HOW HAMMOND TAMED THE TUC

Peter Paterson explains how the electricians,

far from being punished, are forcing change upon the trade unions

HISTORY does not record what happened to the guardsman whose mother proudly boasted to the neighbours as the column marched by: 'My Johnny's the only one in step.' But it provided a sequel of sorts last week when Eric Hammond and his electri- cians' union, the EETPU, were disciplined by the general council of the Trades Union Congress for being wildly out of step with the prevailing sentiment of the movement, While on the sidelines the unlikely maternal figure of Rupert Murdoch insisted that the reverse was the truth.

Yet Mr Hammond did not by any means suffer the condign punishment at the hands Of his general council judges widely pre- dicted for him. The TUC, after all, was Putting its authority as the governing body of British trade unionism to the test, and along with that authority, much else that has been taken as the natural order of things by the trade union fraternity for more than a century. When the time came, however, their resolution faltered.

It was in many ways an extraordinary and fateful moment, in terms of courtroom drama providing the necessary contrast between individuals personifying the clash of ideas. On one side, Eric Hammond, the Gravesend provocateur, pioneer of the new unionism', delivering a 60-page de- fence document full of barbed attacks on his accusers, even to the point of alleging falsification of the evidence. His is a blatant challenge from the Right to the traditional conservatism of the TUC. On the other, the trade union movement's full time chief executive, Norman Willis, TUC General Secretary, yet to achieve anything of note since taking over from Len Murray last year, painfully aware of his own and his organisation's limitations, but hand- lapped as a persuader, despite his inclina- tion to talk non-stop, by an inability ever to finish a sentence. Mr Willis's short reign has been filled with crises, but unlike Mr Len (now Lord) Murray, who became ever more gaunt in trying to solve them, his successor seems to add half a stone in Weight each time the general council Meets.

At the end of an exhausting day's de- bate, after more than 13 hours' considera- tion of whether to suspend the electricians for actions calculated to bring the trade union movement into disrepute, or varia- tions on that theme, backed up by eight individual counts of bad behaviour — five of which were found proved — Mr Willis and his general council colleagues shrank from executing such a final judgment. Instead they imposed a series of footling 'directions' Mr Hammond would find no difficulty in complying with. The signifi- cant thing about that result was that a straw poll of members of the general council — minus the last straw of Mr Willis — as they arrived that morning at Congress House would certainly have shown a majority for suspension. And that would inevitably have been followed by expulsion when the annual congress met at Brighton in September. Blood lust was running high among the members of the general council because Mr Hammond's aiding and abetting of Mr Murdoch in his astonishing Fleet Street coup have angered, and frightened, union leaders far beyond the newspaper industry. Long before Wapping relocated itself on the map — Pepys, Sexton Blake and the Blitz until then seem to comprise its history — the trade union establishment had be- come deeply disturbed by what they saw as the uncomradely conduct of the EETPU.

Here was a union which appears deliber- ately to flout all the rules — unwritten as well as written — by which British trade unions have conducted their domestic and public affairs for more than a century. Its leaders boast that they see no great merit in clinging to the strike weapon if they can trade it as a bargaining counter. Tradition- al ideas about sharing the work, and multiplying the number of unions, hold no great attraction for them: what they are increasingly after is single-union deals — and the single union has to be the EETPU.

Of course the union does not live in a world in which it is entirely free to reach such agreements. So far, the takers have almost always been foreign-owned firms to which a 'contract' rather than an enforce- able agreement comes more naturally. But the electricians have made it clear that if they manage to hold on to the printing jobs they have seized at Wapping (and they are currently forbidden under the terms of the TUC's `punishment' from making any for- mal, or even informal, deal with News International or any of its subsidiaries) they will expect something on the same lines from Rupert Murdoch. Achieving that will, surely, be almost as big a task as escaping the supreme punishment of the TUC.

If only that were all there was to it the other trade unions could still possibly learn to live with the EETPU. But of course it isn't. In so many other areas the union seems prepared to fly in the face of the rules and conventions of the club. It publicly rejects the closed shop, for exam- ple, as 'conscription' and has called for a reform of the TUC's sacred Bridlington Agreement, which regulates competition between unions. The EETPU sees no reason why, since it conducts more postal ballots than any other union, it should not avail itself of the government subsidy provided for that purpose. It flirts with 'outcasts' like the breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers. And politically it derides those unions which cast their bloc votes in Labour leadership elections with- out democratically consulting their mem- bers as to their individual choice. Now all this certainly adds up to a kind of 'new unionism', but it is not without an element of self-interest. While all the publicity focuses on the new-style `no- strike' agreements, the EETPU remains the guardian of many thousands of deals on behalf of its members, lots of them jointly agreed with other unions, without the slightest degree of unorthodoxy about them. It is locked into closed shop agree- ments cherished as much by its own shop stewards as similar restraints of trade have been nurtured, and now mourned, by the print workers of Fleet Street. And in the vast majority of the industries in which it operates it has certainly not forsworn the strike weapon.

While it urges changes in Bridlington, the EETPU is as jealous as any other union over 'poaching' by rival unions, and has shown itself ready to invoke the estab- lished machinery of the TUC to uphold its rights. Indeed, there is a sense of schi- zophrenia — its enemies would doubtless say hypocrisy — in its public attitudes. Mr Eric Hammond, the electricians' leader, may hobnob with Mr Roy Lynk, thus raising Mr Scargill's blood-pressure to boil- ing point, but would move swiftly to crush any breakaway union of electricians.

So what is the EETPU up to? Why has it, three times in succession — over taking state money for ballots, by encouraging a breakaway union, and now by taking over the traditional jobs of printers at Wapping — courted expulsion from the national trade union centre? Why, more important, does the general council, in the face of such deliberate provocation and defiance, resist the almost overpowering urge to cast this pestilent union into outer darkness?

The answer is that Eric Hammond has sensed that he is free to operate in new territory, and that the TUC has failed to keep up with a changed and changing world. That the drive for a new kind of trade unionism should come from the electricians is not surprising. The seminal event in their history was the communist ballot-rigging scandal almost 30 years ago. The uncovering of the gigantic swindle embarrassed the rest of the trade union movement, and the union has never quite been forgiven for rocking the boat, existing ever since as an outsider.

One of the effects of the scandal was to destroy the left-wing influence within the union, thus assisting Mr Hammond by neutralising the kind of opposition any other union leader could expect if he attempted to break the mould of union politics in a similar way. Much of the difference, however, between what Mr Hammond preaches and what his union in most of the situations in which it finds itself actually practises, can fairly be put down to the pragmatism in his own character, the extraordinary power that can still be wielded by an individual union leader over his subordinates, and a highly developed sense of corporate opportunism in the upper reaches of the EETPU developed by some remarkably able outsiders brought in as advisers. While the rhetoric still makes obeisance to the traditional link with the Labour Party, it is increasingly nostalgic in tone, harking back to the golden age before the Militant Tendency gained a foothold, before unilateralism — well, before Kinnock, once you get down to it. In other words, in terms of philosophy, Mr Hammond's EETPU has, in all but name and the destination of its affiliation fees, become the first SDP trade union.

So what happened at the trial of Mr Hammond was not so much a lack of will on the part of the TUC as a telling example of how life has changed for the trade union movement. The reasons are many: the TUC is hard-up and could scarcely afford to lose the contributions of the EETPU; it feared that suspension might provoke Mr Hammond into establishing a rival trade union organisation, using the Nottingham- shire miners, rebellious railwaymen, a sprinkling of no-strike teacher unions and other components of an alternative move- ment which has been developing in recent years; allies of the electricians from within the TUC's ranks, most notably the en- gineers, might also have joined them out of anti-Left solidarity; and the calculation was made that an electricians' union on the loose might win more members than it lost.

Overriding any such considerations, however, was a fear of the law. No one was certain that, if put to the test, the TUC's constitution could withstand the scrutiny of the courts. And Eric Hammond made it abundantly clear to his judges that were they to opt for suspension he would have no hesitation in mounting a legal challenge at once. So, in the end, the fate of the EETPU was not decided in the time- honoured way by a bunch of union leaders assessing the behaviour of one of their peers, and voting either on the evidence produced, according to political inclina- tion, or on the basis of past favours performed or withheld, but on what their legal advisers told them to do.

Just how remarkable a change this repre- sents may be gauged from events in the past. The TUC was able to suspend, and then expel, more than 20 unions which defied orders and registered under Edward Heath's 1971 Industrial Relations Act. None of them, including, as it happens, the NGA, one of Mr Hammond's accusers this time, thought to challenge the decision at law. Of course, both the law and the legal climate have changed since then, and that is the whole point.

The scene is now entirely different, and both Mr Hammond and the general council are well aware of it. There is an entirely new atmosphere, a new culture. Actions must be tempered by what the law may decide, whether on the picket line, at the bargaining table, or in the TUC's own council chamber.

The TUC began as a powerless secretar- iat, or clearing house, for the trade union movement. It grew sufficiently powerful to found a political party, and to be hailed as the potential 'general staff' of the Labour movement. The failure of the General Strike destroyed that notion, but in the early Seventies the same glittering, illusory prize again beckoned.

The electricians' rebellion, the failure to crush it, and the appalling weight of the new laws, amply demonstrated this week by sequestration of the funds of the print union Sogat 82 — the direct result of Mr Hammond's tinkering with craft bound- aries — confront the TUC with the harsh- est of choices. It can combine with its most bellicose units to stage a rebellion against the restrictive new legal framework. And in that case the portly Mr Willis might as well vacate his plush offices in Great Russell Street and go underground. Or it can allow the print unions and their allies to realise that the world has changed, keep its own hands clean in terms of the law — and survive, What's left will not be a general staff, nor a power complex capable of negotiating with, let alone making or breaking, governments. The TUC will revert to its original role of secretariat or, more likely, a neighbourhood law centre for trade unions.