WHAT ARE AND CHAPPLE UP TO?

Merger mania is in the air again, but this time the flirtation everyone is talking about is between two powerful trade unions rather than a brace of industrial giants. The courting couple in question are the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, with 1.5 million card-holders, and the 450,000-strong Electrical and Plumbing Trades Union. If they do finaliy get together, British industry will face hefty new challenge to its profrom a 2 million member, working-class juggernaut. Or so the Fleet St stories go.

But what is the truth behind these stories? Why are union mergers on the order of the day? How are they viewed by the SLL?

It is no secret that the engineering union leaders- along with those of the Transport and General Workers' Union, the General and Municipal Workers' Union and several others-have for some time been casting around for likely marriage partners.

The costs of running a modern-day union are enormous, we are told. Last year the AUEW spent out £7.5m, but only_ raked in £6.5m in subscriptions. Economics of scale are needed just as in big business.

Courtship rituals started for the engineers in earnest during the reign of Lord William Carron, the union's late right-wing President. Then the Amalgamated Society of Boilermakers was the object of attemtion.

But the romance failed to blossom, and after the joint talks broke down, the union began moving towards its present federation' with the foundryworkers, the constructional engineers and the draughtsmen who now form its technical and supervisory secBesides the EPTU, which is itself in parallel talks with the G&MWU, the engineers are today also in merger discussions with the 78,000-strong National Union of Sheet Metal Workers and the National Society Metal Mechanics (46,000 members).

The AUEW also held talks with the National Union of Vehicle Builders before their recent merger with the T&GWU.

As far as the T&GWU, already Britain's biggest union, is concerned various other virtual takeovers have set it well on the road to a 2 million membership.

Recent years have also seen a spate of mergers in the building and white-collar fields.

It is not just in glib, journalistic turns of phrase that the association was made between these developments and the trend of greater and greater monopolization in the world of big capital.

In an interview last week with Vincent Hanna of the •Sunday Times', AUEW President Hugh Scanion uttered one extremely telling sentence:

'The prolificity of trade unions . . . can be a serious irritation to employers when trying to negotiate satisfactory agreements particularly at plant level'.

Of course he has other things to say too. But they were all on the same bureaucratic plane.

Regardless of anything else which may be in Scanlon's mind, it is significant that his first response when asked •Why merge?' is not "To fight the employers better'.

Scanlon is a proponent of the view that while the class struggle is irreconcilable, it only breaks out overtly when the 'balance of terror' becomes weighted in fayour of the workers or employers, by say, the Industrial Relations Presumably the logical extension of his statement to Hanna is that union mergers help redress the balance and contribute to class peace.

Scanlon went on to explain to Hanna some of the other no doubt sound organizational and financial reasons why union leaders today feel 'almost a compulsion' towards increased size. Let us examine the nature of this compulsion in class terms. As one leading union official close to merger discussions told are not the mergers of the formative years of the trade union movement. •They are no concentrations of industrial power pressed forward or enthusiastically supported by the rank and file. They are mergers from the top' The AUEW-EPTU discussions are of particular interest from this standpoint.

Scanlon, AUEW general secretary jim Conway and the seven-man executive of the dominant engineers' section of the union appear to have agreed in principle with the proposal of Frank Chapple, the right-wing secretary of the EPTU, for a full merger.

This would give the electricians three seats on a new ten-man executive, with the posts of president and general secretary open to election by the whole membership.

If all the present executive members held down their jobs in the AUEW, this would considerably strengthen the grip of the right wing on the whole union. And since Scanlon has made clear he might stand down to facilitate the merger, Chapple could have a clear shot at the presidency. Left-wing opinion in the union appears to be pulled two ways on the subject.

Although on balance it is against for directly political reasons, there are those who talk grimly about 'having to face the economic facts'. There is also some support for Chapple's insistence on a full merger and a common rule-book.

The method on both sides of the argument is short-sighted, totally inadequate and completely empirical; the issue cannot be decided on these grounds. Shortly before his murder by a Stalinist agent in 1940, Leon Trotsky wrote the following in the pamphlet Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay': 'Monopoly capitalism does not rest on competition and free private initiative but on centralized command. The capitalist cliques at the head of mighty trusts, synidcates, banking consortia, etc., view economic life from the very same heights as does state power; and they require at every step the collaboration of the latter.

In their turn the trade unions in the most important branches of industry find themselves deprived of the possibility of profiting by the competition between the different enterprises. "They have to confront a centralized capitalist adversary, intimately bound up with state power. Hence flows the need of the trade unions—in so far as they remain on reformist positions, i.e. on positions of adapting themselves to private property. to adapt themselves to the capitalist state and to contend for its co-operation. 'In the eyes of the bureaucracy of the trade union movement the chief task lies in "freeing" the state from the embrace of capitalism, in weakening. its. dependence on trusts, in pulling it over to their side.' He went on to stress that these conditions 'leave almost no room at all for workers' democracy which, in the good old days, when free trade ruled on the economic arena, constituted the content of the inner life of labour organizations'.

The two slogans of the struggle for revolutionary trade unionism, Unconditionate dependence te, the unions from the capitalist state and trade union democracy. The second was inseparable from the first.

These are the real forces at work behind these 'merger moves from the top' as Scanlon's very revealing comment to Vincent Hanna showed.

As every electrician is forcibly reminded every of his trade union life, the impact of the state on the EPTU has been discreet and considerable. In 1961, the High Court ousted Communist Party members from the leadership after evidence of ballot-rigging and installed right wingers in their stead.

Since then, the right wing has steadily tightened its grip.

Local branches have been closed down. Industrial branches with full-time branch secretaries have been set up. The secret ballot by post has become the order of the day, if there are elections at all.

What is perhaps less well-known is that militants in the AUEW discern similar trends ..No less than 71 of the present Above: the Manchester engineering sit-ins which have tolled the death-knell of Scanion's 'balance' of class forces. Far left: Hugh Scanion, AUEW president. Left: JIm Conway, AUEW general secretary. Right: EPTU secretary Frank Chapple leaving the Department of Employment 2,000-odd local branches were closed down last year-the most since 1939. The ultimate aim of the right wing is thought to be 1,000 regional branches with full-time secretaries. Postal ballots are now union policy, despite the enormous : cost-estimated at £100,000 a time. Even in the minds of usually well-meaning union officials, these developments are sometimes halfjustified by the argument that in the 1970s, with the rapid growth in power of multi-national companies, the unions have to become big, efficient, go-ahead organizations.

This is not the issue.

The struggle for revolutionary trade unionism, which is the only struggle through which workers today can defend their nara-won rignts, demands the nost determined fight against all the requirements in the unions of decaying capitalism and its state machine.

Manchester's engineering sit-ins and the National Industrial Relations Court have tolled the death-knell of Scanlon's 'balance' of class forces.

Tuesda Deutione! Behrt Cudy