The Use and Abuse of Trade Unions, by Arthur Bottomley

[p048] The Use and Abuse of Trade Unions. By Arthur Bottomley. Ampersand, 3/6. Right-wing Labour MP, former member of the Labour government, Arthur Bottomley has written a dull and boring booklet. Naturally, it is a small work. Mr. Bottomley has few ideas on the trade unions. Those he has are of the type that make a labour leader welcome in employers’ circles. In the first part of his booklet, Bottomley has strung together some meagre references to past events which are passed off as a resumé of the history of trade union organisa- tion. The second part is a contribu- tion to the Cold War and to the witch-hunt against militancy in the trade unions today. Bottomley blames the class struggle on evil men. ‘The Greeks put ruthless, dedicated men into the Trojan horse to take their enemies by stealth,’ he writes. ‘Today, Communists employ the same strategem against trade unions of the free world so as to use them for their own ends.’ According to Mr, Bottomley, the Communist Party is not alone in supplying ruthless men, dedicated to trouble-making. ‘A feature of recent years is the “emergence of Trotskyite groups— militant Marxists who have broken away from the party—and are active in the motor industry, ports, building trades, engineering and so on.’ The ‘Communist-led trade unions’ and the Communist parties are not, of course, the militant bodies such as this servant of the imperialist Cold War describes them. Cer- tainly the British Communist Party

[p049] 210 is becoming less and less deserving of the attack that it places industrial agitation above ‘what should be the prime purpose of a bona fide poiitical party—the return of candi- dates co local council and to Parliament’, Really, in the light of the ‘British Road to Socialism’ the Communist Party is most undeserv- ing of the criticism that it is not a bona fide reformist party. Trade unions deveioped through a ‘natural unforced grow.h’, is Mr. Botiomiey’s ignorant conciusion. In his booklet there is not the least breath of air from the real history of trade unions—a _ history of struggle. he readily blames the workers themselves for the repressions they suifered in the past. In this way he commenis on the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union which swept the country in the 1830s. When the workers then organised to fight intolerable conditions, the tyranny of employers, courts and army were let loose on them with greater fury. Bottomley, naturally, comes down on the side of the oppressors. The vic‘ims were to blame. ‘The declared policy of the National Consolidated to bring about .a national strike naturally aroused considerable oppo- sition and reaction.’ Mr. Bottomley has no use for General Strikes. In fact, he really has no use for trade unions at all, except to discipline the working class, in a society where state, employers and workers have common interests. His book has a smell of Moral Rearmament about it. ‘The bad employer and the bad workman are enemies of society,’ he tells us. “The role of the trade unions in a free society,’ he writes, is not just one of ‘bargaining’ with the employers for more pay, shorter hours and better conditions. He sees more important tasks for them to perform. Not in assisting to change society. Oh no! The trade unions must ‘strengthen the national economy by improving standards of workmanship and productivity’. With ‘responsible leadership’ and working for this, ‘trade unions can and do wield enormous influence in the councils of industry and with governments’, The ‘use’ of trade unions is thus to orderly govern sections of the working class so that LABOUR REVIEW —Summer 1963 they conform to the economic relations, insitutions and ideology of capitalist society in the way Mr. Bottomley does so thoroughly bim- self. W.H. ‘Industrial Relations’