John Edmonds, the general secretary of the GMB, Britain’s
second largest union, talks to Paul Anderson about the aftermath of last month’s
European summit in Maastricht
John Edmonds is not pleased that the British government
opted out of the social provisions agreed by the other 11 European Community governments
at the Maastricht summit last month. But, he says, it all could have been much
worse.
“I went to Brussels the Friday before Maastricht and talked
to people in the Socialist Group of the European Parliament to get their views
of what was going on,” he says. “And their worry was not that Britain would
effectively opt out. It was that an attempt would be made by Helmut Kohl to
accommodate John Major, and the social chapter would be so diluted, particularly
in respect of majority voting, that it would lose a lot of its force. That
really was a nightmare scenario.”
Instead, the French government stood firm against a
last-ditch attempt to water down the social chapter of the treaty to make it
acceptable to Britain. Major refused to budge and the 11 signed a protocol
committing them to develop common policies on workers’ rights which they will
transcribe into national law.
“I was delighted by the attitude of the French,” says
Edmonds. “They played a blinder. Their attitude throughout was that if Britain
didn’t want to come along with the social chapter it would have no involvement
whatsoever. The French insisted that the protocol signed by the 11 excluded
Britain.”
The priority now, he says, is to get a Labour government
which will sign up with the 11. Failing that, although “a lot of companies will
be operating from 1993 onwards through standard policies applied to Britain as
elsewhere”, the unions “will have to take action with individual companies to
ensure that they match the rights they have to give elsewhere. There are plenty
of options for us. In the long term, no one can see Britain standing aside from
the social dimension because more and more the social issues are going to be
integrated with economic decisions.”
Edmonds is scathing about the Tories’ attempts to justify
the refusal to back the social chapter, accusing Michael Howard, the Employment
Secretary, of lying in his claim that signing up would have cost Britain £5,000
million. “I don’t know where he got that figure from,” he says. “The first
batch of measures are to do with consultation and information rights. There
are no costs at all.”
“The other point where the government lied was when Major
said that the social chapter would drive a coach and horses through the trade
union legislation of the eighties. This is absolutely untrue. The social
chapter is all about individual rights. It has nothing to do with trade union
rights. In fact, freedom of association is specifically excluded as an issue.”
So far, there has been no attempt to prescribe the precise
institutional framework within which workers’ rights to be consulted and
informed will be exercised. But the 11 are likely to agree that works councils be set up in larger
companies, either on the German model, where works councils consist only of
workers, or the French, involving workers and management. In either case, the
trade unions have no formal role in representing workers at workplace level:
works councils are elected by balloting workers directly, regardless of whether
or not they are in a union.
The British trade unions are traditionally hostile to works
councils, but Edmonds’ union, the GMB, Britain’s second largest, believes that
the German model is the way forward. “We’re going to get it anyway as a result
of increasing EC integration,” he says. “The trade union movement can fight a
rearguard action against it, but that would be stupid.
“The German model of industrial relations is much better
than the British model. Here, in order to have proper rights at work you have
to be a member of a trade union, your employer has to recognise the union, you
have to get an agreement establishing your rights and then you have to have the
industrial power to enforce them, Many workers in Britain don’t have all that.
A system that provides for rights in law of representation and consultation
is much better.”
Not that Edmonds wants simply to copy the German system with
no modifications: “No one is arguing that the German system is the perfect
one. If the support given by the trade unions to elected representatives was
rather more direct than in Germany I think that would be a good thing. One of
the worries about the German system is that the German unions don’t have the
constant commitment to recruiting people that we have in Britain. The level of
unionisation is comparable but it is sustained in many industries by a series
of campaigns. Normally when you start work in Britain you get a form pushed at
you and you’re asked ‘Would you like to join the trade union?’ That isn’t so
much the norm in Germany.”
On the other hand, “pay bargaining can come out of the workplace
and be made regional or national. That does seem to be an advantage. The
local representatives are not obsessed with pay bargaining and the local
committee has more time to deal with and promotional opportunities, health and
safety issues and so on.”
All this fits in neatly with another of Edmonds’ ideas
which has been the cause of much controversy. He was the principle architect
of Labour’s proposals for rationalising the structure and timing of Britain’s
pay bargaining by introducing an annual National Economic Assessment.
Critics say that this is just an old-fashioned incomes
policy in disguise, but Edmonds disagrees. “There is nothing in the proposals
that would mean wage controls. The whole thing is about whether trade unions
can co-ordinal* collective bargaining with employers. It’s an attempt to work
out a new set of pay-bargaining arrangements so we’re less caught up in
chasing each other’s tails.
“With the system contemplated by the Labour Party and
strongly supported by the TUC, we’d have a well-informed debate involving the
social partners in the run up to Xmas and a pay-bargaining period that lasted
the first three months of the year. Most of the keynote settlements would be
made at that time – everybody knows which ones they are: Ford, ICI, local government
manual workers and so on – instead of playing this silly game when everyone
ends up feeling very unhappy because everyone feels that someone, somewhere
is getting a better deal. We’d try to co-ordinate the pay settlements in the
light of the economic performance of the country. The government would find
it much easier to manage the economy because the Chancellor would have a much
better view of the level of pay settlements before the budget.”
It is clear that Edmonds does not see the TUC playing as
large a part in the National Economic Assessment as it did in previous labour-union
arrangements. “It would have a role in the co-ordinated pay bargaining,
providing a forum for discussion and from time to time some leadership,” he
says, but he is also keen to emphasise that “the TUC is going to have to change
very rapidly” to provide more services to member unions, mainly on the research
and legal front.
The reason for this attitude towards the TUC is simple:
with the growth of giant super-unions in recent years as a result of mergers
the TUC’s co-ordinating function has waned considerably. The GMB has been one
of the most active in the merger field and is likely to remain so in the
nineties: Edmonds even raises the distant possibility of continent-wide union
mergers, He will not, however, be drawn on the rumours that the next merger on
the cards is with the Transport and General Workers’ Union – a joining of
forces that would create a super-super-union.
“It is obviously the case that the TGWU and the GMB will
work more closely together in the future,” he says. “We should do that because
we overlap to such an extraordinary extent in our membership. There are all
sorts of influences pushing us in that direction. Neither of us is rich enough
to waste resources. The services we could provide if we complemented each other
would be a lot better. And if we have a continental system of works councils,
it would force us to have a different, closer relationship at a local level.
“I think we ought to put a lot of effort into a closer
working arrangement. If it leads to something else, so be it.”
