Transcript
National Press Club Discussion
JOHN MONKS
General Secretary, Trades Union Congress
introduction by
MORTON BAHR
President, Communications Workers of
Albert
Shanker Institute Board of Directors
These
remarks were delivered at a luncheon discussion on workforce development and
training sponsored by the Albert Shanker Institute and the New Economy Information
Service in Washington, D.C. on January 3, 2003, as part of an ongoing
exploration of this topic.
Morton
Bahr: We are here to discuss
a matter that many of us see as a necessity for the growth of the labor
movement — its contribution to the skills and education of our workforce. This
is an imperative not only because today's union member is required to keep up
his or her skills to stay afloat in a changing economy, but also because many
of us believe we can build our unions by offering education and training
services to workers. This is especially true when we consider workers in the
so-called New Economy, where traditional ways of organizing do not always
resonate.
John Monks,
General Secretary of the British Trades Union Congress, has helped lead the TUC
in boldly redefining itself as a movement of skills developers. The TUC and its
affiliates have partnered with employers, government and educational
institutions to develop many first-rate training programs. They not only have
mounted a successful campaign to gain employer and public funding for union-sponsored
training, they also have pioneered in establishing union-based training
representatives.
These union
staff members advise union members at the job site about their training needs
and the programs that may be available to accommodate those needs. These
initiatives have cast the TUC as a movement engaged in their country's economic
renewal, one that is firmly committed to the productivity, competitiveness and
stability of unionized employers, and to the needs and aspirations of
individual union members.
My own union
has been aggressive in this field here in the United States. When the Bell
System was broken up in January of 1984, and domestic and global competition
were introduced into what for 100 years had been a protected monopoly, we knew
the lives of our telecommunications members would never be the same. No longer
could a worker leave high school at age 18, start working for the telephone
company, and retire 30 or more years later with a full pension, often leaving
from the same building where he or she had been hired 30 years before.
We were
required to redefine job security. We redefined it by helping our members make
themselves more employable. If possible, they would be able to stay with the
employer they were already working for. But, if not, they could find work in
the general marketplace. We sought to do this through expanded education and
training programs.
In 1986, we
bargained with AT&T to create the first educational corporation in the
telecommunications industry jointly owned by labor and management. We have come
to see these workplace and training programs not only as essential to our
industry, but also to our nation's competitiveness. Other unions also have
developed impressive programs of their own, among them the electrical workers,
the machinists, the teachers, the seafarers, and many others. Perhaps we in the
U.S. now should begin thinking of all these efforts as a whole that can be
larger than the sum of its parts — as something that can be a strategically
important component of the broader labor cause.
Now let's hear
what John Monks has to say. John Monks became General Secretary of the TUC in
September 1993 after heading its Organizing Department and serving as its
Deputy General Secretary. In January 2001, the TUC adopted his proposal to
create a Partnership Institute. The TUC is aiming to change British workplaces
by establishing partnerships as a potentially successful approach to industrial
relations. The Institute trains business managers and union leaders in ways of working
together. With the election of Tony Blair in 1997, John was able to gain
government backing for a Union Learning Fund to finance more labor training
programs than could supported through the collective bargaining process alone.
The Fund has recently begun to support union learning representatives, union
staff who advise prospective trainees at the workplace.
This spring,
John will pass on his training and partnership legacy to Brendan Barber and
move on to become a candidate to succeed Emilio Gabaglio
as General Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). The ETUC
leadership has decided to support John's candidacy for General Secretary when
the 10th ETUC Statutory Congress convenes in Prague on May 26-29 of this year.
John, we in the
U.S. have heard intriguing bits and pieces about new ideas and new programs
that are being tried out in Britain. It has been said that the TUC's partnership training has helped labor reach
entry-level and younger workers, and that you are finding ways to appeal to
technical and professional employees who are eager for skills that will make
them more competitive and productive. It is said that employers are granting
more respect and standing and decision-making authority to employees as a
result of the TUC's efforts. Some claim that TUC
programs strengthen labor's role in shaping the labor market in the technical
and professional sectors. And, of course, we hear that these efforts are
changing labor's public image, its standing within the Labour
Party, and its appeal to its membership. Now, John, is all this true? Or have
we been fed a bill of goods by your public relations folks? If it is true, we
are going to want to learn a lot more, and you are the man with the credentials
to explain i
John
Monks: I am not asked often
to talk about workforce development and training. It is about the least sexy
subject you can ever put on the agenda of a trade union meeting. And
"lifelong learning" may be the most deadly phrase I have ever heard:
only one level up from a life sentence at San Quentin. Think of yourself as a
kid who did not do too well at school, and who was very relieved to escape into
the world of work. Then somebody comes along and says, "Have I got a great
idea for you: lifelong learning."
The world of vocational
learning is also a realm of horrendous jargon. There may be at most four people
who understand the vocational training qualification system in Britain. I am
the Vice Chairman of the Learning and Skills Council of England, and I don't
understand it. The academic routes are pretty clear, but the vocational
education routes are complex, jargon-ridden, and impenetrable for many. The
story I want to tell you today starts back in 1987. We had a cataclysmic
miners' strike. Arthur Scargill was at the head of
it, pitted against Mrs. Thatcher. It took the mobilization of the whole
resources of the state to defeat him, but she did it. Arthur Scargill had argued mightily that defeat for the miners
would be defeat for the whole labor movement, and that was one thing he got
right. We were all defeated. Militancy ground to a dead halt. Any employer
faced with a restless group of workers said, "Do you want to end up like
the militant miners?" Rupert Murdoch followed up with the London printers'
conflict: there was a series of disputes in which regiments of workers were
thrown against the barbed wire as in a First World War infantry charge. The
unions were bruised, bleeding and losing members fast. Militancy against the
government was leading us nowhere. We put a lot of faith in the resurgence of
the Labor Party under then-leader Neal Kinnock, but he lost in 1987. What, many
asked, was the purpose then of the TUC, of organized labor? That was the year I
became Deputy General Secretary of the TUC.
The first thing
we decided to do was to try to find out a bit more about what rank-and-file
workers wanted. What did they want from unions? What were they looking for from
work? We commissioned someone to do some opinion research. The results
surprised us. What did the workers want? First, job security. Second--this was
the surprise--esteem. I had never seen that word on any union agenda, but it
came in second. The respondents didn't mean esteem in general. They meant that
they wanted to be held in respect by the people for whom they worked, and the
organization for which they worked. If you want to be miserable, they were
telling us, work for somebody who doesn't respect you. Perhaps that issue
should not have been a surprise, but it was, because we had just never talked
about it as a union issue. Then came our third issue: pay. A lot of us had
expected that pay would be listed at least second, and perhaps first. And the
number four issue on the list was skills and training. Work hours, vacations
and other traditional workplace issues were quite a bit lower down on the list.
So two out of the top four responses--esteem and skills training--were a
surprise.
We began to
understand that over the years, priorities have changed. For young
professionals, single or in relationships, job security may no longer be number
one. For others with family responsibilities, it is. We sense, too, that
workers have a great need now for more control over time, for the flexibility
to balance the pressures and the stresses of working life with bringing up a
family or leisure activities. Esteem and respect have become more important.
I soon made it
a rule that a day-and-a-half a week I would leave the office and get out of
London, if possible, to get around to different workplaces, and to listen to
all kinds of different groups. What I heard about labor relations was often
very different from the conflict model described in the newspapers. I found
people engaged in creative deals, helping one another through very difficult
problems, among them the huge job losses in manufacturing--another trend that
you have seen in the United States.
Some ingenious
things are being done in industrial relations, some high trust relationships
are being built. Yet we do not talk about those a lot in the union world. We did
not celebrate the good agreement, the deal, we did not celebrate the good
relationship; we celebrated the strike, we celebrated the conflicts. But we
were not doing very well at those conflicts in the 1980s, against a very strong
Prime Minister who was determined never to allow militant unions to win
anything, no matter what it might cost the state.
The survey and
the changes in the workplaces we observed led us to put an emphasis on the
partnership agenda, and on the skills agenda. But those were not the only two
factors; there were other reasons as well. Nothing upsets me more in our
debates than the assertion that that you can only do one thing in the unions.
The reality is that you need a militant approach with some employers in some
circumstances. You certainly need a strong emphasis on organizing, and we have
borrowed from AFL-CIO when it comes to training organizers and getting unions
to put more money into organizing. But there are other situations where
different approaches are useful. We are in a very complex labor market, with
all kinds of people with different attitudes, and we need many different ways
to approach them.
While we
recognized that the strike is an important weapon in the union arsenal, we also
needed to try to get the Labour Party elected, and to
make some friends outside Labour. Even the
Conservative Party was not hostile on all issues.
We wanted to
present the TUC as something interesting, something unusual. What we developed
was a mixed brew. It didn't translate easily into a mission statement. There
was something in it for the militants, something for the moderates--it spanned
the union political spectrum quite effectively. It can be criticized perhaps
for lack of focus, but in a labor market as complex as today's you need a variety
of approaches.
This brings us
to partnership and skills development. The partnership agenda has had some
difficulties in our British unions. There are some people who have been elected
to leadership positions in the trade union movement recently who do not like it
much. It sounds like collaboration, with all the French 1940's feel that word
evokes. It has been attacked from the left, and they have plenty of ammunition.
In the last decade executive pay has gone up in both of our countries. Pension
arrangements are under attack. I am as militant about fighting to defend
pensions as anybody in Britain, and this has to be a top union priority at the
moment.
It is also true
that partnerships can sometimes be sweetheart deals. Norman Willis, my
predecessor, looked at the way some unions were dealing with incoming
investors, mainly Japanese, and described it as a beauty contest. Various
unions paraded their "moderation" on the catwalk in front of the men
from Tokyo and Nagoya. It didn't do trade unionism any good. As I once put it,
it was a good thing that slavery was illegal in Britain, or somebody might have
been offering that. This process produced agreements that were sometimes called
partnership agreements, but we at the TUC did not recognize all of them as
genuine partnership agreements.
Partnership is
not the partnership between a man and his dog. It is a relationship of equals,
built on a recognition that both sides can actually do some damage to one
another other. We created our own Partnership Institute so that we could
promote what we considered this genuine form of partnership. This is what you
might call a virtual institute--it is centered at the TUC, but it employs union
staff, business consultants, employers and others who are well-respected to help
people cope with change in our workplaces.
We have got a
lot of good examples of partnerships that are working for us. The biggest
employer of union labor in the private sector in Britain is Tesco,
with over 100,000 members of the Shopworkers' Union in
their stores. Barclays Bank has, like all banks, been reorganized in the wake
of the electronic revolution, but has handled it in an extremely cooperative
way with the unions concerned. Then there is the British Bakeries employing
mainly night workers, people slogging away through the night to put fresh bread
on the breakfast table. Their problems are very different from those of bank
staff and saleswomen and men. We have employed the partnership approach to help
all involved exercise some flexibility at the workplace so that in the middle
of the night, when a supervisor has a row with the shop steward, the work isn't
shut down by an unofficial strike. We have about 60 other partnerships like
these, led by workers who are very proud of what they have achieved and
committed to resolving issues with minimal disruption either to pay or output.
That brings me
to "skills," because skills only really fits in when you have a
relationship with an employer in which you can talk about things other than pay
and effort. British bargaining in the periods of higher conflict was all about
pay vs. effort--what you got for what you did. If you hope to broaden the
collective bargaining agenda you must establish a more relaxed relationship.
Both sides have to be willing to experiment. Not everything that is achieved
can be seen as an inviolate right that must be defended at all costs. We are
the oldest labor movement in the world, and have been through a lot of it, but
handling change is still very difficult.
In the area of
skills development we have a similar tradition to that of the United States.
Here, too, apprenticeship has been central to the craft unions. From the
beginning, unions too had an affection for liberal education, and encouraged
bright team members to go on with education, to learn more. We have both
provided access to adult education: second chance education is something that
came in early in the workers' educational movements. And, especially in the
last 20 to 30 years, we have given a lot of attention to providing high quality
training to our own union leadership cadres, be they shop stewards or full-time
officers.
Two significant
developments came along in the late 1980's. One actually was made in
America--in Detroit. We took up the example of the Ford agreement with the
United Auto Workers (UAW) to establish a community college in Detroit. When
they were downsizing in the early 1980's they found that many workers had a
vast problem of literacy and numeracy. They had the
good sense to form a college to provide people with skills so they would be
employable somewhere else. This Ford experiment was brought to Britain. There
was no need to form an entirely new college, because we already have public
continuing education colleges. Our unions got more closely involved with those
institutions. Every Ford worker in Britain got 200 pounds a year as a budget
for his or her own learning. They could do with it what they wanted to, with
the understanding that they should use it for skills upgrade with an eye toward
long-term employability.
I have been a
frequent visitor over the years to the plant in Liverpool that now makes
Jaguars. I was very impressed when I heard that 80% of the workers had taken up
the offer. (I was a bit less impressed when I found that 20% of that 80% were
in golf driving classes). But we are trying to change a culture; we are making
progress, but there is a lot of work to be done. Despite some flaws, the value
of the Jaguar program is proving itself. A factory where nothing could be changed
without a terrible argument is now producing very successful Jaguar models, and
finds change quite easy. The union is not weaker as a result--the union is
stronger. Most importantly, the plant is still there, when many others that
could not change have shut their doors.
I am the
Honorary Vice President of Scottish Power Learning. Scottish Power is important
in America's northwestern states as an electricity generator. We are trying
replicate the experiences here that we have had in Scottish Power back home.
There we are up to about 70% participation in our training and education
programs, which are notable for requiring employees to undertake some learning
on their own time. All this grew out of that American idea, pioneered by the
UAW.
My other example
is more homespun, but you'll recognize that it also has taken hold in many
places in America. There was a particular plant in the Liverpool area that made
the bodywork for trucks. It had six changes of ownership in five years. It was
worth nothing. There were strikes every other week; everyone was in despair. A
new managing director came in and asked the union district leadership what
could possibly be done: "I am only going to be here for six months, and if
I do no better than my predecessors, then this plant is going to be
closed." The union leaders said that the workforce were not very good at
what they were doing and didn't really have any idea about what was needed. The
company brought the shop stewards in and had the same discussion with them. They
too were in the dark. The stewards explained that workers were always being
asked to take up new production methods, like just-in-time, or to follow new
management techniques, but they were never really clear about what the managers
were talking about. They asked, "What does all this really mean for
us?"
The TUC
regional education officer, who was based in Liverpool, was brought in and
asked to lay on some training. He brought in a tutor who virtually lived with
the workers for a bit, and made sure they got courses on every new technique
the company wanted to introduce. Then they went into contract negotiations when
they understood their problem. They came out with an agreement, and taken
another, and the company is now thriving: relationships are good and strikes
are almost non-existent. So we found that through learning we could produce a
lot of other benefits, including a much better relationship between union and
management. We sought to spread that lesson.
Let's go back
for a moment to that worker who did not do very well at school, and was being
challenged with the words "lifelong learning." We found out--again,
by accident--that when an employer says you need to upgrade your skills to be
equipped for the new technology of the future, many workers shy away, become
scared. They worry that they will be next on the restructuring list. But when
the union tells them about learning, they will listen without trepidation.
Computers have
been a great vehicle for engaging our people in skills development, because
older workers want to get their hands on them when they see young people
working with them. We have all sorts of projects going on in this area. For
example, British Bakeries was the most unpromising territory for skills
development, because there were so many literacy problems. But the unions found
a role as a kind of guardian. We didn't set up the kind of pass-fail situation
that people face in school examinations. We instead allowed workers to take
classes on their own time, at their own pace. The union supported them all the
way through it. It has been a terrific thing.
One of the few
things we were able to accomplish under 18 years of Tory rule was to impress
them with what we did on this issue-- bringing into the learning world people
who were miles outside it. We even got some money from them. Now you have Dubya down in the White House, and a Republican Congress. I
don't want to draw too close a parallel, but in this area, we were able to get
some money from a Conservative government. They were concerned about this
problem, and your government may be as well.
Our vocational
learning systems in Britain were not comparable to some of those in the
European Union, certainly not those in Germany. Many in our production work
were not up to the levels of those in the Asian countries either, so we could
capitalize on a widely- recognized problem. The government was aware that seven
million adults in Britain have a literacy problem, out of a total population of
60 million–a huge problem. Too many people have not done well at school.
By 1997, when
the Labour Party came into power, the unions had
proved very effective in reaching out with basic educational skills to
illiterate workers, like some of the bakery workers. The employers were
supportive, because things were happening that would not have happened without
union support. The TUC was employing staff on the regional and local level to
go out and spread the message. With government support a union learning fund
was created, with about £10 million annually. Unions can apply for modest
amounts, in what have to be joint applications with employers, who pay for part
of the programs themselves.
The next idea
we developed was the concept of the union learning representative. We wanted to
dispel the idea that to be a shop steward and union activist was to set
yourself up for victimization by the employer, rather than to benefit. We
wanted to establish roles for shop stewards that allowed them to take part in
activities that did not always involve conflict with employers. We needed to
find a different way to recruit a new next generation of union representatives.
We are hoping that learning can be a way to do this, and we are making progress
in this area. The union learning rep position is kind of a halfway house on the
way to becoming a shop steward. We already have about 3,000 union learning
reps–it is moving quite quickly. They are soon going to be given
government-sanctioned status--anywhere a union is recognized it will be
entitled by law to appoint learning reps. They will be given time off by the
employer, and facilities to do their jobs. You will not hear too many union
activists saying "thank you" to the Labour
government for these steps, because that is not the political mood at the
moment. But they are important steps.
There are now
60 TUC staff employed full-time in this area. All of them are paid by public
funds. This is quite helpful, but it also worries us. If the government
changes, a lot of this could be undone. But at the moment it is quite popular,
and has full government support. The Learning and Skills Council is a public
administrative body that oversees all this in England. I have recently become
its Vice Chairman, and Chairman of its Adult Committee. So the unions are
integrally involved in our whole system of vocational training. Would we pay
for what the unions are doing out of our own resources if we lost government
support? We couldn't afford to on the same scale. But there are a lot of people
who have come up through this route now, young people who are enthusiastic and
also would fight to keep it in the union budget.
What has been
the overall effect of our efforts in partnership and training on the strategic
situation of the British labor movement? The picture is mixed. I can certainly
point to examples of how this activity has been successful in particular
workplaces. But, overall, union membership has only stabilized–even though we
have had a very buoyant labor market. We are still experiencing losses in
manufacturing, and we have problems of density in some areas of public service.
The need for a vital organizing program is absolutely crucial. We have been
going through a period of union mergers, when unions tend to focus internally.
The maneuvers vis-à-vis the Blair government can be consuming. People too
easily lose sight of the hard, nitty-gritty work of organizing.
When it comes
to increasing membership, I can point to examples where strikes and other
traditional union strategies have helped, as well as to situations in which
lifelong learning and partnership have helped. Some people make successes of
certain things, and others do not. Where the partnership and learning agenda
has clearly helped is in collective bargaining. We have been able to get
agreements that entail flexibility for people on production line jobs, and give
them some choices, some sense of self-respect and control. We are also hanging
on a lot better to decent pension arrangements--even improving them in some
cases--than we were when there was an atmosphere of greater conflict. Employers
would often put pension cuts on the list just to have something else to use in
the conflicts they knew they would have with us.
I believe
partnership and learning is now an important part of the TUC agenda, and will
grow as the new European Directive on Information and Consultation comes into
force. This EU rule will apply to British employers in the year 2005, with some
variations according to a company's size. It requires management to inform the
workers' representatives before making major changes, so there can be some
opportunity to influence those changes. This is a big departure from the
shareholder-value principal that has been so overwhelmingly powerful in both
our countries. It will give workers some say in the rules of the game, which
have been rigged against us in recent years.
There are other
ways the partnership and learning agenda can be important to our future. Our
unions have a great need to appeal to workers in the new workforce. There has
been a huge growth of service occupations in both of our countries, not just at
the bottom end, but also in the professional and skilled fields. Some of these
jobs are hard to define, but just ask people what their kids do and you'll get
some interesting answers. The names our unions go by often reflect the world of
work as it was in the 1960's, not what it is today. One thing I leave the TUC
with regrets about is that I have not been able to convince the General Council
of the TUC that we should have one highly visible Internet-based information
service to bring people halfway towards the union movement. Such a thing would
do much more to reach out to the professional/technical group of workers that Morty Bahr is so concerned about.
All these
issues now go to my successor, Brendan Barber. He will have to bring along the
group of union leaders who do not always agree with some of the things I have
spoken about so positively here today. He will also have to deal with figures
in our government who can be careless toward those who have supported them in
ways that Bill Clinton never was, and who have an exaggerated respect for
business (which you might say Bill Clinton shared) that makes them too cautious
in some matters.
At a time when
corporate reputations are falling we in labor and on the left of center and
center should be speaking up more vigorously with new ideas. For example, there
is a sense that the public sector in Britain could be privatized along American
lines. These new public/private partnerships can lead to lower conditions for
staff. So far, we have not found the ways to negotiate through the problems. So
we have a resurgent militancy around some matters in the public sector or areas
like transportation, which are not going to take off to China or Central
Europe.
I am leaving
now to fight the battle for social dialogue and true partnership across the
whole of Europe, particularly in emerging democracies and economies where there
have been no traditions of this kind. To seek to uphold the European social
model against the shareholder value model associated with Wall Street and the
City of London and every business school in both our countries. To do this I've
had to adopt the principle of lifelong learning for myself – at the moment, I'm
learning French. As I said to Brendan Barber on his election as General
Secretary-Elect at the TUC General Council in December, "Après moi, le déluge."
MODERATOR: Morton
Bahr, President,
Communication Workers of America:
Thank you so much, the floor is open.
Sam Leiken, consultant, New Economy Information Service:
I may be the only person here who has read the collected works of John Monks,
because, on behalf of the New Economy Information Service, I recently went to
the UK to look at how their unions deal with lifelong learning. The result
appears in an article in their workforce development book* called
"Classroom Struggle Unionism." In a speech you gave to the business
school at Leeds University you noted that unions now have the capacity to
provide individual services to individual workers. Both in the United States
and in the UK there are large numbers of workers who are unaffiliated to any
union, many of them former union members, who are nevertheless positively
inclined towards unions. They have no readily-available way to connect to
unions organizationally. They also have very little access to lifelong
learning, or to expert help in getting the kinds of services that they need. Is
it conceivable that unions could attract not only workplace-based union members
but also individual union members who need various services that the market
does not efficiently provide?
John Monks:
Unions are essentially collective. The idea of your individual union officer
giving you advice at your elbow all the way through your working life is
lovely, but it's not practical. The Dutch Federation, the FNV, did try
something along these lines. They set up a special unit and advertised it quite
extensively. It was in the bottom right-hand corner of a lot of newspapers:
"the FNV, your agent." They took over the term from the movie stars
and footballers – "your agent."
It's going to
be difficult to deliver on that. The economics of unions make it hard for us to
offer professional services to individuals. The best we can do is train shop
stewards and learning reps to be aware of the kinds of opportunities that
exist.
Morton Bahr:
Let me add something, because our union is working on something along the lines
Sam mentioned in two companies – IBM and Microsoft – that are hardly pro-union
companies. High-level technical workers and engineers may not think they have a
reason to belong to unions. But, almost without exception, they belong to
professional organizations. We've done a lot of research in this. We want our
union to offer in a non-collective bargaining scenario the same kinds of
services and educational opportunities these employees get from professional
organizations. These employees do not respond to the traditional ways of
organizing low-paid workers, and expect something else. They do want esteem in
the workplace, ways to deal with high-level management and assistance in career
development. But when you get into this area you have to make a long-term
commitment before you can see results.
Marshall
Goldberg,
Joint Labor-Management Educational Programs Association
I had the opportunity to go to the UK in 1992 when the last government launched
something called "Investing in People." Was there a seat at the table
for the trade union movement in the legislation that set up "Investing in
People"? That was a time when your government was not exactly
union-friendly. How did that program work, and were you able to use it for the
benefit of your membership?
John Monks:
Investing In People is a simple concept. Employees are supposed to be aware of
where a company is going, where they fit in and what training and development
employees need in order to do their jobs. It's a "badge" that
companies can apply for if they conduct this program with the TUC, and
demonstrate that they are doing their bit. This was a very hard program to get
started back in 1993. But eventually it got wide acceptance, even from the
Conservative government. It showed that the unions were committed to learning.
The program is
not established in legislation -- it's all voluntary. You apply for it and you
can get a bit of money to help if you're a small firm. At the moment, about 40%
of British employees are covered by "Investors in People." It's
weaknesses, we would say, are that it's not pro-active enough on equality of
opportunity, it's not pro-active enough in setting up systems of qualifications
and transferable skills that enable a person who has undertaken training to use
it if the company goes under and he or she is thrown out into the world. We're
trying to improve the program -- we're now on the board and very much engaged
in it.
Penn Kemble, Senior Scholar,
Freedom House; consultant, New Economy Information Service:
The words that one might use to describe your presentation are constructive,
modest, cooperative and skeptical--things I find quite attractive. But if you
put your partnership and lifelong learning ideas up against people in the labor
movement who are angry--sometimes with considerable justification–and whose
anger is often alloyed with a kind of ideological militancy that is not always
reasonable, you may well lose. In fact, there's whispering that you're leaving
the TUC because this agenda has already lost out. As you put it, the deluge is coming.
How do you answer that?
John Monks:
That's not the reason I'm leaving. The battle you describe is one that goes on
all the time in the labor movement. The pragmatic vs. militant debate goes back
to the very origins of trade unionism, and is one that swings one way and then
swings the other. I'm very philosophical about that. The challenge to Brendan
will be something like this: we managed to have a major row with the Labour government in 1969, and went on to lose the election
in 1970. We managed to do it again in 1979, and then lost the election in 1979.
Brendan won't want to be the General Secretary who presides over that "hat
trick" any more than I would.
We face a real
risk because of disputes in the public sector, the socialized, non-market sector.
When that's the epicenter of disputes, you don't have to be from a right-wing
business school to acknowledge that it's the socialist bit that's not working.
The private sector is not doing too badly. It's handling change, people in
partnership agreements and so forth. You may have noticed that I didn't cite
any public sector examples of good partnership in the ones I gave. There are
some, but they're small compared to the more spectacular ones like Tesco, Barclays and the British Bakeries.
The struggle to
find a proper balance between militancy and partnership is quite a battle, and
it'll go on long after both Brendan Barber and I are gone. We're trying to
establish the labor movement as the natural place for workers to be in a very
changed labor market–one that is not based on the mine, the mill, the big
factory or even the big socialized public services. You need a lot of different
weapons to use in achieving this. I've skewed my remarks around partnership and
learning, but that is an emphasis that could change. If employers keep trying
to wriggle out of pension schemes, and if they continue to pay themselves these
huge amounts on an accelerating basis, then partnership will become extremely
difficult.
During the
1990's we found that we could use different approaches for different employers,
and some of them didn't fit familiar rhetorical patterns. I'm quite ready to
step up and defend what we've done. We got some good agreements. We've got
better relations and we're doing things that are effective together. This is
something that we need to make clear, so that it's not just the militant
posture that gets the credit.
Bruce Olsson, HPWO Partnerships
Department, International Association of Machinists:
I'm with the machinists' union, and I work with a department that helps our
local unions set up labor management partnerships with their employers. I was
impressed with your comments that partnership is just one tool to be used in
dealing with employers, and that its usefulness depends on a particular situation.
Strikes are certainly appropriate at certain times. I have a couple of
questions. One is that at your Partnership Institute you say you use business
consultants in some of your work. Our experience has been that when we're
dealing with workplace change the rank and file is very skeptical of business
consultants, because they believe they carry out the agenda of management,
which in many cases aims at eliminating our members' jobs. What is the
accountability process that you have for those management consultants? Do you
review their work on any type of regular basis? Can you remove them if you feel
they have acted inappropriately?
My second
question: your Partnership Institute, as I understand it, comes under the new
unionism sector of the TUC, which has to do with organizing. Have you been able
to make this work for what we call "front door organizing"? In this
country we have to fight through many legal and other obstacles to organize a
new workplace. Our hope is that through partnership we might be able to walk in
when a new facility has opened up and offer better relationships with employers
so we can organize right from the very beginning. We've had very limited
success with this. Harley Davidson had been one example. Are there examples in
the British experience?
John Monks:
There can be tension between the Organizing Academy at the TUC and the
Partnership Institute. The Organizing Academy is naturally pulled more toward
the rough end of the labor market, with exploitative employers. These are kids
who often come with a militant outlook, who are angry about the conditions many
people are working under. The Partnership group is working in circumstances
where there is a shared willingness to improve those conditions. As you have
noted, we think both groups have important roles to play. A union needs to do
both things, to be capable of acting in both theaters.
But this
necessity can cause conflicts within a union staff, and these can become
political from time to time. One of my tasks has been to argue that both are
aspects of the whole, and that we have to appeal to different groups in the
labor market. On the other question, consultants go as TUC associates into the
various workplaces, and they're accountable for both elements of our over-all
strategy. For every task they take on there is a review process with the union.
If they don't get good marks they won't be used again. If we are using people
with business backgrounds, they have to deal with union needs. But our
organizers and consultants also have to know how to keep the employer on board
if partnership is going to be successful.
Anthony Carnevale, Educational Testing Service:
In America, it seems that we only discuss adult training seriously when we are
dealing with broad economic issues like trade in which training is offered as a
trade-off for jobs. That is, you allow jobs to go overseas, or eliminate them
with technology, and then give those who have lost jobs training. But this
approach deals only with the short-term. And when people who represent workers
are forced to choose between jobs and training, of course they choose jobs.
One way to
overcome this short-term approach is to give training and education greater
attention from the bottom up, by getting workers involved before their jobs are
at risk. This is what is being done by leaders like Morty
Bahr. But it may also be possible again to develop concern at the top about
longer-term strategies. That can happen as trade issues become more and more
important in the private sector, and if there's a scarcity of competent labor.
In the United
States an important turning point will be reached in about three years: the
rapid retirement of the baby boom generation. More than 46 million American
workers over the age of 55 or 60 who are currently employed and who have
education or training beyond high school--especially males--will be retiring in
droves between now and 2020. There may be a fundamental scarcity of skilled
labor. Macroeconomic projections suggest a general labor supply problem that in
gross terms is larger than is generally imagined. One has to assume that people
who retire keep eating, so the demand for labor remains fairly robust. So you
either fill demand by reaching offshore, or you have to do other things–like
re-training.
Trade policy
may have to be altered in a fairly serious way to adjust to an economy with
scarce labor. I wonder whether Europeans are thinking about this kind of
situation?
John Monks:
We have some similarities in our labor markets. We are a long way from full
employment, because we've got pockets of high unemployment. Nevertheless, the
most noticeable thing in the British labor market at the moment is the shortage
in the skilled crafts. After systems engineers in computing and all that,
skilled craftsmen are our big problem area. A shortage of plumbers is one of
our main problems. This extends to Scotland and the north of England and South
Wales, where unemployment is traditionally higher than in the south of England.
So we're learning to live with something you here have always had to deal with:
waves of immigration in the construction trades.
We've not had
immigration from the Republic of Ireland, given the fantastic growth rates they
have had. But we're now receiving large numbers of building tradesmen from Central
and Eastern Europe, going beyond Poland into the Ukraine and Russia. It was
quite a shock to come into the TUC building six months ago to find a team of
Ukrainian electricians doing the rewiring of one of our rooms. The union
membership inquiries are still outstanding on them.
High employment
levels are pulling people into countries of the European Union. The Netherlands
is a good case in point: its population went from nine million to 19 million
since the Second World War. It's not a very big area. Immigration is a major
factor in meeting skill shortages and making up for a decreasing birthrate and
an aging population. It's socially difficult in parts of the country, and we
have had some race riots, especially in some of the old northern towns. Unions
have a big job to do to help our country embrace immigrants as full workers.
That's our stance, not the protectionist one of trying to keep them out. You're
not going to keep them out, because the Channel is as porous as the Rio Grande.
Their assimilation will be both politically and economically important.
Birth rates in
Britain are low. Birth rates in the traditionally Catholic countries are even
lower – now even in the Republic of Ireland. Huge changes are taking place.
Only three parts of the world are magnets for the rest – North America, Western
Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. Immigration will be a major problem for
unions to handle.
Morton Bahr:
We've got jobs going in both directions. There are tens of thousands of call
center workers in India today. Most of the companies here are doing this
quietly. When you call the 800 number for a variety of services the worker at
the other end does not identify where he or she is located. Companies,
particularly in India, are training workers to lose their Indian accent. They
already have the English language ability, so in training school they sit
hour-after-hour watching Laverne & Shirley videos. So don't be surprised
when all the call center responses sound like they are located in Flatbush,
Brooklyn.
Let me offer an
observation before we thank John. What we didn't mention was how fragile
partnership agreements are. We see this from our own experience. We began ours
in 1980 with AT&T, the old Bell system, which had over half a million
workers. As John explained, partnerships opened up many doors that had been
closed. We established The Alliance for Employee Growth and Development, an
educational corporation owned jointly by the company and the union, and funded
it through collective bargaining. The Bell system's management changed, after a
man named Bob Allen left. Mike Armstrong came in, and the system disappeared
overnight. But what is incredible is that not only AT&T but all the other
companies followed a similar pattern: education and training has never been
held hostage by either the company or the union. It has survived strikes,
lockouts, and all sorts of disputes because it has become ingrained in the
culture, and neither side is willing to jeopardize it. We have been able to get
a number of the companies together where the unions – CWA and the IBEW – are
the only thing they have in common.
We have worked
together with Pace University -- using an initial grant from the Sloan
Foundation – to deliver education online. We now have about 5 telecom companies
in this consortia, many of whom compete with each other in a variety of ways.
This means that when one of our members graduates with a degree certifying her
at a certain level, she can move across the country to get a job based on that
credential.
The frustration
that we really have is that the companies and the unions that have been
involved in fostering these partnership agreements over the last 15 years or
have been stuck on a plateau. We have not grown much on the labor side, and we
certainly haven't grown on the employer side. One of the ideas the Shanker
Institute and the New Economy Information Service have been discussing is how
we can open the dialogue up to more people. We tend to preach to the choir. Now
we need to find some way to persuade our colleagues on the union side as well
as those on the employer side that this approach is worth trying.
I myself was
once a skeptic. The only reason I bought into the idea in 1980 is I was on the
national bargaining committee that negotiated it. But I really didn't believe
in it. But because I was on the committee, and Vice President out of New York,
I thought we owed it a try. I went in with tongue-in-cheek, saying "show
me." I quickly became a convert when I saw the doors that opened. I've
been sold ever since.
Please join me
in thanking John Monks for a great presentation and dialogue.