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INTRODUCTION
In the mid-seventies the trade union movement was at the peak of its power. The TUC, led by Vic Feather, Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, virtually had the status of an alternative government.
Indeed, Edward Heath went to the country in February 1974 on the specific question: "Who runs the country - the Conservative Party or the trade unions?" The Conservative Party did not win the election!
Nevertheless the unions, with all their power and strength, still did not perform or take part in any of the functions of government. They retained their original character - that of a protest movement. But with this difference. The protest movement was now strong enough to prevent government from governing whenever and in whatever sphere it wished.
This was not a situation which could continue for long if there was to be any government at all. Either the trade unions would go all the way and take on some of the functions of government (both nationally and in the government of enterprises) or partake in government in some way, or else they would have to find a way of remaining protest organisations for the indefinite future. The matter was debated in the unions and outside of them, but by no means extensively or thoroughly. Neither course of action was fully explained or understood.
Some union leaders did their best. David Lea of the TUC tried to explain how workers' control and a share in government would preserve union power through the responsible use and development of that power, and the relationship of all that to socialism.
Joe Gormley favoured retaining the protest character of the unions but maintained that they could also retain their new found power if they used this power with the greatest caution.
Both Lea, the workers' controller, and Gormley, the collective bargainer, understood the power stalemate which existed in the mid seventies and they devised practical ways of resolving that stalemate. One may have been a progressive and the other a conservative, but both were practical and feasible.
Unfortunately, Lea and Gormley were exceptions. Most trade unionists did not understand the stalemate, and most of those who did understand it tried to muddle through an impossible middle course. They affirmed, as Hugh Scanlon put it, "management's right to manage" along with the government's right to govern. But at the same time they determined to preserve the power of veto which the unions possessed, in an undiminished form.
The nearest thing to a major debate was organised by the National Union of Mineworkers at Harrogate in December 1977. The NUM journal The Miner, billed the Conference as the beginning of the debate on workers' control versus free collective bargaining.
In fact it was the end of the debate.
Attempts to establish forms of workers' control in both public and private sectors over the previous couple of years (especially the attempts of the Bullock Committee) had been effectively defeated by the combined efforts of Hugh Scanlon, Frank Chapple and Arthur Scargill. Arthur Scargill appears in the pages that follow to get the worst of the discussion. But he was already victorious before Harrogate took place.
His opponents neither explained nor agitated for their position in any serious way, and Arthur was never compelled to take his own position to its logical conclusion in debate.
We have since been experiencing the working out of the crisis of the mid seventies. It was a crisis of the trade union movement and it is the trade union movement which is having to live with the consequences.
First we had the 1979 "winter of discontent" which brought down the Labour government and brought Thatcher to power.
Now we have a protracted miners' strike and the next best thing to a civil war inside the trade union movement.
The resolution of the crisis has been taken out of the debating chamber and onto the streets. The union movement which refused to either develop its power or define it, is now having that power taken from it.
If we are to understand our present crisis, let alone do anything about it, we need to look at its origins. These can be seen in the debates of the mid seventies. Here we present one of the most important of these.
Ernest Bevin Society. September, 1984.