Back to Labour Values index
Back to section index
Back to article index
Previous
DEMOCRACY AND ORDER
What the Thatcher Tories expected from industrial democracy was well put by Peregrine Worsthorne in the Sunday Telegraph of January 30th:
"The basic purpose behind the Bullock proposals is to strengthen management: to restore authority to the boss. That is what talk of industrial democracy is really all about: the creation of a new industrial framework wherein workers will once again be willing to do what they are told. It is not about freedom at all, but about order ... This, of course, is why so much emphasis is placed on pushing trade unionists into boardrooms: because trade unionists are thought by Bullock to be able to lead, to get their orders obeyed, much better than managers ... The aim, very simply, is to find a new way of rendering the inevitable disciplines of a technological society acceptable to those members whose fate it is to bear their brunt.
"That this aim should be disguised under the title of industrial democracy is so much claptrap, expressly intended to mislead the workers into supposing that they are being offered more freedom rather than less. In fact, workers today enjoy immense freedom to disobey the boss with impunity. In no other country in the world can the worker get away with such flagrant and brazen demonstrations of personal independence ... This chaotic state of affairs is precisely what Bullock is intended to put an end to, because no industrial system can work efficiently against a background of so much personal freedom. Under the present system trade union power is genuinely, if disastrously, libertarian on the shop floor ... What Bullock is seeking to bring about is a state of affairs where trade union power is used to impose order rather than to undermine it ...
"In practice, as against theory, democracy must be understood as a highly successful method of eliciting mass support for, and consent to, that inevitable growth in State power demanded by the processes of industrialisation. If that is the truth about political democracy, it will be even more the truth about industrial democracy, since enfranchising the man on the shop floor is bound to be even less meaningful in terms of giving him real industrial power than enfranchising the man in the street was meaningful in terms of giving him real political power."
Worsthorne opposes the Bullock report on the ground that it will not achieve its purpose of making the worker a contented cog in the industrial process, but will make that purpose even more difficult to achieve:
"...this necessary aim is precisely what Bullock will not succeed in encompassing, since his chosen instrument, the trade unions, is no longer what Bullock assumes it to be. For, far from lending legitimacy to the authority of the boardroom, thereby inducing a greater willingness among workers to do what they are told, trade union-nominated directors will have precisely the opposite effect because in present circumstances trade union power is increasingly seen itself as shockingly illegitimate. A generation ago workers did see trade unions as embodying some high moral principle to which they would gladly bend their knee ...
"So the assumption that the powers of management would be enhanced today by a trade union presence is just as out of date as the earlier assumption that a quota of aristocrats added prestige to the board ... Trade union directors would, in fact, vastly weaken the authority of management, injecting into its ranks from the bottom an entirely new source of nepotism, patronage, amateurism and privilege just at the very moment when such liabilities are being squeezed out of the top."
He concludes that the Bullock Report "would merely stir up the disorder which it is intended to damp down."
It is far from being impossible that the implementation of the Bullock proposals would have the effect that Worsthorne anticipates. And if it is successfully implemented it will almost certainly go through a phase in which its bourgeois opponents will see their nightmares being realised. The best order is a necessary product of disorder. The most efficient order is that which exists just on this side of disorder by common consent - witness the Israeli army, which according to military tradition ought to be incapable of fighting. The new order in British industry will be a product of the operation of existing disorder rather than of a scheme to circumvent it.
Trade union power on the board will undoubtedly be able to stir up disorder. If it merely behaves in accordance with its traditional ideology, that is all it will be capable of doing. But it is more likely that if trade union power is confronted with a choice between wrecking industry and reconstructing it more effectively, it will do the latter. If it fails to do the latter in Britain, where the most civilised working class movement exists (to quote a recent New Statesman diatribe by Paul Johnson), it will be time to reassess many things. But there is no good reason to assume that it will fail.