EUROPE IS STILL THE FOCUS

John Edmonds is not pleased that the British gov­ernment opted out of the so­cial provisions agreed by the other 11 European Community govern­ments at the Maastricht summit last month. But, he says, it all could have been much worse.

“I went to Brussels the Friday before Maastricht and talked to people in the Socialist Group of the European Parliament to get their views of what was going on,” he says. “And their worry was not that Britain would effectively opt out. It was that an attempt would be made by Helmut Kohl to accommodate John Major, and the social chapter would be so diluted, par­ticularly in respect of majority vot­ing, that it would lose a lot of its force. That really was a nightmare scenario.”

Instead, the French government stood firm against a last-ditch at­tempt to water down the social chapter of the treaty to make it ac­ceptable to Britain. Major refused to budge and the 11 signed a proto­col committing them to develop common policies on workers’ rights which they will transcribe into na­tional law.

“I was delighted by the attitude of the French,” says Edmonds. “They played a blinder. Their atti­tude throughout was that if Britain didn’t want to come along with the social chapter it would have no involvement whatsoever. The French insisted that the proto­col signed by the 11 excluded Britain.”

The priority now, he says, is to get a Labour government which will sign up with the 11. Failing that, although “a lot of companies will be operating from 1993 onwards through standard policies applied to Britain as elsewhere”, the unions “will have to take ac­tion with individual companies to ensure that they match the rights they have to give elsewhere. There are plenty of options for us. In the long term, no one can see Britain standing aside from the social di­mension because more and more the social issues are going to be in­tegrated with economic decisions.”

Edmonds is scathing about the Tories’ attempts to justify the re­fusal to back the social chapter, ac­cusing Michael Howard, the Em­ployment Secretary, of lying in his claim that signing up would have cost Britain £5,000 million. “I don’t know where he got that figure from,” he says. “The first batch of measures are to do with consulta­tion and information rights. There are no costs at all.”

“The other point where the gov­ernment lied was when Major said that the social chapter would drive a coach and horses through the trade union legislation of the eighties. This is absolutely untrue. The social chapter is all about individual rights. It has nothing to do with trade union rights. In fact, freedom of association is specifical­ly excluded as an issue.”

So far, there has been no at­tempt to prescribe the precise in­stitutional framework within which workers’ rights to be con­sulted and informed will be exer­cised. But the 11 are likely to  agree that works councils be set up in larger companies, either on the German model, where works councils consist only of workers, or the French, involving workers and management. In either case, the trade unions have no formal role in representing workers at workplace level: works councils are elected by balloting workers directly, regardless of whether or not they are in a union.

The British trade unions are tra­ditionally hostile to works councils, but Edmonds’ union, the GMB, Britain’s second largest, believes that the German model is the way forward. “We’re going to get it any­way as a result of increasing EC integration,” he says. “The trade union movement can fight a rear­guard action against it, but that would be stupid.

“The German model of industri­al relations is much better than the British model. Here, in order to have proper rights at work you have to be a member of a trade union, your employer has to recog­nise the union, you have to get an agreement establishing your rights and then you have to have the industrial power to enforce them, Many workers in Britain don’t have all that. A system that pro­vides for rights in law of represen­tation and consultation is  much better.”

Not that Edmonds wants simply to copy the German system with no modifications: “No one is argu­ing that the German system is the perfect one. If the support given by the trade unions to elected repre­sentatives was rather more direct than in Germany I think that would be a good thing. One of the worries about the German system is that the German unions don’t have the constant commitment to recruiting people that we have in Britain. The level of unionisation is comparable but it is sustained in many industries by a series of campaigns. Normally when you start work in Britain you get a form pushed at you and you’re asked ‘Would you like to join the trade union?’ That isn’t so much the norm in Germany.”

On the other hand, “pay bar­gaining can come out of the work­place and be made regional or na­tional. That does seem to be an ad­vantage. The local representatives are not obsessed with pay bargain­ing and the local committee has more time to deal with and promo­tional opportunities, health and safety issues and so on.”

All this fits in neatly with anoth­er of Edmonds’ ideas which has been the cause of much controver­sy. He was the principle architect of Labour’s proposals for rational­ising the structure and timing of Britain’s pay bargaining by intro­ducing an annual National Eco­nomic Assessment.

Critics say that this is just an old-fashioned incomes policy in disguise, but Edmonds disagrees. “There is nothing in the proposals that would mean wage controls. The whole thing is about whether trade unions can co-ordinal* col­lective bargaining with employers. It’s an attempt to work out a new set of pay-bargaining arrange­ments so we’re less caught up in chasing each other’s tails.

“With the system contemplated by the Labour Party and strongly supported by the TUC, we’d have a well-informed debate involving the social partners in the run up to Xmas and a pay-bargaining period that lasted the first three months of the year. Most of the keynote settlements would be made at that time – everybody knows which ones they are: Ford, ICI, local government manual workers and so on – instead of playing this silly game when everyone ends up feel­ing very unhappy because every­one feels that someone, somewhere is getting a better deal. We’d try to co-ordinate the pay settlements in the light of the economic perfor­mance of the country. The govern­ment would find it much easier to manage the economy because the Chancellor would have a much bet­ter view of the level of pay settle­ments before the budget.”

It is clear that Edmonds does not see the TUC playing as large a part in the National Economic Assessment as it did in previous labour-union arrangements. “It would have a role in the co-ordi­nated pay bargaining, providing a forum for discussion and from time to time some leadership,” he says, but he is also keen to emphasise that “the TUC is going to have to change very rapidly” to provide more services to member unions, mainly on the research and legal front.

The reason for this attitude to­wards the TUC is simple: with the growth of giant super-unions in re­cent years as a result of mergers the TUC’s co-ordinating function has waned considerably. The GMB has been one of the most active in the merger field and is likely to re­main so in the nineties: Edmonds even raises the distant possibility of continent-wide union mergers, He will not, however, be drawn on the rumours that the next merger on the cards is with the Transport and General Workers’ Union – a joining of forces that would create a super-super-union.

“It is obviously the case that the TGWU and the GMB will work more closely together in the fu­ture,” he says. “We should do that because we overlap to such an ex­traordinary extent in our member­ship. There are all sorts of influ­ences pushing us in that direction. Neither of us is rich enough to waste resources. The services we could provide if we complemented each other would be a lot better. And if we have a continental sys­tem of works councils, it would force us to have a different, closer relationship at a local level.

“I think we ought to put a lot of effort into a closer working ar­rangement. If it leads to something else, so be it.”