Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (74 page)

Docklands was the perfect example of a part of Britain that was transformed during the eighties from a place where ‘visible’ earnings were made by trading goods and raw materials
into a location for the generation of ‘invisible’ earnings from financial and allied services. The domestic consumer boom of the second half of the decade increased the demand for
imports of goods that Britain either no longer made or else made at a higher price than most customers wished to pay, worsening the trade balance significantly in spite of the supposedly
counterbalancing inflow from ‘invisibles’. But whether imported or exported, goods continued to pass through the country’s remaining ports and it was there that the third and
final great eighties tussle with traditional trade union power was fought.

Throughout the months of strife in the coalfields and disorder outside Fortress Wapping, the most restrictive union practice of all, the National Dock Labour Scheme, continued to operate in
sixty-three major British ports – including Tilbury, Liverpool, Southampton, Hull, Cardiff, the Forth and the Clyde – affecting the profitability of 150 firms and the rights of over
nine thousand workers. Introduced by Attlee’s government in 1947, the scheme’s objective was to end the insecurity the country’s dockers suffered through being employed as casual
labour, since the quantity of goods to be loaded or unloaded could vary considerably from day to day. It solved the
problem by, in effect, guaranteeing them employment
regardless of whether there was work to be done. Assigned half the seats on the National Dock Labour Board, TGWU representatives enjoyed the statutory privilege of being able to block any
management proposal that involved job losses. It was also in the gift of the TGWU – the largest trade union in the Western world – to determine who was employed in the docks and to
adjudicate on matters of discipline. Unsurprisingly, sackings were rare when the decision was taken by a union rather than an employer. The most spectacular decoupling between market forces and the
payroll was manifest in the way the scheme operated when a dock closed down. In this eventuality, registered dockers were entitled to choose either a £25,000 severance payment or transfer to
a dock that was still operational, the latter being legally compelled to employ them even if there was no work to be undertaken.

Given these burdens, it was hardly surprising that docks did close down, their business migrating either to Felixstowe and Dover (which were outside the scheme and were able to deploy flexible
labour) or to other European entrepôts such as Antwerp and Rotterdam. While many registered dockers opted for the severance pay-out, the weight of having to support those who applied to the
remaining docks undermined the latter’s competitiveness. What was more, the scheme had not even bought industrial peace. Union militancy in the docks remained high. Terrified of taking on the
TGWU, Edward Heath’s government had even strengthened the scheme’s terms in order to buy off a potentially crippling strike in 1972, and stoppages, official and unofficial, continued to
plague productivity. If the Thatcher government was up for a fight, it could only abolish the scheme by repealing the 1947 act. Yet while several Cabinet ministers, including Nick Ridley, Tom King
and Nigel Lawson, believed the immediate aftermath of the defeats of the mining and print unions represented exactly the psychological moment to revoke the dock scheme, Thatcher
hesitated.
⁵⁵
There were only so many long and bruising strikes a country could endure in almost continuous succession, and the dockers had the
ability to sever most of the major arteries of the country’s international trade. As a consequence, the National Dock Labour Scheme almost survived the eighties intact.

Finally, Thatcher was persuaded to risk a confrontation, though the terms she countenanced demonstrated how keen she was to buy off the dockers rather than fight them to the death. In return for
losing their registered status under the scheme, they would each receive a payment of £35,000. The sweetener’s cost to the taxpayer exceeded £300 million. The probability that the
dockers would nonetheless reject the offer remained high, and the government’s plans were undertaken in great secrecy because forewarning the dockers of the scheme’s imminent demise
risked giving them time to
plan a coordinated response. Among the precautions taken was the identification of small harbours where goods might be loaded and unloaded in the
event of a strike paralysing the major ports for months. One particularly incendiary proposal involved flying in foreign dockers to undertake the work. Announced on 6 April 1989, the repeal act
became law on 6 July. The speed with which it was rushed through Parliament caught the dockers off-guard; for while some stopped working unilaterally, it took time for the TGWU to organize the
necessary strike ballot, not least because of delays caused by having to fight off – successfully – legal action by the dock employers. As a result, by the time the strike started
officially, the dockers were manning picket lines in defence of a scheme that no longer existed. This was not the basis for fighting a sustained campaign and, fearing the sack and the prospect of
losing the £35,000 pay-out, a return to work by dockers at Tilbury triggered similar capitulations in other ports. Its effectiveness shattered, in August the strike was called off. Except in
Liverpool, where the port owners continued to recognize the TGWU in return for agreeing major redundancies (the showdown would not come there until 1995), union power in Britain’s ports was
shattered. Docks became again a place for casual and contract labour. However, as the government had anticipated, greater productivity attracted back to Britain trade that had been diverted to
European ports – breathing life back into docks from Bristol to the Forth, Sheerness to the Tees, whose future in the late eighties had seemed imperilled.

United They Stand?

If judged purely by the number and scale of strikes and stoppages called, the eighties clearly transformed the country’s industrial relations. Less than four million days
were being lost to strikes in the second half of the decade, compared with over fourteen million when Edward Heath was prime minister. What was more, Thatcher’s period of office not only
reversed the militancy of the previous decade, it set the economy on course for even fewer strikes in the nineties. By 1997, strike activity was at its lowest level since records began in 1891, and
the historically low incidence of disputes continued through the first decade of the twenty-first century, reaching a new recorded low of 157,000 days lost in 2005.
⁵⁶
While other Western countries also experienced reduced levels of industrial action during this period, it was in Britain that the fall was most marked: by the nineties, the
number of days lost per British employee was less than half the European Union average.
⁵⁷
A country that when Thatcher came to power was
internationally notorious for being strike-torn became, within a short period of time, a model of industrial peace. The statistics in Table 1 speak for themselves:

The most obvious explanation was that the eighties coincided with the start of a continual decline in trade union membership. In 1979, the year of the Winter of Discontent,
membership stood at an all-time peak of 13.2 million. By 1990, it was down to 9.8 million, and heading below 7 million by the beginning of the 2010s, a thirty-year decline that took union
membership from over half the workforce down to less than a quarter.
⁵⁹
Not only did ‘organized labour’ shrink in absolute numbers, it
was especially hard hit by the privatization of – and job losses in – formerly nationalized industries where militancy had been especially strong.

Market forces were not the only factor. In particular, the Thatcher government’s legislation transformed the way in which strikes could be organized, investing the courts with powers to
fine unions that transgressed the letter of the new laws. James Prior’s Employment Act 1980 ensured picket lines were legal only if they were manned by workers employed by the company at the
heart of the dispute and took place at that company’s premises. ‘Sympathetic’ action by other unions and their members was thereby illegal. The Employment Act 1982 made disobeying
these picketing requirements no longer an option. Unions knowingly doing so could be fined and if they refused to accept liability, they risked having their assets sequestered until they purged
their contempt of court. Piloted through the Commons by Norman Tebbit, the Trade Union Act 1984 made it illegal for union leaders to call their members out on strike without first putting the
matter to a secret ballot. Had Tebbit’s law reached the statute book in time, the requirement to hold a ballot would have ensured either that the miners’ strike enjoyed far wider
support, or that it did not happen at all.

The miners’ and printers’ strikes demonstrated the effectualness of legislation designed to make picketing primarily a force for persuasion rather than coercion.
Nottinghamshire’s working collieries might have been overrun but for the ability of the police to turn back flying pickets. Fear of their being classified as ‘secondary action’
restricted the deeds of sympathetic unions. Sequestration of assets hampered the NUM’s activities and, ultimately, dealt the
coup de grâce
to SOGAT. Nonetheless, though such
measures were
deployed in some of the most important strikes, it would be an overstatement to suggest that they became the standard means of restoring the whip hand to
management. With the number of strikes running at about one thousand per year between 1983 and 1987, the combined figure of 114 court injunctions against unions during this period showed both the
high level of union compliance with the law – despite the fact that it was not until 1986 that the TUC dropped its opposition to pre-strike ballots – and the reluctance of employers to
turn to the courts to undermine those with whom they were in dispute.
⁶⁰

Judging union power purely through the number and severity of strikes provides a telling, but limited, picture. Neither government policies nor union activities were single-mindedly focused upon
this one weapon in the armoury of syndicalism. The limiting of union influence went far further. In particular, doing away with an incomes policy meant that there was no longer a need for
government ministers to negotiate pay norms with union leaders – indeed, no need to engage the unions in policy decisions at all. The whole structure of corporatism – which had enticed
Heath’s administration almost as much as Wilson’s and Callaghan’s – was dismantled. Since 1962, the National Economic Development Council (known as ‘Neddy’) had
brought ministers and civil servants together with representatives of British business and the unions to outline plans for economic growth. Without taking the trouble to abolish it (a task left to
her successor in 1992), Thatcher made sure Neddy became an irrelevance. Its convocations became occasional, with government ministers often represented by their understudies. In 1989, the TUC was
even deprived of its right to chose the union representation on the council – insult being added to injury when the government decided Eric Hammond, whose union was by then not even
affiliated to the TUC, should attend. In truth, there was almost nothing that mainstream union leaders were likely to propose that did not conflict with Thatcher’s determination to make the
labour market more flexible as a primary means of reducing the burdens on job creation. Openly sidelined, union leaders were disabused of the notion that they were still regarded as partners in
policy formation – just as those among them who tried to use strikes to recreate the dynamic of the Heath years or the Winter of Discontent until their demands were met were forced to think
again. In these ways, Thatcher finally provided the answer to the question ‘Who Governs?’ which her hapless Conservative predecessor had fatally put to the electorate back in 1974.

Other, more specific union practices and prerogatives also came under attack. Strongly promoted by Michael Foot’s Employment Protection Act 1975, the closed shop forced those employers it
embraced to hire only members of a specified union. Intended as a means of securing strong
collective bargaining, the closed shop was a major restriction on
management’s ability to choose whoever it considered the best talent for a job, and it forced applicants to join a particular union rather than to enjoy the possibility of freedom from
– as well as of – association. Indeed, under Foot’s legislation it was a legal requirement to sack employees who tried to leave the union to which they were assigned. The
Employment Act 1980 began to undermine this effort to create a union monopoly by making the continuation of the closed shop conditional on an overwhelming endorsement (the threshold was 80 per cent
in a secret ballot) by employees in the companies where it operated. This stipulation, and the declining numbers of jobs in traditional areas of the economy where the closed shop was most
entrenched, ensured that during the eighties the number of employees subject to closed shop terms of employment fell from 4.5 million to under half a million. Dismissal for refusing to join a union
was made illegal in 1988 and the closed shop was done away with altogether four years later.