144
PARTISAN fVEVIEW
of the political Labor movement, the trade unions, have today become
the heaviest drag on the Labor Government. While I am writing this,
the London transport workers are out on an unauthorized strike and
the Government has had to resort to the ominous measure of calling in
the Army to maintain London's food supply. Although the troops are
being used to get the goods to the people and not to break the strike,
the workers are of course unimpressed by such subtle distinctions; so
bitterness is mounting and the Government's stock is falling. Now even
Conservative papers admit that the men's demands are reasonable
enough-the main point being the reduction of the lorry-drivers' work–
ing week from 48 to 44 hours. The Transport and General Workers'
Union, to which the men belong, naturally backs their claims. It is the
most powerful union in the country.
If
it cannot reach agreement with
the employers through the national joint negotiating machinery, it can
ask for a committee of inquiry, appeal to Parliament, and so on.
But the union leaders in charge have let the negotiations drag on
for nine months-on points of contest which could have been settled
in nine days. They "do not seem to have worried over the time wasted.
They were unaware of the fact that the patience of the men was at an
end. The leaders of this mammoth union were clearly out of touch with
the men they were supposed to represent. They seemed to know next
to nothing of the mood of their members. So great is the gulf that has
developed between the central executive and the rank and file, that
both have come to obey different impulses.... "
The above comment is not from some Trotskyite paper, but from
Tribune,
the Labor weekly, one of whose editors is Jenny Lee, wife to
Cabinet Minister Nye Bevan. I quote it to show you how generally it
is realized among clear-sighted Labor politicians that the trade unions
have become the most awkward problem of the socialist future. For it
is almost mathematically predictable that as nationalization and plan–
ning progress, and as the unions become more and more absorbed into
semigovernmental, managerial functions, the estrangement between their
bureaucracy and the working masses will become even greater. "The
time has passed when. the only function of the unions was to represent
the interests of the men against the employers." This sounds like a
pronouncement out of
Pravda,
but I am still .quoting the English
Tribune.
The article ends with the pious hope that the union leaders will regain
the confidence of the rank and file. But it is an illogical hope. When
the State becomes the biggest employer and the unions part of the
State bureaucracy, they cease to be an instrument of the working class
and become an instrument of the coercion of the working class. That
is what has happened in Russia, where the worker is once more as
helpless as he was in pre-Tolpuddle days. Who is going to protect the
workers in the Workers' State?- The question is less paradoxical than
