From: Adam Rose <Adam-AT-pmel.com> Subject: M-I: The Communist Party and the Revival of Shop Stewards Organisation Date: Thu, 6 Feb 1997 08:41:46 -0000 [ An excerpt from "Socialists in the Trade Unions by Alex Callinicos ]. The working class movement began to recover from the disaster of the General strike in the mid 1930's. This revival saw the beginnings of a change in the pattern of economic class struggle that was to prevail into the 1960's. As Table 1 shows, the number of strikes rose over the period to historically very high levels. At the same time, the number of workers involved in an "average strike" in the 1960's was half that in the 1930's. The length of strikes also fell sharply. These changes reflected the emergence of strong shop stewards organisations. The new rank and file organisations began to develop in the 1930's in some of the new industries like vehicle manufacture, electrical engineering, chemicals, and artificial fibre production, reflecting a reorganisation of British capitalism from old staple industries like coal and textiles. By the mid 1930's the worst of the Great Depression was over. At the same time, the prospect of another world war led the British government to launch a programme of rearmament which benefited not only industries producing directly for the military, such as the aircraft industry, but the whole of the engineering sector. The resulting fall in unemployment began to increase workers self confidence. The historian Richard Croucher writes : "The effect of seeing old mates, even in ones and twos, coming back into the shops, was out of all proportion to the numbers involved. The iron workshop discipline of the previous two years, when it was not unheard of for men to be sacked for laughing at work, began to dissipate." Nevertheless, it took a hard fight to organise the new industries. For example, the Pressed Steel plant at Cowley in Oxford involved highly automated, dangerous production. The workforce were unskilled and unorganised, consistingly largely of "immigrants" from high unemployment areas in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and of locally recruited women. "Workers were often hired and sacked by the day, unable to keep up with the pace required by a driving management. In 1934, these "coolies" ( as they called themselves ) rebelled against the "slave shop", and with the support of the TGWU and local Communists ( but not the craft unions in the factory ), launched a successful strike for higher wages and the right to shop steward representation. By March 1938 there were 40 TGWU stewards at Pressed Steel representing 2,500 members. As Croucher observes, "upsurges in the British labour movement, in the 1880's, 1910's and again in the 1930's, brought an almost entirely unexpected broadening in membership, with previously thought to be among the most "backward" sections of the working class exploding into incandescent militancy." Thus Engineering apprentices, low paid and denied proper training, launched two strike waves in 1937. The first began on the Clyde in April and rapidly spread to other areas. Over 150,000 engineering workers took part in a one day solidarity strike. Later that year, more strikes started in the Manchester area and spilled over elsewhere. The employers made some concessions nationally and many local wage agreements conceded big increases. More importantly, the strikes marked "a watershed between the dark years of the Depression and the groing strength and confidence evident in the months immediately preceeding the war" and a further strengthening of shop steward organisation. The revival of workplace trade union organisation was not simply a matter of piecemeal struggles by individual militants in different factories and industries. The Communist party acted as a driving force behind the growth of the stewards movement. Its members were among the best fighters organising inside individual factories. At the same time, the Communists sought to link together different workplaces in a movement capable both of supporting particular struggles and pursuing a coordinated strategy. In March 1935 workers at Hawker's Brockworth factory came out on strike with strong support from the company's Kingston plant. Though the strike did not achieve all its objectives : "it was the midwife of the first shop stewards' movement worthy of the name since WWI. The strike occurred in the factories that formed the core of the most important aircraft firm. The communists were able to use their network of contacts nationally to coordinate joint action and organise support. The CP members had carefully prepared the way for the dispute in both Hawker factories, as well as in the unions themselves. The Daily Worker [ the CP's paper ] had been adopted as the official organ of the strike committee, and Tom Roberts, the CP's Industrial Organiser in the midlands, had been involved throughout. The CP ensured that these advantages were not lost, and acted very quickly to set up a national movement of aircraft stewards." Soon after the Hawker strike the Aircraft Shop Steward's National Council was set up. It's paper, New Propellor, developed from a support sheet set up during the strike, and was edited by a CP member. By October 1938 New Propellor claimed a circulation of 20,000 in 51 factories. The involvement of more and more factories in defence production, especially after the outbreak of WWII, helped spread this movement beyond the aircraft industry. In April 1940 the council became the Engineering and Allied Trades Shop Stewards' National Council at a conference attended by 283 shop stewards from 107 factories, by no means all of which were making aircraft. The Communist Party was transformed by its involvement in building shop stewards organisation. The change in the party is well described by Bob Darke, who was an important CP activist in Hackney and a leading militant first amongst the London firefighters and then the bus workers in the 1930's and 1940's. Darke joined the CP in 1931 but broke with the party at the height of the Cold War in the 1950's. In 1931 the Party in Hackney was "a loose gathering of intellectual wastrels" , "a little society of café revolutionaries" who "talked and talked". Persistent involvement in the local working class movement changed all this : "When I started active work for the Party I began to enlist working men like myself, paintworkers at first for I was then working for Lewis Bergers. Factory groups of Communists came into being, then cell fractions inside the unions . . . The Zinken Cabinet factory had the biggest Party membership. There were soon 20 Communists among the Dalston busmen. Bergers, when I left the factory, had 20 active comrades. By the time the war broke out we had our finger in everything. We were a party of working men and we were a dangerous party, aggressive, militant trade unionists, tried, tough, ruthless." When Darke left the CP in 1951 it had 880 members in Hackney, and at some stage controlled 28 of the 35 union branches in Hackney. The growth in the CP's size and influence reflected the consistent work carried out by its members in the life and struggles of the working class of Hackney. Regular sales of the Daily worker outside workplaces played a crucial role in building the CP. The same story could be told of many working class areas in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s. However, there were serious weaknesses with the way the CP sought to rebuild workers organisation. The CP resolutely pursued a policy of trying to get left wing union officials into union positions as the main way forward for workers. Already in the late 1930s the CP led shop stewards movement was seeking to find an "accommodation" with the leadership of the Amalgamated Engineering Union ( AEU ) , an approach which was reinforced by the election of Jack Tanner, a former supporter of the National Minority Movement ( a CP inspired and led movement in the unions in the 1920's ) as AEU President in 1939, and of the Communist Wal Hannington as National Organiser in 1942. The German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 brought the CP behind Britain's war effort. Its stewards opposed strikes and worked with management in Joint Production Committees. When workers discontent found expression in a strike wave in 1943 - 1944, they sometimes turned to Trotskyist groups which, though tiny, supported their struggles. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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