On 6 September Wedgwood Benn is due to tell a mass meeting of workers at Industrial Property Developments -one-time Fisher Bendix-details of how his department intend to save 1,200 jobs.
For the past month the workforce has been operating a system of work-sharing. This has Tollowed their second occupation against closure and miss redundancies in the last year. Their last occupation forced the Labour Government to step in. The Govemment saw that the occupation threatened to blow sky-high the "socisi contract by becoming the first major battle against business bankruptcies.
It is almost certain that Benn will announce that the Government is going to buy the factory and that it will be re-equipped to produce for new markets, The proposals that Benn puts to the workers at IPD have an impor tance, not just for those workers but JOT LOU WOEKIRE CLASS IN SODEEL EN particular it will reveal the Labour Government's attitude to the actual The present crisis has started a die cuision on Worken Democracy Even the TUC has felt the cold draught of the that sho However. S they were still living in the sixties after reading the TUC report on Industrial Democracy. The thinking at Congress House appears to have been influenced by readinga plain man's guide on Progressive Management and How to Deal With Noisy Trade Unionists in a Boom.
The TUC clains "The major way to extend collective control of workpeople over their work situation will continue to be through the strengthening of trade union organisation and the widening of the scope of collective bargaining." This means the unions have to strike bargains with management on a whole series of fronts such as manning scales, information ahout the company ete To get this they presumably have to use the same techaiques and methods that they used to win their present wage levels.
This simply ignores the presence of that vast army of low-paid workers who have not been able to improve their wages and conditions by those cruditional methods advocated by the TUC document. Because their power for collective bargaining is weak their chances of winning measures of workers control are going to be very slender.
The trade unions lave enormous power, but that power is not unlimited and has to be mobilised if it is going to be effective. With inflation escalating towards heights of 20 to 25 percent and the so-called Welfare State falling apart the need tor the TUC to put forward plans for using trade union power to impose a workers solution is urgent.
More than pious mutterings about collective bargaining is needed. The TUC proposals provide no way forward but simply lead to classical participation schemes.
In the document the TUC points out that for many the basic conflict of interest between workers and owners. ingful participation in management decisions" Then they proudly unemployment and secondly, Just how many teeth Benn's nationalisation plan has. out a solution to the economic crisis in the interests of the working class across the whole economy. No job to take now in order to move from the anarchy of private competition with its miseries of mass unemployby demanding that Bens and the Labour Government must