We live in a capitalist society. Does this mean that the workers have to wait until state power is taken, or do we set about eroding the system right now? The question answers itself: the day-to-day struggle forces us to make inroads on the power of the employers, and as the struggle develops, so do new methods emerge.
How do the workers at a well-organised engineering factory deal with these questions in practice? There is first the struggle for a 100% trade union factory: if a worker will not join a trade union then he does not work there, and the shop floor will not hesitate to enforce that position. Where several unions are concerned, a Joint Shop Stewards Committee is set up, in which shop stewards from all the unions act together in unity.
The next step is to establish some control over the company's right to 'hire and fire'. To this end, the unions insist that the company negotiate on the amount of labour recruited, on questions such as the number of workers required to achieve a given amount of production.
The question of how many workers leave the factory is a more complex one. As for dismissal of workers for disciplinary reasons, it can be said that nowadays no worker is easily dismissed from a well-organised factory by the management. The question of redundancy or closure, however, Is a much more difficult problem to deal with.
In the late forties and early fifties the slogan "the right to work' was campaigned for by the shop stewards movement, after many strikes we have now achieved the position where many managements will readily agree to work-sharing rather than redundancy. It can be said that the Redundancy Payments Act is the outcome of this shop floor struggle. However, the result of this act has been to some extent to blunt the anti-redundancy struggle as many workers are now tempted to accept redundancy because of substantial cash payments. When it comes to a complete closure the problem is more acute, very lew victories having been won on the issue of keeping a factory open, here the determining factor is seen to be who owns the means of production.
Another way in which labour loading can be controlled is in the stringent control of overtime working, and the of overtime by the unions not only can lead to more jobs being available but increases the pressure for more money for the forty hours worked.
Not only do the unions have to deal with how many are employed in a factory but they also have to deal with what grades of labour are employed. Here many unions tend to safeguard the interests of the craft workers; they also in my opinion tend to act in a more defensive way than on other issues. Often the fight is to retain demarcations which themselves were originally laid down by the employers. However, when the issue is what type of labour should man new processes or machines then the unions can act in a positive, rather than a defensive, way And with technological change this type of struggle is coming to the forefront.
The major area of conflict lies in the wages issue. Here we find the whole weight of the state, buttressed by reactionary ideas formulated in the universities, being thrown behind the employers in an effort to reduce the control being exercised by organised workers over their earnings. In Capital, Marx deals with the question of piecework and day work in two chapters. At the time, he pointed out that piecework was a system making for the greater exploitation of the worker; today the workers by their organisation have turned the piecework thereby ending the playing off of one individual against another, and by strong organisation; and they are helped by the lower levels of unemployment which have appertained since the war. The workers have found that the day-to-day struggle on piecework prices can increase wages faster than the occasional general wage claim, by linking day workers to piecework earnings and using their negotiations comparisons within the factory or district. A steady upward trend in earnings can thus be maintained.
Despite all this, the rate of exploitation per worker is still little different from that of the last century, approximately 70%: i.e., the worker still produces twice as much surplus value in relation to what he requires for living. Here we can see the lesson that economic struggle in itself is not enough.
In this context the developing campaign for workers control has some importance for the worker on the shop floor: it gives him a perspective beyond the economic struggle, it can help to break down the disillusionment caused by the Labour Government, it can show him that the nationalisation we have under monopoly capitalism is nothing like socialism.
We certainly do not pretend that the workers' control movement can do other under capitalism than extend certain of the powers that workers already have taken on the shop floor, but the demand for workers' control can help to develop the struggle for socialism. It can also help to unify many of the progressive sections of the labour movement.
The workers are responding to the ideas of workers control because they can see that large scale production is a social process, without them industry could not exist. The alienation of workers under monopoly capitalism has its contradiction as well, because the organisation of industry today gives quite small sections of workers great power; with good organisation there is good morale, the worker of today is confident of his strength. The key question is how he will use that strength; but, being realists, the workers will not follow ideas not based on their own experience. The workers control movement is something which can give a perspective based on that experience.
Phillip Higgs The author, though writing in his personal capacity, is a convener, Joint Shop Stewards Committee, Rolls-Royce Bristol Engine Division, Coventry.
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