteria. One such criterion was the consideration of evidence produced by the Pay Research Unit (PRU) (which had been set up in 1956. PRU was key to the fairness of the system.
Pay restraint policies in the mid-1970s under first Heath and then Wilson rode over the nationally agreed Priestley pay reaearch system for setting pay, and were thought to interefere unfairly in holding down pulbic sector pay whilst not, in reality, controlling private sector pay. There was great dissatisfaction in the Civil Service over this series of incomes policies (most of all, ironocically at the senior levels, who sometimes saw their former colleagues now retired and on inflation-linked pensions seeming to be catching up on them). The affiliation of the staff associations to the TUC provided the backdrop to what happened next. The Civil Service went on strike, not so mch over pay as the sytem for establishing pay. The first strike in the Civil Service (as opposed to the Post Office) was in 1973. It was about pay, but more about Government pay policy and interference with the Civil Service pay system than about the level of specific pay increases. The larger scale strike of 1979 was the first major incidence of industrial action in which the Civil Service, and even Senior Civil Servants, took part. It was a precursor to a much bigger, more serious strike of 1981.
What happened was that each union member contributed by way of single days of action – strike days, in effect – and lost pay as a result. The impact was obvuiously some loss of service, but it did not really hit the receipt of taxes in quite the scale desired. Government circumvented the impact on the collection service, by using the central accounting maasive and computer-based Accounts Office centres in shipley and Cumbernauld to receive employer deposits of PAYE tax and national insurance and other taxes. When the bigger strikes occurred in 1981, the IRSF aimed to target those big Accounts Offices especially but the Thatcher government had worked out how to stop this tiny union bringing the country to its knees, and this was really the last play of industrial action having anything like success. She then broke the power of the unions, – power being an over-statement, as workers have only the power ot withdraw their labour (at personal cost) whereas their employers had all the power of the state.
From my perspective, we – the IRSF – had a legitimate grievance and our two days of industrial action were no more than flea bites.
The piled-up rubbish in Leicester Square were there because local councils like Westminster City Council could have removed these piles but chose not to in order ot make a political point. Stories of bodies lying unburied in cemetaries were cited as examples of unfeeling unions vrsus the common man. Not surprisingly this caused great anger amonst ordinary NUPE and other union memberships whose pay rates then were far from good by any measure. It’s worth pointing out that a 5% pay rise on a really low level of pay is still worthless, just as you could now increase the national minimum wage by 10% and still not increase it by that much in cash terms. So quite possibly the pay bill cost of a pay rise ot meet NUPE demands might have been in double figures, but you have to consider which pay groups wouls have got double figure pay rises. Weighell’s NUR mrmbers, though doing tough and unlovely jobs, were better paid by comparison.
It’s worth reflecting that had Callaghan paid more respect to union leaders then, in 1978 and 1979, we might not have had Scragill, McGarvey and the Militant Tendency type of head bashers.