Abstract
Richard Hyman’s work presents us with a rich portrayal of questions of solidarity and its meaning, the re-imagining of union roles, and the complex identity of unions, located in a concern with emancipation and worker representation. Hyman’s early work of the 1970s acts as a vital precursor for such concerns and offers a rich set of concepts explaining the dilemma of labour representation, its inherent instability, and the importance of the role of the political in shaping it, even if the concept of the political is underdeveloped. Drawing on a series of texts in a discursive and reflective manner, it points to the irony that the discussion in that period has more to tell us than many currently think. The question of politics and democracy – and purpose – in trade unions is discussed in terms of the tensions and ambivalence that exists within the employment relation and the way notions of achievement and progress are understood, and not just the contouring of the institutional landscape.
Introduction
The early work of Hyman – the Hyman of the 1970s and early 1980s – is not simply a ‘purer’ or more ‘classically radical’ oeuvre, which has less to say or has less relevance for the study of internal union politics and class relations compared to the broader, more sociological and nuanced focus of his later work. This article will argue that during the earlier phase we see elements forming the basis of a critical tradition within Marxism that has partly been lost by many current Marxist observers. In fact, what is highly significant about this early period is that it produced a range of concerns, thematic elements and reflections that suggest an alternative and at times relatively open, reflective Marxist and critical tradition.
This article argues that Hyman’s work consists of significant but different elements and phases. The degree of emphasis on class, conflict and questions of bureaucracy are seen to shift in the later Hyman, which is concerned with broader questions of union identity, politics and action within a comparative perspective and with less of an Anglo-Saxon focus. Yet the origins of this concern with identity, politics and action in part rest in a set of debates around Hyman’s interventions in the 1970s, which cannot be reduced to discussion of class reductionism and revolutionary discourse in some stereotypical manner. This was an era in which Marxists meditated on unions in a sophisticated and subtle manner. It might have had limitations – and might have been obsessed with assumptions about the political ‘ends’ of trade union and worker action through specific ideological views – but the early Hyman and the debates of the 1970s form a heritage which foreshadows many later concerns with the way agendas are framed, constructed and engaged with, as well as how they can be ambivalent and contradictory. In effect, the current interest in difference, ambiguity and power in the representation of work and employment is implicit in the work of Marxists – broadly defined – prior to the renewed (empirical) pluralism and postmodern turns of the 1980s. We can therefore understand the debate of the 1970s from the point of view of the concerns of the current time by revisiting the significance of this work and considering what it contributes, not just as a precursor to the new forms of industrial relations analysis but also as a set of relevant narratives and meditations about the actual constraints and context of organised labour. Unions are discussed in terms of the externality or outcomes of their actions, but not their evolution and complexity in terms of politics, purpose and identity. This sophisticated understanding is imperative, given the way that Marxist debates are reduced increasingly to the micro-level labour process and the outcomes of management action at work, being less concerned with the institutional framework of employment regulation and the question of engagement and alternative narratives (Martínez Lucio, 2010). Another problem is that the debates on trade unions seem currently to be fixated on the strategic ‘choices’ facing unions without understanding how these have evolved or are contextualised (Martínez Lucio and Stuart, 2009).
This article will therefore start with a discussion of three features of Hyman’s early work and a sample of the debates and interventions in relation to it: the concern with trade unions as agents of political change; the role of their internal governance in terms of the construction of priorities and practices; and the role of state and capital in constructing an ideological context and a hegemony of ‘common sense’ regarding trade union purpose and roles. These features appear in various facets of Hyman’s work during the 1970s and in related debates and responses – as with Peter Fairbrother’s concern with Hyman’s pessimistic view of bureaucracy and its impact on our understanding of unions. The first – and main – section of the article will therefore draw out the importance of the contribution made by Hyman and colleagues in establishing a subtle and dialectical view of trade unions across the three dimensions of politics, democracy and regulation. The second section will look at the limitations of some of the early work. We are aware of the development of Hyman’s work later in his career (something we shall not engage with systematically, given its objectives). However, the paper will attempt to argue that one needs to see these limitations as part of a broader problem in Anglo-Saxon industrial relations, and the way that concern with ‘vertical’ relations within unions can play down attention from broader, ‘horizontal’ relations. In addition, the way that the political (the ‘outside’ of industrial relations) becomes a defining part of how trade union purpose and action is constructed and, indeed, constrained, is examined. We attempt to consolidate the main elements of early Hyman by arguing that much of this early work remains highly relevant to today’s debates on trade unions, even if it did not go as far as it might have done in engaging with the political.
The later Hyman presents us with a rich portrayal of questions of solidarity and its meaning, the re-imagining of union roles, and the complex identity of unions; but the early work acts as a vital precursor and offers a rich set of concepts explaining the dilemma of labour representation, its inherent instability, and the importance of the role of the political in shaping it, even if the concept of the political is underdeveloped. Hence the paper draws on a series of texts in a discursive and reflective manner, pointing to the irony that ‘1970s Marxism’ has more to tell us than many currently think. It is not just about creating institutional maps, organisational typologies and triangular graphics, but of opening a door on how we need to understand some of the core concerns and interventions of Marxism, which both reductionist and foundationalist Marxists and anti-Marxists have a tendency to trivialise as being concerned merely with ‘class’.
The aim of the article is not to trawl through Richard Hyman’s early work in the form of a historical literature review and essay. It is not some attempt to map the logic, continuity and breaks – and hence ‘purity’ – in his narrative as a Marxist and scholar, nor is it concerned merely with the coherence or ultimate meaning of his early work. The aim is to reflect on the earlier part of the debate concerning unions, class and strategy within a capitalist context seen from the perspective and concerns of the current intellectual and political climate. The recent work by Hyman on class identity, union strategy and the meaning of solidarity, in part resolves many of the tensions of that early period and moves the discussion to a more sensitive, multi-causal and sociological analysis, but it makes greater sense by engaging with earlier interventions on the purpose and politics of trade unions.
Are trade unions agents for change or not?
The political purpose of unions
A historical concern among the left in relation to trade unions is the extent of their role in social and political change. As the main form of worker representation in a capitalist society, the role and impact of trade unions has engaged political activists and academics for some time. From a contemporary 21st-century perspective this may sound unrealistic, given the concern with the decline and change to which the unions themselves have been subjected. However, as formal and informal organisations of worker activity in terms of employment relations, their role is a subject of great interest. Richard Hyman’s 1971 publication Marxism and the Sociology of Trade Unionism was set in a context in which trade union power and its role in industrial conflict was a source of concern for both state and political elites within the capitalist system, as well as a source of positive inspiration among large parts of the left, and part of an ongoing and rich debate especially within Fourth Internationalists in Britain (Cliff, 1970; James 1960). Hyman brought together, and moved to a more academic and critical dimension, many of the contributions of the left in Britain since the 1950s. As a member of the International Socialists, he was pivotal in opening up discussions about the role of workplace representation and its potential, yet ambivalent, relation to politics and progressive agendas (with the latter becoming more important as a focus of discussion towards the end of the 1970s and into the early 1980s). On the left, the emergence of a more dynamic system of workplace representation in the 1960s and 1970s within various key trade unions led to the prospect that trade unions were well placed to make real gains and changes within the industrial order. Broader debates about workers’ control in industry were apparent within industrial relations at that time, in both academic and practitioner spheres. There was an increasing awareness of worker-led organisations from the early 1960s, in organisations such as the Institute of Worker Control, among others, both in the form of workers’ and activists’ influence on formal industrial relations mechanisms and as an emerging interest in direct forms of worker control in the capitalist labour process and organisation (see Barratt Brown et al., 1975). This debate around worker control concerned the indirect effects of workplace representation and agitation on the scope and nature of management control, but it also concerned the direct effects in terms of the content of production, as in specific cases where workers took a step into the purpose and content of production. This is another legacy that has not been well served by contemporary debates on industrial relations (see Martínez Lucio, 2010, for a discussion). In terms of these critical discussions, the 1970s were not focused only on issues of trade union action and resistance against management.
The discussion on forms of worker participation within industry and the workplace from a critical, Marxist and Labour Process perspective is an almost forgotten chapter regarding the content of various leading conferences over the past ten to twenty years. In the 1960s and 1970s, two sets of discussions developed that involved a strong Marxist element. The first dealt with notions of worker participation in terms of co-operatives and worker-oriented organisations. Marx (1976: 449) was ambivalent about co-operatives. On the one hand, they showed that workers could own and control their places of work, indicating to all that they could manage the workplace and provide an alternative approach to that of the ‘master’. However, on the other hand, they were pockets of worker control within a context of capitalism and markets, which required greater political change and greater challenges to the social and political hierarchies that surrounded them if they were to progress any further. The extent to which workers owned or managed the organisations in which they worked was a popular feature for discussion in the 1970s. There was also a range of debates on the way that specific organisations had been subjected to worker intervention as an alternative to restructuring (Cooley, 1981, 1982). Workers and unions – alongside supportive experts – developed alternative views of production that permitted a more socially oriented approach to the product and the way it was made. Yet a lack of supportive economic policies made such approaches vulnerable to the challenges of a capitalist, and hostile, context: these were ‘islands’ of socialism in a sea of capitalism.
In addition, there was the experience of Yugoslavia. While the memory of Communist Yugoslavia is currently linked to the tragic wars and ethnic tensions of the 1990s and beyond, this former country was a model of workers’ control that was highly elaborate and paid more attention to the voice of workers than did most neighbouring communist states (Warner, 1975). However, the problem of the unclear lines between management and unions, the lack of union autonomy and the rather interventionist system of management structures were apparent (Warner, 1975). Hence, once more we see a relatively pessimistic approach towards issues of control, participation and worker representation within these alternative organisational configurations. Participation is constrained without genuine worker control, in terms of self-management committees, strategic worker ownership and a greater say in questions of conception rather than merely execution, and by developments at the macro, micro and political levels: issues that were central to Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Yet workers’ control was recast within this period to also refer to the indirect influence and impact of workers’ representatives within enterprises, and in particular in the workplace in terms management control (see Zeitlin, 1980, for a review). Strategies of resistance to management control became a central feature of discussions within industrial relations and labour sociology (Beynon, 1973). The fact that workers did not directly control production did not detract from the interest that worker interventions could have in limiting and constraining the strategies of management (Cliff, 1970). Cliff and Barker (1966) were aware of the weaknesses of such shop steward movements caused by fragmentation and co-ordination issues, but the role of political intervention could play an offsetting role: while the workplace was as much a space of democratic aspiration as political intervention. The concern within the revolutionary left was the negative impact of the bureaucracy:
The struggle for democracy in the unions – regular elections of all officials, the right to recall them, giving them the average pay of the workers they represent get, the decision on the conduct of all strikes to be taken by mass meetings of workers etc. – will become of cardinal importance. A vacillating bureaucracy needs the steady, controlling hands of the rank and file. (Cliff, 1971)
The 1960s and 1970s thus represented a time when worker representatives and trade unions were becoming more influential actors in the broader politics of production. For some, this tradition continued well into the 1990s (Darlington, 1994).
It is against this backdrop of re-imagining worker representation in the UK and Europe, and of new waves of activism, that Hyman (1971) summarised historic arguments within the Marxist legacy regarding trade unions. The aim appears to have been to open the discussion on the reality and diversity of trade unionism. There has been no real consensus among socialists on the role and possibilities of trade unions. Hyman presents us with the legacy of a binary approach that wavers between optimistic and pessimistic views.
Pessimistic approaches tend to rest on the view that unions are, by their nature, economic and not political organisations. Lenin’s work is usually a significant point of reference in relation to trade unions developing wage consciousness and a narrower vision of demands in relation to employers (see Hammond, 1957). Unions work within the framework of the capitalist employment relationship, and seek improvements for workers in economic and not political terms. The narrative varies and can at times even be contradictory within Marxism, but Hyman alerts the reader to the fact that trade unionism in itself is seen by a stream of thought within Marxism as being unlikely to evolve into a generalised critiques of the social and economic system. This pessimism is grounded in the nature of the relationships in which trade unions are involved. Unions are (as in Anderson’s 1967 argument) caught between being both an opposition to capitalism given their very presence in organising the labouring classes, but are also a component of it in trying to improve the lot of workers within this context. They actually help to formalise the relationship between capital and labour – organising labour in relation to the contours (for example, sectors and firms) and agendas (for example, wages and time management systems) of capital. This leads to a level of complexity within labour organisations that in turn distances trade union leadership and decision-making from a political and critical position: the short-term internal organisational imperatives become as important a feature as the longer-term external organisational objectives (hence the engagement with Michels’s (1915) work in the text). Hyman tries to show us the value of being aware that there are – as Anderson (1967) noted – possibilities and limits to trade union action. The argument is that Marxism can be a broader template than many might imagine.
The limits and possibilities of trade unionism in political terms was therefore a topic of vibrant debate in the 1970s. As we have seen, Hyman (1971) argued that Marxism was torn between optimistic and pessimistic approaches to questions of trade unionism and worker representation, whether through their roles as representative organisations or through activities with employers in the form of collective bargaining. For Allen (1966), collective bargaining almost became an end in itself for the trade union movement and its leadership. Clarke (1977) and Clements (1977) had similar reservations about unions being able to politicise and generalise struggles around wages, though this pessimistic view of wage struggle and its potential for politicisation is by no means shared in later Marxist interventions (Kelly, 1988 and 1998). Hobsbawm (1978) added to the pessimistic trend, as Britain prepared to enter the 1980s, stating that the working class was no longer at the centre stage of political engagement and that there was an opening up of the political space, with unions being unable to grasp this social and political shift. Whatever one’s views or position, this type of reflection is normally absent in many current discussions, partly because the debate focuses on the presence and survival of unions as organisations – and their relevance and regeneration – and not always on their specific qualities and identities (Martínez Lucio and Stuart, 2009).
Yet Hyman’s concern has gone further than merely outlining the importance of a meditation on purpose and possibilities: he points out that these pessimistic texts and narratives fail to understand the nature of the development and imposition of a ‘narrow’ view of industrial relations inside trade unions, hence limiting the possibilities of internal debate and democracy within organised labour by formalising relations of control over the working class. However, these trends are never politically stable and inevitable. There is for Hyman no simple answer to this tension. It is interesting that, while Hyman in his 1970 text starts with a brief outline of the early optimistic approach regarding trade unions (as organisations that limit competition, create schools for coaching working people into the logic of collectivism, and act as counterpoints to the power of capital) he nevertheless focuses on engaging with the pessimistic thesis. This is because there is a finer line between the two traditions and trends than one would at first imagine: Hyman engages with pessimistic views with the aim of unravelling the assumptions within them. One presumes that a pessimistic thesis relegates industrial relations and employment issues within the scale of socialist priorities, and emphasises the role of external political agents (for example, revolutionary parties) to overcome these tendencies. However, a binary notion of ‘political/economic’ fails to realise that there is a synergy between the two, and that trade unions are an expression of ongoing tensions that can develop in various directions, and not necessarily bureaucratic and employer-friendly ones. Unions may not, as the pessimists insist, think politically all the time, but their presence, their questioning of even the mildest forms of employer prerogative, and their formative role in providing political possibilities, cannot be ignored. Their presence is, in various ways, an affront to the capitalist system even if it is for structural reasons rather than strategic or deliberate ones. This is why Hyman’s work has been significant – because the restlessness of workers and their lives are written back into the narrative of union purpose and capacity.
It is important to acknowledge that there is an uncertainty and instability within employment relations and modes of representation – this is something Hyman aims to grapple with and even to celebrate. And it is here that Antonio Gramsci (not Leon Trotsky alone) comes to the fore in his narrative: for this reason we see an early link into Gramsci’s later work which is clearly open to such ideas, especially as he is often seen as part of a less revolutionary tradition within Marxism compared to that related to Trotsky and Fourth Internationalism. Yet within this debate among revolutionary left Marxists in the 1960s and 1970s, Gramsci was a major referent. Towards the end of this 1970 text by Hyman, Gramsci begins to emerge as a possible solution to the dilemma regarding trade unions and their roles, even if in some parts of the pamphlet he is cast as a pessimist, seeing unions as short-sighted and accommodating. The problem is that there are limits and corporativist features to trade union action, but there are also spontaneous features and directly active elements to trade unions, and in particular broader forms of worker action within work and industry. The question of dialogue and direction – the question of praxis – may depend on the particular context and balance of power at any one time: that is, on the role of context, dialogue, debate and politics.
The conclusions of this text on the sociology of trade unions in 1970 are interesting but present us with new dilemmas. In many ways, the text is not an attempt to resolve tensions but to ensure that the study of trade unions is aware of these competing views and, more importantly, of the different stresses and strains on worker representation (especially at a time when workers do not control the means of production). It is about bringing us closer to issues of instability and uncertainty – and to the views of unions that are not simply institutional or static. The issue was to move the debate away from a fixation with leaders and activists – and bureaucracy and membership – and to try to instill a sense that worker representation was more open and complex – perhaps indeterminate – and that Marxism itself was also more open and complex (that it was relational).
Trade unions as democratic organisations
In parallel with, and integral to, the debate on unions and their political purpose was the concern with trade union democracy and politics – a disappearing feature of contemporary studies on trade unions and industrial relations. Yet this dimension and discussion is important for any discussion on purpose, if that purpose is to be realised. Hyman’s (1975) Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction focuses on this issue, among others. Whereas the debate outlined above referenced the external relations of trade unions, the debate on how internal institutional relations evolved and conditioned union identity became an increasing focus of the Marxist debate. The presence and reality of a strong workplace culture of representation and resistance to management, which sat uneasily with the cultures of union organisation and leadership based on social democratic and collective bargaining, brought the question of democracy to the fore. The 1960s and 1970s in the UK were a period in which new forms of direct and unofficial worker action emerged from the contradictions of post-war development. The emerging tensions within trade unions reflected a range of issues, but this dimension of industrial relations was a source of discussion in pluralist as well as Marxist industrial relations (Clegg, 1976; Martin, 1968).
Hyman’s Introduction discussed these issues in terms of the relations between various levels of trade union representation, building a more integrated understanding within the Marxist traditions of the way the institutionalisation of trade unions emerges. This institutionalisation is not the automatic outcome of either economic or social developments. It is constructed at various levels and sustained through a range of institutional practices and power relations. These are not simply hierarchically constructed through inevitable bureaucratic processes and estranged/incorporated union leaders, but through the tensions emerging from having to sustain dignified work in a context of powerlessness. This is explained with careful detail in Hyman’s text. After an outline of industrial relations in the context of capital–labour relations, and its implications, the book presents a discussion of union structure.
The institutional forms within the labour movement have been influenced by sector level, spatial and exploitative features and the contours of capitalist relations since the 19th century. Labour is born of capital, according to Hyman (a direct and obvious reference to the work of Marx and Engels): the basic identity of labour is marked from its inception. It is by its very nature disfigured at birth, and it is this feature that constitutes the basis of so much tension and later issues in the form of worker representation. Agendas of worker struggles are caught within that prism:
the forms of worker solidarity indicate contradictory elements in their consciousness: there exist a strong pressure on the one hand towards sectionalism, and the other towards broader unity, and these find their organisational expression in the complex patterns of trade union structure. To an important extent current union boundaries are reflections of past experience. (Hyman, 1975: 62)
Hyman draws on Turner (1962) for aspects of this argument. There are fault-lines within the very being of organised labour. This leads to a discussion about union democracy and the heritage of the Webbs’ influence in the context of these structures. This underpins the issue of democracy not only in terms of interest and institutional form, but also in terms of the tensions between efficiency and democracy. There is a tension between the need to deliver in the short term and the ability to overcome the limitations placed on organised labour that emerge from the socioeconomic system. The emergence of a bureaucracy that serves to limit internal debate and controls worker action in informal and local spheres is partly a result of various ideological and political processes, but it is also linked to the way that agendas, objectives and notions of ‘success’ are formed. The political narrowing of the industrial relations agenda allows for realisable demands, but it skews the overall ability to engage with a broader critique and awareness of the limits of these gains. In effect, we see the pessimistic approach loom large in this part of the text, though it is one that is forged and understood in historical and strategic terms, and not just in structuralist or functionalist ones. It emerges from the way that gain, progress and advancement are constructed.
While this aspect of Hyman’s views was significant – partly because a large part of the left was uncertain of, and concerned about, what it saw as the corrosive role of union bureaucrats on the imagination and potential of union and worker action – many within Marxist traditions felt it underplayed the democratic heritage and possibilities of organised labour. There have been many responses to Hyman’s work, but Fairbrother’s (1984) is one of the most significant, because he acts as a deliberate and conscious counterpoint and reminder of the broader social terrain of unions, and introduces democracy as a reference point rather than bureaucracy alone. Fairbrother represents the sociological end of the Warwick tradition (the location for both these academics) with its greater concern for the social and political features of worker representation. This stood apart from the micro-political explorations of worker representation in the Industrial Relations Research Unit which at that time, in the late-1970s and early 1980s, sought to differentiate forms of workplace representation and explain their relationship to micro level, organisational and informal processes (see Batstone et al., 1977, 1984). Fairbrother argued that Hyman’s thesis – especially in Capital and Class (1979) – focuses on how bureaucracy emerges as a result of the role of institutional needs, the complexity of rules and questions of expertise. Even workplace representation, which is viewed by some as a counter to formal and official levels of union organisation, is exposed to bureaucratisation: hence the need to view bureaucracy in terms of relations and not merely levels. Fairbrother builds on this argument, which emphasises the role of relationships and power, and not just the overall context, but tries also to overcome its pessimistic qualities – even if he does acknowledge that Hyman does not see bureaucracy as an inevitable outcome but rather as being constructed by historical and contextual factors.
In a study which remains one of the more insightful texts on union democracy and politics, Fairbrother extends this logic by arguing that democracy is not solely about how different tiers of organisations relate to each other and the extent of their responsiveness to members and workers, but also concerns the relations and concepts (principles) that permeate an organisation. In an analysis that broadens the study of trade union action to include gender related issues alongside economism and sectionalism as determining factors within unions, Fairbrother looks at the flipside of the bureaucracy coin and argues that, if we are to begin to focus on relations then we need to address issues of accountability and not just control. Furthermore, democracy and rules are a significant space and vector for the interplay of union politics and debates. They are spaces and traditions that are open to contestation. This allows us to view questions of democracy within trade unions as concerning the way purpose is constructed, the way core concepts and shared meanings are developed, and the way internal spaces of dialogue are referenced. The relevance to us is that the ambivalence of unions rest in their relations with workers, as stated previously, but also to the manner in which a relationship and dialogue with workers is constructed and legitimated (providing spaces for organising debate within its institutional structures).
The role of the state and capital in framing an ideological context and ‘common sense’ of trade union purposes and roles
This academic debate gives rise to a realisation that questions of union action need to be understood in more dynamic ways and not just in terms of strategic choices or formal institutional mechanisms. In fact, the pessimism of which Hyman was accused during the late-1970s – something which is not that clear from reading his work – is one based on contextual, strategic and historical factors and not solely on any inevitable iron laws of oligarchy (see Hyman, 1975: 80–3; Michels, 1915). And as we read Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction on trade union democracy, this becomes clearer. Fairbrother’s points are valid, but can be even more applicable if we engage with what the second half of the text is telling us. It is the chapters on capital and the state that begin to frame a broader discussion of the pressure on organised labour to ‘conform’. The roles capitalists can play in shaping labour in terms of its structures and processes are outlined. The relationship between both has been established in the UK context in terms of bargaining – an institutional ritual that consolidates labour’s identity and roles (even after parts of the employer class disengaged with such relations from the 1980s onwards). Hyman cites Allen (1966) to argue that the very nature of success within unions is understood in terms of piecemeal gains that do not question power relations (see Hyman, 1975: 192).
Hence, framing the agendas of trade union demands and activities is a curious and complex process:
The union official, in other words, experiences a natural commitment to the existing bargaining arrangements and the terms of existing collective agreements. This commitment, moreover, is attributable less to any personal characteristics of the official than to his function: the negotiation and renegotiation of order within constraints set by a capitalist economy and a capitalist state. (Hyman, 1975: 91)
While these ‘games’ may institutionalise and bureaucratise labour organisations and roles, they also give rise to new contradictions as workers and activists seek to circumvent them and raise workplace issues directly. These in turn become the subject of capitalist responses as management attempts to frame what is significant locally. There is no state of rest in such relations as workers and managers struggle with the limits of their institutional arrangements and their costs. This is where Hyman consolidates the significance of the Marxist contribution by explaining the instability and dialectical dynamics of industrial relations in a way that pluralists fail to grasp, even after the inroads of the intellectual projects around the British government’s enquiry and research on industrial relations in the form of the Donovan Commission in the 1960s. Panitch (1981) discusses the instability of the corporatist arrangements of the 1970s by referring to how such national strategies of incorporation are themselves limited because of negative responses by workplace-based activists towards incomes policies, but also the way in which the national institutional arrangements actually politicise union action as they tie leaders into state projects at the expense of members and activists. These contradictions and outcomes are, in turn, a source of, and a focus for, responses and engagement by the state. The attempt to frame and institutionalise industrial relations is never complete and stable.
Hence the state attempts to build a political shell around industrial relations, which emphasises passive and indirect democracy and representation: it solicits hierarchical approaches within organisations and civil society. National interest and non-class referents are developed to counter conflict within the workplace and employment relations, as seen in the context of corporatist discourse (see Panitch, 1981). Moreover, just as the state incorporates social actors it also coerces them, as in Britain in 1972 (Hyman, 1975: 144) where strategies of containment and control in terms of the regulation of union affairs gave rise to new tensions and new forms of worker action, as later chapters of Hyman’s text explain. Instability and uncertainty is a central feature of industrial relations, requiring ongoing state investment in institutional processes, projects of reform and strategies of change. Their success is driven partly by the state’s ongoing investment in the politics of industrial relations, on the one hand, and the legacy of sectionalism and often a lack of alternative political narratives within labour, on the other.
An even closer reading of Hyman’s chapter reveals his concern with the language of industrial relations. The question of language within most Marxist traditions – especially those linked to the new waves of the ‘labour process tradition’, with its failure to engage with the explicit role of the political and the importance of counter-narratives (Stewart and Martínez Lucio, 2011) – inevitably sparks concerns among these constituencies of a postmodern turn within social analysis and a tendency to privilege the ideological over the material. The split within labour process and critical management studies is in part related to this. Yet within Hyman’s early work, the role of language and ideology is part of a broader tapestry of Marxist analysis. For example, the language of ‘fairness’ was mobilised in the 1970s by the state, in terms of wages and working time, and assumes reciprocal relations and obligations between managers and workers (2011: 146). The agenda is developed with a view of moderating unions and not management alone. Fairness is a common feature of current trends in the study and practice of industrial relations where fairness at work, ‘good jobs’ and the role of the ‘good employer’ are exalted as desirable features of employment relations. In fact, many are now engaging with questions of language in ideological and literal terms, as with the study of bullying, for example. Hence the question of language also relates to questions of the state, and to this extent the state attempts to frame the terminology of industrial relations through political interventions. This allows us to understand how trade union action, identity and agendas are framed. It also shows how gains and successes are understood in one-dimensional terms, i.e. minor increments in industrial relations elements such as wages and minimal conditions (see Allen, 1966). This leads logically to Hyman’s concern that political responses require not just systematic collective action but a new political imagination and language that rethinks these concepts (this echoes throughout his later work as well – see Hyman, 1989).
Hence, taken-for-granted concepts can carry assumptions about desired organisational behaviour, institutional and personal conduct, and political purpose. This theme also underpins Hyman’s later work on the subject of unions (see Hyman, 1989 and 2007). It is a leitmotif that shows a concern with ideology and language, and not just with structure and context. At a time when references to language and terminology lead to ludicrous accusations of being postmodern – a curious feature of current ‘radical’ debates around the labour process – Hyman’s early work suggests that such concepts must be seen as a vital focus of attention; and what is more, it locates within industrial relations a concern with culture and language that was prevalent within Marxist traditions (Williams, 1958), but which has again been ignored in contemporary debates since the 1980s.
The closure and framing of industrial relations agendas is therefore of paramount importance to Hyman – the pessimism is underpinned by a realisation of the diverse elements working within the context of employment relations. And it is this context that drives the later Hyman to understand the role that other contexts and narratives play. In his early work, the concern was with how tensions and grievances are represented and articulated. In keeping with Lenin’s concerns, but with a less pessimistic framework for the possibilities of union action, Hyman seeks solace in the political and the role of alternative readings and narratives in rethinking the nature of purposes and agendas. The role of the working-class subculture, the defence of the social, the position of minorities of workers and the role of political networks are seen as being vital for any development of a counter vision (Hyman, 1975: 201–2) (this stream of thought pre-dates much of the current vogue for networking and community initiatives, for example, though these rarely refer back to such classic texts).
Hence the ‘answer’ is, in part, inside the system in terms of its contradictions, but it is also outside the system in terms of alternative agents and ideas. Darlington (2002) has developed this idea more clearly by linking phases and moments of union and worker activism with the role of political networks and how these develop. The need to have an understanding of how debates are framed politically and institutionally around work is a missing element, according to Darlington, in many conventional studies of unions. The need to map the politics of work and its ‘outside’ is therefore a major outcome of the Marxist tradition, referenced by Hyman and pointed out by many at that time. The early Hyman provides us with an alternative view and narrative, but it also provides us with a meditation and an awareness of the construction of patterns of behaviours in terms of trade unions and industrial relations. It maps the way that issues evolve, are contained, and encourage responses. It also suggests a radical lineage within industrial relations that is more integrated across time than one at first might think.
The political and the need to go outside
This article does not aim to consider the later Hyman and the partial resolution and development of earlier meditations, though the author agrees with a large part of this latter oeuvre. There are issues in Hyman’s early work which suggest that the methodology and insights he provided need a degree of further discussion to exploit its awareness of the limits of industrial relations and its construction. There are limitations and these require that we return to Fairbrother (1984). The framing of organisational practice is the outcome of various factors; for example, gender relations and the way that male chauvinism frames the politics of trade unions is an important factor (see McBride, 2001). Philips and Taylor (1980) studied the gendered construction of industrial relations elements such as skill and wages. These create fissures among workers and form their identity and material position. The practices Hyman studied in terms of their evolution were also structured around social relations in the labour market (both internal and external), and forms of worker action that prioritised specific forms of masculine action and display. Collective action reflects a myriad of contextual characteristics. Hyman’s early work is sometimes seen as having had less to say about this and, as stated earlier, the question of the framing of collective action was rarely expounded systematically. Yet, this limitation can be overcome, as the methodology used by Hyman lends itself to a more open and (in a very broad sense) ‘de-constructivist’ approach; the early Hyman is more of a template than a closed and reductionist text.
In the early work, while context is discussed in political and economic terms – and to a lesser extent in social terms – the emphasis is on the vertical nature of relations. It is restricted analytically by the prisms of leadership versus the led, and of hierarchies and bureaucracy, which frame much of Hyman’s early work and reflect a good deal of the debate on Marxism within the area. There is reference to the ‘outside’ but it is mainly in terms of competing workplace-based political networks and their political languages/stances. This is a very Anglo-Saxon concern that reflects the study of work in terms of workplaces and employers. It is therefore the source of a degree of concern about the way the employment relationship is visualised. Hyman was not as concerned in his early work with industrial democracy, co-operatives and alternative social organisation, though he was open to considering these issues with the main proponents of worker control (see Barratt Brown et al., 1975). The focus in his work is on the tensions and contradictions within employment relations as defined within contemporary capitalism, especially industrial organised capitalism. However, this is a problem linked primarily to aspects of his conclusions and his focus on the limitations of union leadership and hierarchy, but the methodology and approach deployed by Hyman allow for such alternatives to be understood in the way the industrial relations agenda has been constructed academically and politically – as outlined above.
The notion of the ‘outside’ is therefore important to Marxism – in part because the ‘inside’ (the economic and the regulatory) does not in itself lead to the tensions and changes Marx was seen to predict. It shows that the economic in itself cannot evolve politically and be transformed without contradictions being realised and acted on, in part, from external sources and agencies –though a strongly reductionist or essentialist Marxism may argue otherwise (see Laclau and Mouffe, 1984: 19–29, for their critical outline of that reductionist view). The ‘outside’ is not clearly defined in Hyman’s early work: it is not until the later work, which is based on a broader view of union structure and identity, that this moved to the centre of his attention, consisting of an interest in the political environment and social constituents. Yet part of the problem with the debate is that it does not always look at how union action and structure are constructed across various external dimensions that cross over with internal employment relations. Relations are seen in terms of the political-economic nexus or the vertical leader-activist dimension.
The current interest in community unionism may, for example, be a possible avenue to explore, though in the main it is constructed by community union sympathisers in terms of a binary opposition to workplace politics, as Cohen (2006) reminds us. It is as if the community is a necessary venture to develop alternative models of unionism, which influence workplace politics but do not interact with it. However, there is a further problem. The workplace and employment relations, and elements such as the wage relationship, are subject to influence from various social and political spheres. Unions engage, to some extent, in wages and workplace struggles (formal or informal bargaining), local labour market activities (recruitment or training), community level action (such as social consumption and state services), and political relations with various tiers of the state and other actors such as employers (through political bargaining or networking) (Martínez Lucio, 1988, 2011). The question is how we see this ‘outside’, how we understand the different links and roles that union activists and leaders play in them, and how they piece these spheres together within their strategies to influence their agendas and their identities. Hence, in Spain in the mid-1970s, towards the end of and just after the Francoist dictatorship, for example, the trade union Workers’ Commissions linked workplace struggles with community activism around social consumption and welfare issues to construct a socio-political identity. It linked these spheres around narratives of mobilisation. On the other hand, the social democratic union the Union General de Trabajadores prioritised a ‘differentiating’ strategy using formal bargaining and political links to construct a different approach in relation to the social role of the state. History, context and circumstance contributed to these factors, as did political networks. Yet the outside in this national case was more complex, differentiated and linked to issue of wages and work through a range of mechanisms and narratives.
In this respect, the limits of the early Hyman are that the binary of the ‘political and economic’ began to exhaust itself; it was unable to capture the more complex nature of the inside and the outside (for the sake of retaining these metaphors). However, it could have been developed further by Marxists rethinking the notion of the outside and the political by using the very method that can be found in the 1975 text, and by engaging with relevant social theories in relation to regulation and critical discourse.
Conclusion
The early work of Hyman is relevant as a set of ideas but it is also relevant as a method. His later developments are in many respects a more considered academic approach, sensitive to difference and strategy within industrial relations. However, his early work is not a pre-history. It is not a stepping stone to something else or something different. It is more complex, curious and relevant. This earlier period is also an encapsulation of the positive attributes of Marxism as a critical and multi-dimensional form of analysis, even if some levels are more privileged than others in some approaches. Moreover, it is relevant because at its heart is a level of meditation and concern with uncertainty that breaks with the image of Marxism held by many today. In effect, it discusses questions of action in terms of how possibilities are framed and how relations are constructed. The concern with bureaucracy and with the political brings to the fore the nature and purpose of action. One could argue that assumptions are made about what unions should be doing that are not always empirically and logically grounded, yet once we take this into account and understand the surrounding political narratives of that period, we can locate these debates in our current understanding of the nature of union action and its limitations.
The debates of the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s actually show us that the concerns we take for granted today concerning identity, the framing of agendas and the nature of organisational habits are not foreign to the Marxist tradition, even if these are seen by some non-Marxists and Marxists alike as belonging to particular social theories disconnected from critical and materialist schools. Marxism is stereotyped as having ignored linguistics, the state, regulation and power, by many within the tradition, as well as those outside it, yet these issues are very much central to Marxist meditations on labour and its organisation.
A close inspection of Hyman presents us with a meditation about how we sleepwalk through industrial relations and its traditions; separating out levels of analysis in terms of regulation, culture and politics, and sometimes failing to realise how particular meanings and concepts become hegemonic and part of common sense – especially as the early Hyman references Gramsci more often than we would like to recall. The early Hyman is concerned with mapping how the formal practices of industrial relations emerged. It points to the role of national context and the way the practices and expectations of industrial relations are generated by particular structural factors and strategic moments. Questions of how narrow industrial relations agendas are framed so as to limit discussion and remove many issues of the employment relationship from worker control are addressed. The role of political elites, the state and their role in legitimating systems of economic governance – and the core terminology of industrial relations – are mapped in terms of the necessities of order and regularity. How we combine questions of work, community, labour markets and regulation move to the centre of study. The language of success and achievement – vital for sustaining the character of any system of regulation – is outlined within Hyman, who draws on and encapsulates the interventions of earlier Marxists including Vic Allen. What we are left with is a body of interventions forming a basis for the later influence of paths of development and regulatory complexity.
Yet what one is struck by when re-reading a selection of key texts by, and around, Hyman is the emphasis on ambivalence, uncertainty, instability and tension. No system is perfectly closed and none can easily limit agendas and practices through hierarchical processes and relations. The question of framing industrial relations is ongoing and relentless. The debate may not always have been overtly concerned with questions of gender, race and difference, but in many respects it was able to open the door and challenge more passive understandings of plurality and difference within mainstream and pluralist approaches. The early Hyman and the ‘early’ post-war Marxist tradition in modern British industrial relations – which I have not had space to do justice to – was concerned with the construction of social and political order and not just the possible nature of alternatives. Perhaps it is time to continue our exploration of the past if we are to take a step forward. Many of the new concepts we take for granted today existed – albeit at times within an essentialist discourse – in this earlier period and its discussions. These questions of purpose, politics, organisational habits and democratic relations – along with the link between internal and external relations – and how they all fit together remind us that it is our duty to remember that what we see within employment and work is made by men and women, and therefore subject to change by them.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Keith Povey and David Turner for helping with the copy-editing of this article, and an anonymous referee who provided some important comments. The article was first presented as a paper at the conference in 2009 at the London School of Economics in honour of Richard Hyman’s work. The article is based on the author’s personal and political interpretation of Hyman’s work, and his concerns with contemporary industrial relations debates.