Back to 1970s index
Back to Miners Strike index
Scargill and Gormley
- A striking contrast
Pamphlet published in September 1984 from an article in The Irish Communist, April 1984.
The Chairman of the National Coal Board and the President of the NUM - industrial relations as they ought to be.
"Far from acting as management might be expected to do” recalled Mrs Thatcher acidly, “the NCB board was behaving as if it entirely shared the interests of the union representing its employees.” (Daily Telegraph obituary for Derek Ezra, 22 Dec 2015)
A copy of this article can be downloaded as a Word document here
On 'free collective bargaining'
'Gormley was a wholehearted practitioner of free collective bargaining, while Scargill is only an ideologist of it.'
The position of the trade union movement in the 1970s
'The refusal of the Labour movement to move decisively into the position of a ruling class in the seventies is having catastrophic effects on it in the eighties. It is like a horse whose nerve has gone because it refused a fence.'
Strength and limitation of Gormley's straightforward trade unionism
'The appointment of McGregor has has been widely condemned as a mischievous provocation. But it is only the working out of the trade union decision to shoot down the Bullock proposals on the ground that "it is the business of management to manage".
The strike
'A major strike can either be an industrial strike on a sound economic issue or it can be a political strike on some issue of general interest to the trade union movement - even if it is only breaking a wages freeze. Scargill's strike is neither. It falls between every stool there is.'