File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-02-08.012, message 38


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.






























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