Number of jobs declining

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33878, 25 June 1975, Page 19

Number of jobs declining

Paul Johnson makes no attempt to explain why the union “gangsters” manage to retain the loyalty of their followers, and even to expand their movement, taking into membership many thousands of middle-class professional workers like Mr Johnson himself. Now it may be that the way national union leaders are elected in some unions does not represent the full flowering of democracy. Personally, I favour the idea of postal balloting, and my own union uses this method. But the trade union movement does not consist of the Scanlons, the Joneses and the Clive Jenkinses alone. Beneath them there is a network of full time national and local officials, backed up in the factories and offices by shop stewards, men and women who know their constituents in a way that no member of Parliament can ever get to know his, and with a close personal knowledge of their working lives: “The toad beneath the harrow knows, Exactly where each toothpoint goes . . .” The unions have produced their own, highly responsive, form of democracy and community politics. Mr Johnson also argues that the brilliant management talents who have despaired of running strike-happy factories were forced to move into the financial sector. And that, of course, includes property, where speculation two years ago starved industry of investment and gave inflation its fatal fillip. It is utterly wrong of Johnson to accuse the unions of sabotaging industrial investment by refusing to accept lower manning scales. There may be isolated horror stories, but the employment figures show the true picture, with a decline in jobs in the nationalised sector and in private industries running into many hundreds of thousands: the process Tony Benn calls “de-industrialisation.” Many jobs have disappeared not because British workers cling affectionately to outdated equipment, but because new equipment has just not been forthcoming: investment per worker in Britain is less than half that in France or Japan. Meanwhile direct investment by British firms overseas has trebled in 10 years. All the arguments have, of course, been heard

before, though Pau! Johnson’s thesis is less of an argument than a point of view. He has not been able to demonstrate that wage restraint and the abolition of trade unions have any more relevance to the old and the sick than the nursery adage about a child having to eat up everything on the plate because other children are starving in India.

Union leaders like Jack Jones in fact have a very good record of concern and action on behalf of pensioners and others (a point he fails to mention). If the unions really were the “arbiters of the British economy” of Mr Johnson’s imagination, does anyone doubt that pensions and other social benefits would be higher than they are? Nor is it sensible to employ the divisive argument that all the gains of the last year have gone to powerful groups able to employ “industrial muscle.” Many traditionally low-paid workers have won increases, and there has been a real element of redistribution. In the nature of things, however, it is not the job of the unions to strive for a perfect pattern of income distribution. That is the task of governments, using the taxation system. Regrettably, Paul Johnson, in his rage over inflation, has substituted prejudice for analysis. He has picked his target and then relapsed into the familiar “I always realised the fellow was a bounder” school of witch-hunting. Indeed, so reckless and immoderate are many of the points he has made that he may well have produced, in addition to a novel definition of socialism, something akin to the Protocols of the Elders of the T.U.C., a scream of anguish from the Home Counties. He argues like some latter-day Henry VIII, anxious to break the power of the workers by ordering the dissolution of their unions. They must do his bidding, surrender their attempt to maintain as best they can their living standards in a time of economic adversity, meekly hand over their duties to the State, or be smashed. If that is what Paul Johnson wants, there are modern precedents in pre-war Germany and Italy: they went by the names of National Socialism and Fascism.