British Unions Are Flexing Muscles Again

After a traumatic decade of defeats in battle with Margaret Thatcher, British labor unions are flexing their muscles again.

In some ways, this summer’s spate of strikes has been reminiscent of the years before Mrs. Thatcher was elected prime minister in May, 1979, on a wave of anti-union sentiment.

But in crucial other ways, they reflect a recognition that the old days of militancy and unbridled power, which were partly to blame for infecting the economy with the so-called “British disease,” are over.

Strikes this summer in public transportation, city halls and the British Broadcasting Corp. ended with employers surrendering on all fronts: yielding near double-digit pay raises and abandoning demands for higher productivity and new bargaining procedures.

Dockworkers Defeated

But dockworkers striking to preserve a 42-year-old system of job guarantees were soundly defeated.

The longshoremen were the last of the once-mighty blue-collar battalions of organized labor to be vanquished by a Conservative government that had already emasculated the steel, coal-mining and newspaper-production unions.

The public could see a case for giving railwaymen and town hall clerks pay increases that overtake resurging inflation. But it would not buy the longshoremen’s attempt to preserve what it saw as a relic of union featherbedding.

The unions have learned to play by the Thatcher rules, among the toughest in any Western democracy, and even to turn them to advantage.

“It’s been a very difficult 10 years for the trade union movement, but it hasn’t been deadly,” said Norman Willis, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, the national labor federation. “Anyone who thought the unions could be written off was wrong.”

Laws passed since 1980 ban sympathy walkouts and force unions to hold secret ballots by members before calling strikes. Unions that call illegal strikes can be bankrupted by fines for contempt of court and lawsuits by employers for strike-inflicted losses.

Rail Unions Win Sympathy

The rail unions won public sympathy partly because their leaders followed the rules and could not be accused of foisting their wishes on the rank-and-file.

“Unions have learned to live within the law,” Willis said.

Public opinion polls indicate that for the first time in 25 years, most Britons no longer consider the unions too powerful.

Soundings this month by Gallup and by Market Opinion and Research International also found majorities sympathizing with this summer’s wage strikes, despite the commuter misery, and blaming the government, not the unions, for economic problems.

Fifty-four percent still think the unions are dominated by “extremists and militants,” the poll showed. But overall, the change is profound.

No longer disliked because they are no longer feared, the unions have faded as an issue. And the union-bashing that helped Mrs. Thatcher to three successive election victories no longer looks like a vote-puller, now that the unions are being seen as underdogs.

“None of this means that the unions are on the offensive,” cautions Martin Jacques, editor of the monthly Marxism Today. “What is does mean is that . . . the unions have got their heads above the parapet again. And for Thatcherism they no longer represent easy political pickings.”

Strikes Encourage Others

The victorious summer strikes have encouraged others, like ambulance drivers who are citing the railwaymen’s increase in an attempt to justify their demands for a raise above the 8.3% inflation rate.

With pay settlements averaging 9.5%, fears have arisen that Britain is headed back into the inflationary spiral of the 1970s.

Both in numbers and political clout, the unions have taken a long fall from their 1970s heyday, when striking miners helped topple Prime Minister Edward Heath’s Conservative government and when Labor governments consulted union bosses almost as regularly as Cabinet ministers.

The membership of the Trades Union Congress has slumped from 12.2 million to 8.7 million, the lowest in 20 years. In 1979, 29.5 million workdays were lost through strikes. Last year, the total was 3.7 million.

A record 13% unemployment rate in the mid-1980s also dampened union militancy. And with the 1985 collapse of a yearlong strike by the Marxist-led National Union of Mineworkers, which directly challenged the Conservative government, the Thatcher victory seemed complete.

Unions in Fair Shape

But while most analysts agree that things will never be the same, the unions are emerging from the 1980s in fair shape after some painful adaptations.

Forty-two percent of the work force is unionized, down from more than 50% before Thatcher’s decade but more than double the 18% in the United States.

Union confidence has been revived by an unemployment rate that is down to around 6%, by labor shortages in the prosperous southeast, and by a resurgence of inflation.

‘Found Strength Again’

“In the last two to three years our members have woken up and found they are not just in a new position as regards their strength. They’ve found that strength again,” said Mike Meacham, an engineering-union shop steward at the profitable Rolls-Royce aircraft engine plant in Bristol.

Big, moderate-led unions focus recruitment drives on white-collar employees, the fastest-growing section of the work force, who don’t share the old traditions of smokestack industries.

Less than one-fifth of white-collar workers in private enterprise belong to a union, and part-time workers are virtually non-unionized.

Unions now hire publicists and produce glossy brochures advertising insurance policies, pension plans and free legal advice. Although their leaderships remain white- and male-dominated, they are becoming more open to women and blacks.

John Edmonds, moderate head of the 803,000-member General and Municipal Workers’ Union, Britain’s second biggest, says organized labor must continue in this direction or fade into what he calls America’s “ghetto trade unionism”--confined mainly to smokestack industries and parts of the public service.

Edmonds complains that unions that should be looking to the middle class for recruits still talk “as if we are protecting the under-privileged.”

The latest polls underline the shedding of the cloth cap image. Forty-one percent of labor union members are middle-class, up from 32% in 1979. Nearly 80% are buying their own homes, up from 56%.

Charles Hansen, an economics lecturer at Newcastle University, believes things can only get tougher for the unions after 1992, when the 12-nation European Economic Community becomes a single trading bloc with full freedom of movement for workers.

“We’ll have to compete with countries like Portugal, where wages are about one-third of the levels in this country,” Hansen said. “The environment has changed very significantly.”