Trades Union Congress 150th Anniversary

Lord Monks Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by declaring an interest. I am the oldest living former general secretary of the TUC, a position that I am in no hurry to relinquish. I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Prosser, a very good friend and close colleague for many years, for initiating and so skilfully introducing this debate to celebrate, as we do today, the TUC’s 150th birthday and the contribution it has made to the well-being of this country in so many fields of public life.

My noble friend Lady Prosser has, by the way, been a doughty and effective champion of rights for women. The progress made by women in the trade union movement, so that today there are more women members than men within the TUC, is in no small measure due to the efforts of my noble friend and others who have led the way in making the TUC more equal and more representative.

I am also grateful to the other speakers. A range of views have been articulated, all of them constructive. I will not go through them all but there were plenty of ideas there, which people will look at with great interest in the trade union movement. I am sorry to say that it is a bit of a pity, but perhaps not a surprise, that apart from the Minister, who has his job to do, there were no Conservatives down to speak. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, is now looking for an invitation, but I am afraid that no trade unionist can miss the opportunity to get off work early, as we are likely to do this afternoon.

What we have lacked in quantity, we have made up for in quality in the debate. Manchester was the TUC’s birthplace all those years ago. As many noble Lords can tell, it was also my birthplace. I recall with pride that in 1968, on the occasion of the TUC’s centenary when, as my noble friend Lord Lea said, the celebrations were located in Manchester, my father, a parks superintendent, designed and installed in a central city park a floral clock with the TUC logo to celebrate those first 100 years. Little did he or I know that, two years later, I would have a job with the TUC.

In its 150 years, the TUC has had its ups and downs, but it has proved pretty resilient in the face of the great economic change from the UK as the undoubted, yet-to-be-challenged workshop of the world to the predominantly service economy of today. It has stuck up for working people in slumps and booms. It has seen its membership grow, contract, grow again and contract again. It gets written off, as we have heard from other speakers, but it has always found a means to bounce back. Six million people just cannot be wrong in this day and age when voluntary organisations generally are under threat, as far as keeping going is concerned, in a more individualistic and atomistic world than was perhaps the case in the earlier years of our lives.

I am glad that the efforts and determination of the current general secretary, Frances O’Grady, have been referred to in this debate, particularly her new initiative to attract to union membership young people isolated, vulnerable, uncertain about their prospects and perhaps burdened with debts which earlier generations did not have to anything like the same extent. In this precarious labour market, setting off on your own is a pretty daunting prospect unless you have pretty unique skills that are attractive in the labour market. Frances is proving a great asset to the TUC, and on this side of the House and, I hope, more generally in the country, we are very proud of her. As a former general secretary, I am proud of the staff who support her and do a very good job.

Since the 1980s, we have seen certain features which characterised the Victorian labour market—casual working, low pay, arbitrary action and degrees of exploitation by unscrupulous employers—coming back into today’s labour market. I am not pretending that we are back in Dickensian England, but they are features of today’s labour market which Dickens and the delegates to that first TUC in 1868 would recognise. I pick out one central point in particular: it is now clear that the rise in inequality since the 1980s coincided with, and was perhaps partly caused by, a decline in trade union membership and the coverage of collective bargaining. Collective bargaining now covers only about 30% of workers, and outside important exceptions, such as engineering and steel, industry-wide agreements have disappeared in the private sector. The bargaining that does take place is at the lower company and plant levels. This is obviously often very vulnerable to changes in management styles and policies, personality changes and particular changes such as outsourcing, privatisation, the use of agency labour and the rise of zero-hour contracts.

The results of that are now clear. The share of wages and salaries in the national income has been falling. Real wages have been stagnant and insecure contracts are increasingly the norm, especially for the young. I acknowledge that the flexible labour market, much lauded by many over the past 30 years, has a good side—the high level of employment has been impressive—but it has a dark side that has permitted exploitation and arbitrary treatment on a grand scale. It is also, unfortunately, linked to poor productivity and poor training, and the economic performance of this country leaves a lot to be desired. In particular, it cannot be a cause for celebration of the flexible labour market that it takes the average UK worker five days to do what a French or German worker does in four. That is a pretty damning statistic.

Meanwhile, as others have said, top executive pay continues to spew out lottery-winning sums to executives whose performance is often ordinary and in some cases downright dismal. I accept that the trade unions have not yet been able to arrest these trends. The collapse of traditional manufacturing industries, the restrictions imposed by a whole series of hostile laws from a succession of Conservative Governments—we have heard the latest one, the Trade Union Act 2016, mentioned today—and the focus of many managements on short-term shareholder value have all been factors in this weakness. In fact, it has always seemed to me that every time a Conservative Government want to cheer up their constituency associations, while at the same time not spending any money, they introduce a Trade Union Act. Give the unions a kick, we squeal and people in the constituencies think that is pretty good—a pretty unfortunate way to run the country.

I am not just talking about Conservative Governments. New Labour was very different, introducing a lot of welcome steps. I was a strong supporter of that Government on the public sector, the national minimum wage, new rights for trade union recognition and a whole raft of individual rights on maternity, paternity, time off and so on, which were very impressive. However, they were too cautious in promoting a new, fairer settlement generally at work and in arresting this trend towards greater inequality and insecurity. Maybe we thought the good economic times of the early part of this century would run for ever, but they did not. We crashed and we are now left with this picture of insecurity and inequality.

On the question of the flexible labour market, it has been a matter of great frustration for me that we in this country have not been able to emulate other economies in northern Europe such as Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia and introduce European-style social partnership with extensive collective bargaining, strong consultation and a move towards decision by consensus, including having workers represented on the boards. I am sure that that remains the way forward, but too often the UK has preached deregulation to our EU partners or even bragged about the lack of protections and rules for workers and, implicitly perhaps, about the weakness of British trade unions.

My time is up. I was going to conclude by saying that it was the speech of Jacques Delors at the TUC that led the British unions to embrace the EU, as others have said. Delors outlined a powerful single market combined with a lively social dimension, with a range of rights and opportunities. It was important that that initiative should not falter but it did, and the result has been the fact that in too many working-class communities the vote to leave was a reaction against seeing a Europe that did not seem to be doing too much for workers.

Stanley Baldwin has never received rave notices for his performance as Prime Minister, derided by Winston Churchill and Lord Birkenhead, who said:

“I think Baldwin has gone mad. He simply takes one jump in the dark; looks around and then takes another”—


a bit like the Brexit negotiations at the moment, by the way. However, Baldwin was consistent in some respects. He was aware that something had to be done after the General Strike to improve matters and he encouraged collective bargaining, strengthened the new Ministry of Labour and built up joint industrial councils. Crucially, he consulted the TUC, even on the induction of King Edward VII. Baldwin’s worries about employers if left unchecked seem to me to be very contemporary. Maybe the Minister can tell us if the Government are giving any consideration to a little bit of “back to the future” and the Stanley Baldwin lesson.