What Are We Here For?

From JOHN COLE

BLACKPOOL

ATOTAL of 987 delegates have been meeting at Blackpool this week in the 94th Trades Union Congress, but only thirty-five of them really matter. More even than in previous years, the Congress has been a gigantic and impressive public relations exercise, both internal and exter- nal, in which the Genera! Council and the indi- vidual leaders of important unions who form it have propagated their ideas to their followers and to the public. There have not been profound and real divisions and debates like those on wages in the late Forties or on defence policy in the late Fifties and early Sixties. The real work of the TUC will be done during the next twelve months by the General Council.

What has been achieved at Blackpool, how- ever, is the drawing-up of an agenda for the General Council which is far more ambitious than anything it has faced for many years. The credit for this must go principally to Mr. George Woodcock. With two years of his general secre- taryship behind him, he is now feeling more firm- footed, and is prepared to devote the seven or eight years which remain before his retirement to a supreme effort to drag the TUC into the modern age. The resolutions carried in Blackpool this week have, formally speaking, been 'the property of Congress,' but the emphasis given to them has been largely the work of Mr. Woodcock and his devoted young men, who have plotted it all in their splendid headquarters at Blooms- bury.

This new strength and fervour in the bureau- cracy are at once the hope and the danger that spin confusingly round the Woodcock TUC. Leaving aside the Common Market, which finds the unions in as profound a state of disagreement as the Labour Party, three great signposts have been erected at Blackpool this week—on union reorganisation, economic and incomes policy, and fringe benefits in industry. At least, they can be great signposts, if Mr. Woodcock is able to persuade his General Council to treat them seri- ously, rather than with a yawn.

He must know that this will not be easy. The General Council, composed of general secretaries or senior officials of unions with a high degree of sovereignty, has always been jealous of too strong a general secretary. Walter Citrine was one such, and in a reaction after has retirement, the Council turned thankfully to Vincent Tewson, a man who was content to let the Congress take it own direction. Mr. Woodcock is as great a. contrast with Tewson as one can imagine, The hero of his own trade union life has been Citrine, and he shows every sign of following the Citrine example by keeping the TUC in a constant fer- ment of useful thought.

In the long-term view, the organisation inquiry initiated by the Congress on its opening day could be the most fundamental of the three pro- jects, although it is intimately connected with the other two. Mr. Woodcock does not intend that the General Council should plunge straight into another inevitably fruitless attempt to reduce the number of unions by the amalgamations, federa- tions and transfer of members that officials and rank and file alike find so hard to stomach. In- stead he has invited the unions to look first at their purposes in a modern society, no less. 'What are we here for?' Mr. Woodcock asked on Mon- day afternoon, looking like a fundamentalist preacher, under his bushy eyebrows.

This is precisely the kind of question that the General Council would never think of asking itself. To many member; it will sound just as

much like a flight of poetic fancy as 'What are the stars, Joxer?' For no one should under- estimate the resistance to any kind of central action in British trade unionism. Each leader of a union thinks that he and his organisation know best what they are here for—to look after the boilermakers or the compositors, and keep their pure craft status unspotted from the world; to stop the railway clerks being engulfed in a tide of industrial unionism blown up by their manual colleagues; to preserve the size of a general workers' union, at whatever cost.

The fact that more than half the working popu- lation of Britain does not enjoy the services of a trade union at all, and that the 8,312,875 workers who belong to organisations affiliated to the TUC do not get the full fruits of their membership because of anachronistic structure and profound confusion over purpose—these are heretical thoughts which might never have ruffled the calm of the General Council if Mr. Woodcock and a new tide of events had not happened simultaneously. The General Secretary, in a speech which was muffled by his desire not to frighten the timid, touched on the new factor which will force the TUC, willy-nilly, to do something about its inter- nal arrangements—the emergence of Govern- ments with a continuing interest and acknow- ledgement of responsibility for the economic health and industrial development of the country. Every government pronouncement affecting the trade unions in the past six years, from the present Prime Minister's attempt as Chancellor in 1956 to create a plateau of wages and prices to Mr. Ltoyd-Maudling's National Incomes Commission this year, has been a pro- duct of this interest.

The logic of these events is clear to the out- side observer, although obscured to some intelli- gent TUC leaders by their over-sensitive appreci- ation of the difficulties that surround any change in this most conservative of institutions. It is that the British trade union movement must be more centralised. The TUC Economic Committee is going to Sweden next month, and in the new, mood of receptiveness to ideas which has stirred the unions this year the visit could be a profound experience. Swedish unions have made great surrenders of sovereignty to the centre, and in return have gained a stable wages system (though by noe means a perfect one), a position of immense authority in the nation, and a social system engaged in a steady redistribution of wealth towards the poorer sections of the communaY: This last result would be the serious answer i(),Is many British trade unionists to Mr. Woodcocks question, 'What are we here for?' The to s of this week's Congress suggests that the uni°11, may at last be reaching the stage of maturity and success where they can take a hard look at

inequalities within their own ranks. .

If the state of life of the lowest-paid workers suffer and of the pensioners and others who e most from inflation were really to becuil elevated into an issue of conscience in the till e_ major inquiries which the Blackpool Congress has initiated, British trade unionism would really be on the march. It is too early yet to have any

-

but the most tender hopes, but the possibility

can certainly not he discounted.