Unionization and Union Leadership

The Road Haulage Industry

Paul Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134830978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The focus of this book is the process of unionization in the road haulage industry, in particular, the role of leadership in determining the quality of union organization. It analyzes the early history of road haulage unions, the creation of the TGWU, the failure to organize the industry during the 1930s and the consequent reliance upon statutory regulation of wages and conditions, and the subsequent institutional stasis of the TGWU during the 1950s. The transformation and expansion of union organization during the period of 1963-1973, conceived as the mobilization of collective power by workers within the employment relationship, is explored in case studies of TGWU branches in Birmingham, Liverpool and London, and within the wider context of TGWU. The retrenchment of union organization as a result of recession and Conservative government legislation, 1980-1994, is explored. The book concludes with an assessment of theories of unionization and democracy, and the role of leadership, with reference to the historical development of British trade unionism. The research utilizes oral and documentary sources, including hitherto unused archives of the TGWU and the Road Haulage Association.

1	SCOPE AND STRUCTURE

Scope

This analysis of the process of unionization in the road haulage industry was in part first conceived as a critique of commentators who had marginalized the qualitative transformation of British trade unionism after 1945. At the Industrial Relations Research Unit Bain and others had scrutinized the factors promoting the growth of union membership since 1945 but they had excluded any analysis of the changing nature and meaning of trade unionism. The issue of the creation and mobilization of trade union power – unionization – was unexplored. At the same time Batstone and his colleagues had researched an important new dimension of trade unionism – workers’ job controls and workplace organization, and their relationship to trade unions’ national structures, values and action – but the focus remained largely restricted to engineering.¹

A dispute in the hire and reward sector of the road haulage industry broke out in January 1979. It was at the centre of the so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’ – the wages movement by disparate groups of workers in opposition to the Callaghan government’s attempt to impose a 5 per cent limit on pay increases. Formally the dispute was between, on the one hand, the Transport and General Workers’ Union Road Transport Commercial trade group (TGWU RTC) and the United Road Transport Union (URTU), and, on the other, member-companies of the Road Haulage Association (RHA) in the ‘hire and reward’ sector, which supply transport services under contract. The strike quickly spread across the entire hire and reward sector to embrace the state-owned National Freight Corporation and companies that negotiated separate national agreements with the unions, and then to the ‘own-account’ transport sector, comprising companies that moved goods as an integral part of their production and distribution systems. Thus it had the appearance and reality of a general road haulage strike. In retrospect, the strike appears even more important given its role in precipitating the mobilization of state power by the Conservative government to weaken trade unionism, 1979–97. The strike was a visible demonstration of the new-found collective power of drivers’ trade unionism. The creation of this power, its mobilization and the internal struggle within the TGWU provided a ready-made starting point for an exploration of unionization in a hitherto little researched sector. The research’s extension to the period after 1979, during which years union organization has declined, has provided the opportunity to address the issue of the attrition of workers’ collective power.

Abrams has argued that

Unless models of process are contained and counteracted … [by substantive theory and close empirical research] their tendency to absorb rather than to explain history will almost be irresistible … If they are not used at all, history as a relation of past and present will remain baffling.

He further urges:

it is necessary to place one’s explanatory design with all its connections and weightings of connections, assumptions of significance and inference of structuring squarely before the reader, to allow one’s work to be seen for what it is, an argument related to a theoretical design rather than a story naively accomplishing an inarticulate sense of it.²

This is undertaken in Chapter 2, which offers a theoretical analysis of trade unionism and unionization. This provides the framework for the subsequent integrated historical and sociological analysis of the process of unionization in the road haulage industry: ‘the sociological value of a study … cannot be divorced from its historiographical adequacy’.³

This research was not conceived, however, as a narrative ‘history’ of trade unionism in the road haulage industry, principally the TGWU RTC group or its ‘rank-and-file’ members, although it inevitably contributes to such projects. Nor was its focus restricted to an analysis of the institutions, processes and rules of collective bargaining, although it necessarily also embraces aspects of this. These concerns are subordinated to an analysis of the process of unionization, the changing nature of trade unionism, and the role of workers, collectively organized, as subjects acting within given constraints. The focus upon the process of unionization means that much of the rich detail – events and personalities – is not developed although it has informed the research. More local studies are urgently required to test the account given here.

The issue of workers’ collective power is Kelly’s problematic: ‘how individuals are transformed into collective actors willing and able to create and sustain collective organization and engage in collective action against their employers’.⁴ His discussion of workers’ mobilization (Chapters 3 and 4) has many parallels with the concept that is utilized here: of unionization as the creation and mobilization of workers’ collective power. This account of the historical development and changing nature of trade unionism in road haulage provides an extended case study against which to evaluate his contribution. His emphasis upon the role of activists in articulating workers’ grievances over the terms and nature of the employment relationship, and creating the organizational means for protest and remedy, is subjected to detailed inquiry. And the decline of union organization in road haulage is conceived as the result of a counter-mobilization of power by companies, facilitated by the statutory restriction and regulation of trade unions.

The road haulage industry has been largely ignored by scholars working within the fields of industrial relations and social history, in spite of its economic importance. The policies and activities of the parties – trade unions, companies and government – have only occasionally been mentioned. There are various reasons for this. For much of their existence, road haulage workers and their trade unions were ‘losers’. The advance of trade union organization, 1910–21, made little impact except momentarily in the Liverpool transport strike of 1911, and membership was dispersed in a number of local unions and local sections of national organizations.⁵ Nor did the subsequent retrenchment during the early 1920s leave much record, for no mass strikes marked this decline. This lacuna has not been addressed by accounts of the TGWU in which road transport unions – notably the United Vehicle Workers’ Union (UVWU) and the National Union of Vehicle Workers (NUVW) – are not accorded their full importance. Rather the TGWU’s origin is traced to the ‘New unionism’ of the late 1880s, which, by a sleight of hand, becomes largely identified with dockers’ unions. The studies of Bevin only compound this problem, in spite of the fact that he was a carter, albeit a member of the Dockers’ Union.⁶ These accounts quite simply distort the record, for road transport trade unions were themselves the progeny of the New Unionist upsurge, and the contribution of the UVWU and the NUVW was integral to the design, size and nature of the TGWU, which was only later transformed into a general union following the amalgamation with the Workers’ Union in 1928. The one specialist study, Tuckett’s history of the Scottish Horse and Motor-men’s Association (SHMA), is a valuable source but the weight of narrative as against analysis serves as a reminder of the limits of this type of account. Road haulage workers are largely absent from Allen’s analysis of the TGWU’s early years, in contrast to London busmen and dockers; both of these groups were notable for their autonomy within the union. Goodman also gives a useful account of the road haulage industry and the struggle to build trade unionism, but his principal concern is the career of Cousins.⁷

It proved necessary therefore to retrace and reinterpret the TGWU’s formation from the hitherto ignored vantage point of road haulage and road transport trade unions, and to re-evaluate the significance of the Liverpool and District Carters’ and Motormen’s Union (LDCMU). This union appeared at first to be a regional anachronism, obstinately refusing to join the TGWU, but a little research demonstrated that it was the single most powerful trade union in road haulage during the 1920s.⁸

There are parallel problems in relation to road haulage companies and their employers’ associations. In much of the industry during the inter-war years, companies dominated the terms of the pay-effort bargain, and industrial relations as conventionally understood were hardly a pressing issue. Such employers’ associations as existed were local in character and no archives have survived or been located. Companies’ policies must be therefore assessed as refracted through trade union and government records, and as documented in inquiries.

Thompson has asked,

how far are the techniques of the political or constitutional historian adequate to deal with the tensions and lines of growth in movements which (until the highly bureaucratised post-1945 era) have always been exceptionally responsive to problems of local social and industrial context – local splits and breakaways – ground-swells of opinion at the rank-and-file level?⁹

Three case studies of union organization – Liverpool, Birmingham and London – were selected for research because of their leadership role in the qualitative transformation of trade unionism. They are integrated within an investigation of the road haulage industry and national trade union organization. Thus the analysis is sensitive to locality but the case studies are not embedded in detailed histories of their areas, although points of connection are indicated. They may contribute to such work by others.

Structure

The research’s rationale is reflected in the book’s structure. Trade unionism as the institutional embodiment of workers’ collective power is explored in a theoretical analysis that stresses the dialectic of human agency within objective constraints, including the values, policies and organization of trade unions themselves (Chapter 2). This establishes the framework for the subsequent historical exposition. It is argued (Chapter 3) that before 1922, due to the objective circumstances confronting workers, in particular the fragmented structure of the road haulage industry and the atomization of the labour market, trade unionism was characterized by a poverty of collective consciousness and organization – an absence of collective power. The exceptions were Liverpool, London and Bristol. This deficit was not rectified by the formation of the TGWU in 1922. The new, long-distance road haulage industry of the inter-war years was largely non-union; companies dominated the pay-effort bargain. The failure to create the resources of collective power necessary to enforce a voluntary collective agreement caused the TGWU to promote a statutory framework to determine pay and conditions. This was adopted by the employers’ associations in order to reduce wage competition in the industry, and won the support of the National government through the Ministry of Labour. The TGWU RTC group was a microcosm of the union as a whole – officer-led and infused with a form of co-operative trade unionism. In spite of challenges, this ethos remained dominant until the mid-1960s.

A national overview of the TGWU RTC group and industrial relations (Chapter 4), and detailed case studies of London and Liverpool (Chapter 5), and Birmingham (Chapter 6) illuminate the transformation from co-operative to militant trade unionism during the 1960s. This process saw the emergence of a trade union national identity and union branches as the focus of collective power, superordinate to the workplace. Officers’ autonomy was reduced. This was the context for the 1979 dispute in the hire and reward sector (Chapter 7), which was notable for its national dimension, unofficial leadership, widespread picketing and extension across the hire and reward and own-account sectors.

The dispute was a major factor stimulating the counter-offensive initiated by companies and the Conservative government, 1979–97, against trade union organization and action. The attrition of workers’ collective power is explored in the context of the restructuring of the road haulage industry and legislation that restricted and regulated trade unions and industrial action (Chapter 8). The conclusion (Chapter 9) discusses a number of issues raised by the unionization of the road haulage industry – leadership, union inertia during the 1950s and its transformation, the closed shop, and trade union forms. The prospects for union renewal are assessed.

Notes

1 G. S. Bain and F. Elsheikh, Union Growth and the Business Cycle (Oxford, Blackwell: 1976); G. S. Bain and R. Price, ‘Union Growth: Dimensions, Determinants, and Density’, in G. S. Bain (ed.), Industrial Relations in Britain (Oxford, Blackwell: 1983); E. Batstone, I. Boraston and S. Frenkel, Shop Stewards in Action: The Organization of Workplace Conflict and Accommodation (Oxford, Blackwell: 1977).

2 P. Abrams, Historical Sociology (Shepton Mallet, Open Books: 1982), pp. 142, 314.

3 R. Hyman, ‘A Theory of the Labour Movement’, Society for the Study of Labour History Bulletin, 26 (1973), p. 44.

4 J. Kelly, Rethinking Industrial Relations (London, Routledge: 1988), p. 38.

5 For a discussion of haulage unions prior to 1922, see A. Marsh and V. Ryan, Historical Directory of Trade Unions, Vol. 3 (Aldershot, Gower: 1987), pp. 246–51.

6 A. Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin: Vol. 1, Trade Union Leader 1881–1940 (London, Hein...