Robert Taylor has achieved something unprecedented in the annals of trade union historiography. He has written a readable book on the TUC. Writing about trade unions is notoriously dull. From the Webbs onwards, the leaden nature of trade union bureaucracy infected the prose style of the academics who wrote about it.
But Taylor has borrowed a Lytton Strachey formula; his book could be called "Eminent Trade Union Bosses." Telling the story through biographies of key union leaders in the 20th century brings the unions to life. But is Taylor really writing an obituary? The unions have been the most important group in 20th-century British civil society. Membership once reached 13m British citizens. No church, political party, newspaper or television programme had such a following. Even today, the unions have 8m members. After 20 years of Thatcherism and globalisation, the unions, under the effective leadership of John Monks, can say, like the abbot in the French revolution, "We've survived." But have they?
Ernie Bevin shoved the unions into the heart of the Labour party. The second world war then shoved them (and Bevin himself) into the centre of British life. Robin Cook has a bust of Bevin in his room at the Foreign Office. He looks down on the leather sofas where Cook and his team plan British foreign policy. But his legacy has been a troubling one. In foreign policy his rejection of Europe still haunts us. In industrial policy he left the curse of worker militancy, which undermined Labour governments in the 1960s and 1970s.
Taylor presents some remarkable unpublished material from those years, showing how the institutional vanity of individual unions undermined policy. Unions are still divided over the euro and electoral reform, and spend more time recruiting from each other than they do finding members in the non-unionised new economy.
Taylor is the last great survivor of a generation of labour reporters who became in the 1970s the most influential writers in the press. Their influence waned in the 1980s, as Arthur Scargill led trade unionism into a blind alley. The best labour writers, such as Don Macintyre, Trevor Kavanagh and John Lloyd, switched to domestic or European political writing. Taylor stayed on the labour beat and has studied trade union development in the US, Europe and elsewhere.
His book ends on an upbeat note. But it sounds forced. A clear-eyed view of trade unionism would see it arriving with the beginning of the 20th century, growing to full might in the middle of the century, and gently dwindling at the century's end. In all big industrial countries union membership is in decline. Despite a decade of full employment in the US, fewer than one in ten private sector workers are in unions. In France, there are scarcely more than 3m dues-paying members. Germany's mighty DGB has lost a quarter of its members since 1990.
In the 1980s, trade union ideals and organisation helped to overthrow communism in Poland and defeat white supremacism in South Africa. The South Korean generals were removed from power after a general strike in 1987. The unions undermined military rule in Latin America. Yet in Poland, South Africa, Asia and Latin America the arrival of democracy and acceptance of the market economy has left unions stranded. Unable to become co-managers of a responsible capitalism, like the Nordic unions, confrontational trade unionism has been isolated and broken.
In Britain, trade union chiefs were known as "barons." A more appropriate metaphor might be "bishops." Like the churches, trade unions are institutions which represent something of value and whose leaders have a dignified role in our constitution. But there are too few real believers.
Since Tony Blair came to power, Taylor has berated the government in many articles for not moving more swiftly to Europeanise its social and industrial policy. Yet social policy is, in part, a function of what unions demand. Go into any school and you will find three or four competing unions representing teachers. If they cannot speak as one, why should anyone listen? And, contrary to the claims in Taylor's anti-New Labour polemics, the government has been remarkably generous in passing legislation supporting unions. The TUC has identified 26 new laws which help unions. In contrast to mainland Europe, where no employer has to recognise individual trade unions, the laws of Britain now provide this institutional right. It is being used by the railway driver's union Aslef, for example, to kill off a European-style industrial union deal between the TGWU and Eurostar.
The dilemma for unions in advanced democracies is that so many of their core demands have been achieved. Workers enjoy a welfare state and legal rights at work. Unions have tamed capitalism. As a result, most union members no longer confront capital, but the taxpayer. In all countries, the public sector unions dominate. Their quarrel is with a public which does not want to pay more taxes or is repelled by low-quality public services in which serving the public seems the last obligation of the state employee.
Unions which want to grow in power in the 21st century will have to reinvent themselves as the champions of the excluded-here, and in developing countries-not advocates for those who have well-paid jobs and public service pensions. The purpose of remaining an institutional part of the Labour party should be questioned not by ministers but by union leaders themselves. In every other European country, unions split from social democratic parties decades ago.
Above all, they must follow capital and internationalise. Trade unionism is the last bastion of the nation. British unions are utterly different from French unions; both are as different as is possible from German or Swedish unions. Yet workers are the driving force for globalisation, as they flock to shopping malls or go on cheap holidays, purchasing the goods and services which post-national economies provide.
Taylor has written a good book on the TUC's past. Now he should tread on some toes and tell the unions what they must do to stop being bishops and become barons again-using real power for the social ends which are still relevant. That will require a very different trade unionism from the one Ernie Bevin shaped.
