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WORKING CLASS POWER AFTER THE WAR
14. In 1945 both classes expected a postwar slump (experience of World War I had taught them to expect it). Keynesianism meant that the slump never came. Since 1945 there has been a tight labour market and the working class have not had to resist wage cuts or demand the right to work. Until the late '60s, Britain's strike record was amongst the best in the capitalist world. (The trotskyite left and revolutionary intelligentsia began to think that there might not be a revolution after all as the working class had sold its birthright for a mess of pottage.)
15. The working class had been willing to abstain from using its market advantage to the full during both world wars. However, in the 1950s and 60s, the pull of the market continued strong. Though the working class was given reasons by successive Governments for wage restraint (that the economy could not pay more wages without affecting exports and investment), these reasons were flouted in practice by the employers' use of increasing wages to attract and keep labour and ensure that labour actually produced (wage drift in the form of increasing bonus and piece rates).
"Since 1950 most British wage-earners have received an increase in their basic rates at something like annual intervals ... The TUC finally withdrew its support for the 'wage-freeze' in September of that year, and about the same time the rapid rise in raw material prices set off by the outbreak of the Korean War began to be reflected in retail prices. Consequently by Christmas wage increases were coming fairly readily. Prices continued to rise throughout 1951 and a second series of claims was soon in motion. Some Industries even received two increases during that year. By 1952 the pattern had become habitual ..." (The Employers' Challenge, by H.A. Clegg and Rex Adams, 1957, p. 22)
"In this situation (1956, when trade unions were again willing to use the threat to strike openly) some employers changed their attitude to strikes. Since there was no longer an elaborate structure of agreements and understandings between the unions, the government, and themselves which might be wrecked by industrial unrest, they felt themselves free to return to the prewar calculation that the cost of a strike was the cost to their own industry ... Other employers, and certainly the government took a different view. To them it seemed that the institutions and habits of industrial cooperation which had grown up over many years, although a little tarnished, were still so valuable that they should be preserved at almost any cost. A national strike, and still more a series of national strikes, might destroy them. It was not unnatural that the boards of the nationalised industries should share this view." (ibid. p. 31-2)
ATTEMPTS TO DISCIPLINE WORKING CLASS POWER
16. The capitalists at last recognised that this contradictory behaviour from them was bound to lead to the working class following the course of action most habitual to it, that is, exploiting the labour market for higher wages. Consequently, in the late 1960s, the Labour Government let unemployment rise without taking Keynesian countervailing measures, in order to force labour to move to regions where the demand for it was high and into the most profitable industries (this was the first such action by a Government since 1945. Countervailing measures to prevent the emergence of such pressures on labour to move had been taken always when unemployment reached 300,000).
At the same time the rate of inflation increased. The working class resisted both these events by strikes for higher wages and also demanding the right to work ... and returning a Tory government at the next election. After continuing Labour policy on unemployment and failing to control wage increases and price increases, the Conservative Government reversed course and reflated and began the Tripartite Talks. Probably the most important single factor in this reversal was the failure of the Industrial Relations Act. This Act prescribed working class actions within a framework of trade union responsibility for action taken by trade union members before the law (The 1871, 1875 and 1906 Trade Union Acts had granted legal immunity).
Both the Labour Government of 1964-70 and the subsequent Conservative Government believed such a law necessary to erect punitive measures. The logic of the Act was if the working class insisted on making inflationary wage claims and in disrupting production with lightning unofficial strikes and the employers kept caving in by granting wage increases which they could not afford, then the working class must be made legally accountable and thus made to understand that such action was wrong (all previous attempts at reason and persuasion had failed, as will be shewn.) The working class refused to let trade unions be responsible for their actions before the law and the Industrial Relations Act was in fact inoperable from the time it reached the statute book.