Unions smell a foregone conclusion

In the struggle between capital and labour, the workers have been losing for years. How far, asks John Lloyd, will new Labour go to redress the balance?

For most of our lifetimes, strikes were theatrical demonstrations of working-class power. They made sense because they could be taken against a fixed employer by a fixed workforce. The object was to see who could make the pips squeak hardest: would the loss of profit force the capitalist or shareholder to cave in? Would loss of wage, even hunger, make the strikers collapse?

The greatest literary evocation of working-class resistance and misery is Emile Zola's Germinal. It demonstrates the intense locality of the strike, the rootedness of the miners in their squalid villages, the increasing distance of capital - a board in Paris decides the rate of wages, not the local manager who protests to a delegation of miners in his bourgeois drawing room that he is as much a wage slave as they are.

To write a Germinal today, where would the modern Zola look for a model? Not to the central productive engines of society, but to its margins; to, for example, a company named Lufthansa Sky Chef, whose plant on the margins of Heathrow Airport has been on strike since November of last year. Or at least, the former workers and their union, the Transport and General Workers, say they are on strike. The company says it has no dispute.

Lufthansa Sky Chef makes airline meals; a multi-billion dollar business, in which it is the most successful company worldwide. The essence of the business - in which the competition is ferocious - is the preparation of tasty and fresh meals aimed at relatively sophisticated palates. This means round-the-clock working and a combination of chefs, supervisors, chefs' assistants and drivers who operate as a rapid and interchangeable assembly line.

The basic wages, especially for the assistants, are low; but wages were jacked up by overtime working, which covered the non- standard day hours. Lufthansa Sky Chef, like other companies, had tried to whittle away at the idea of the standard week in favour of flexible working. It had made some headway among the bulk of the workforce - largely female and Asian - but encountered a violent reaction among the drivers. Last summer, the company and the union registered an official disagreement. The T&G persuaded the workforce, which had begun unofficial industrial action, to negotiate a new contract; Sky Chef drew one up with new flexible working schedules but said that if workers did not turn up for work under the contract by a given date, they would be deemed dismissed. The T&G proposed a trial period - but by this time, the company was set on a new contract and the bulk of the workforce set against it. A strike ballot of the 280-strong unionised workforce produced a 75 per cent majority for a strike; on 20 November last year, notices went out to all the workers dismissing them on the spot, but offering re-employment under the new contract.

Only five of the unionised workers went back - but more than 100 chefs and supervisors had not come out. The company is able to keep its service going with these staff and with agency workers. The strike is also kept going - with picketing 18 hours a day, seven days a week, run from a Portakabin and two tents by the entrance to the plant. The local Labour MPs have been supportive; motions have been put down in the House of Commons; the International Transport Federation is now seeking to persuade its members to take action in support, and the unions at Lufthansa - represented on the company board in Germany - are already putting pressure on the parent company.

But what real pressure can be exerted? Industrial action does little: the workers go in through the picket lines every day. The Sky Chef workers hope that Lufthansa will be unable to bear the bad publicity they want to generate against it.

The death of the working class has been forecast, described and confirmed for a quarter of a century. It is 20 years since Eric Hobsbawm wrote, in Marxism Today, "The Forward March of Labour Halted", which revealed, at least to labour activists, that what they had seen as the high-water mark of their success in mortally wounding a Labour government was as likely to be their nemesis.

So it has proved. TUC membership has almost halved in the past decade, to around 6.7 million. As Peter Mandelson helpfully pointed out during his TUC appearance last year while he was trade and industry secretary, only 18 per cent of workers under 30 are trade union members. International Labour Organisation figures show union numbers falling in 72 out of 92 countries.

Society is deeply unsettled - sometimes in ways for which unions, in their political mode, have fought. The influx of women into the workforce from the seventies onwards - after a postwar retreat - has been huge, especially into the professional and managerial workforces; but many had no union traditions and worked individually or in small groups where unionisation seemed irrelevant or was regarded as subversive. Educational levels have soared, but most of the managers and specialists that the system produces and modern society demands do not join unions.

Between 1950 and 1970, the middle class - non-manual, with some tertiary education - in the US and Western Europe expanded from 200 million to 500 million people. The same process began, from the late 1980s, in South-east Asia. In India, it now accounts for 15 per cent of the population.

The bourgeoisie have defeated the working class - in power, income, taste and increasingly in numbers. Those who cannot be counted as middle class are split up into groups without natural affinities, pursuing their own lives often in a fragmented way, with a spell of work here, a spell of part-time work there, a spell of idleness somewhere else.

The people for whom Sky Chef makes meals increasingly live in different universes from those who serve their needs. Look at airline lounges; they contain a high proportion of men and women linked in to networks with which they will again link as soon as they are through the customs barriers. These networks carry streams of messages, appointments, memoranda which include them in a world of possibility for action - and increasingly render those who do not have the entry codes idle, or partly or mechanically employed. Time, for the networked, is impossibly stretched; for the non-networked, it stretches on and on.

Can new Labour moderate these trends? On the one hand, of course not; it wants to intensify them. Since modernisation is its goal, flexibility is a means to attain it - and flexibility, when taken out of the glossy pamphlets, is about how to get women into work at midnight to pack tin-foil trays with beef stew, without paying too much overtime. On the other hand, it wants to do something, since it is committed to fairness at work and wants to find out how this can be implemented without rendering British business uncompetitive.

Thus the battle of legislation on fairness at work, due in October, is an index not so much of the relative strengths of capital and labour but of how far new Labour is prepared to use legislation to make the industrial relations balance less loaded against the unions.

Employers' lobbying on this is currently very intense; they are focusing on provisions in the draft legislation that would prevent employers taking action against employees for the first eight weeks of an unofficial strike - a measure that would have prevented Sky Chef from summarily dismissing its strikers. They also hate the provision for a union official to represent workers in a dispute even where the workers are not unionised, and have complained bitterly of the bureaucracy involved in keeping time records of employees' working hours to conform with the working time directive.

The Prime Minister and Stephen Byers, the new Trade and Industry Secretary, are sympathetic; Ian McCartney, the minister responsible for the legislation and the man who has done most to keep the unions onside, is signalling that his credit with them will not extend to further dilution.

Enshrined in the Fairness at Work white paper is a clause saying that it is designed to "enhance competition, prosperity and growth". At the TUC last year, John Edmonds, the general secretary of the GMB union, roared against boardroom "fat cats"; but most of the unions still operating in the private sector, including his own, are careful not to disturb these same fat cats at their cream, for fear of a retaliation against which they have no adequate defence.

Arthur Scargill, still leader of the tiny National Union of Mineworkers, now puts much of his formidable energy into the Socialist Labour Party, whose electoral insignificance is to a degree countered by its gains in the leadership of the rail unions. At the other end of the scale, his fellow leaders sign contracts extolling competition. Like incomes, union strategies have bifurcated and gone to extremes; though the main strategy is of grimly holding on to shrinking redoubts through accommodation, with confrontation as a last resort.

Class explains very little. Marx's idea of class, which has haunted this century, was integrally linked to a belief in crises that would sweep capitalism and the bourgeoisie away. The reverse has happened. The would-be expropriators have been expropriated; the knell of collective property sounds everywhere; the age of anxious contentment rules.

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