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Leading the White-Collar Union: Clive Jenkins, the Management of Trade-Union Officers, and the Politics of the British Labour Mo

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Leading the White-Collar Union: Clive Jenkins, the Management of Trade-Union Officers, and the Politics of the British Labour Mo IRSH 49 (2004), pp. 71–102 DOI: 10.1017/S0020859003001378 # 2004 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis Leading the White-Collar Union: Clive Jenkins, the Management of Trade-Union Officers, and the Politics of the British Labour Movement, c.1968–1979* Joseph Melling Summary: The growth of white-collar unionism and its impact on British trade unions in the postwar period has received little attention from social historians. Radical critics have noted the failure of Clive Jenkins to provide a clear lead in defending workers’ conditions, while mainstream, institutionalist commentators more often stress the diversity of specific interests served by such unions. Recent research has called into question earlier models of union governance, though there remain few studies of the history of officer relations within trade unions. This article examines the leadership of ASTMS in the decade after its formation. It is argued that the strategies pursued by Jenkins, including the recruitment, training, and deployment of fieldworkers, were guided by accumulated knowledge and culture (as well as brilliant opportunism) rather than by the structure of the union or the composition of the membership. In offering educated officers a career structure, ASTMS increased its capacity for expertise and effective communication without descending into the political sectarianism of the postwar years. The charismatic, capricious style adopted by Jenkins, as well as the difficulties of absorbing a diverse membership in this period of rapid growth, contributed to the tensions which culminated in a series of struggles between the union and its bargainers during the 1970s. INTRODUCTION: MODELS OF ORGANIZATION In a television programme broadcast in 1975, the veteran Labour politician, Ian Mikardo, paid tribute to the General Secretary of the largest white-collar union in the United Kingdom. According to Mikardo, * Acknowledgements: The research on which these articles are based was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. I am indebted to present and former members of the ASTMS and MSF-Amicus who contributed to my research, including those identified as interviewees. In particular, the late Clive Jenkins, the late Will Rowe, Baroness Turner, and Gary Morton generously shared original documents with me as well as consenting, as did many others, to be interviewed. The staff of the Modern Record Centre, Warwick University, and the BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, provided patient assistance. Critical comments were provided by Alan Booth, Mark Bufton, Bob Carter, John Fisher, Don Groves, David Lyddon, Paul Smith, Andrew Thorpe and the editors of IRSH. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.203.34, on 04 Oct 2021 at 03:57:27, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859003001378 72 Joseph Melling Clive Jenkins was the best industrial manager he had ever met, combining strategic vision with ‘‘sheer organizational, administrative ability and drive’’. The result was that the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS) had become the fastest-growing trade union of the post-1945 years.1 Jenkins’s undoubted talent for exploiting the mass media to project his personality and political preferences, while marketing white-collar unionism to a sceptical audience of salaried employees, was an important element in his success. The ASTMS leader seized every opportunity to associate trade unionism with innovation and modernity, suggesting that Britain’s Conservative Party were wedded to an outdated style of class conflict while socialists were engineering progressive change in contemporary society.2 The impact of mass communications on the appeal and style of modern trade unionism has attracted limited attention from social and cultural historians, though leading Labour politicians such as Harold Wilson clearly appreciated the impact of attaching the rhetoric of modernization to a party which was struggling to renew its appeal to the British electorate in the 1960s. As a prominent member of ASTMS and confidante of Jenkins, Wilson also appreciated the efforts made by white- collar unions to recruit middle-income staff to the trade-union movement.3 Debates on the history of white-collar unionism have frequently been concerned with broader questions of the class identity of salaried employees as well as the influence of institutional structures on the accountability of union leaders to different sections of the membership. Such discussions have often turned on the interpretation of the union- ization of nonmanual employees as the expression of class identity, either as a consequence of the degradation of salaried employment and the terms on which salaried labour was sold, or as the collective movement of a new working class based on postindustrial technologies and markets.4 The classical study of white-collar unionism in the United Kingdom, published by George Bain in 1970, rejected Weberian and Marxist explanations of trade-union recruitment among the middle classes. Bain’s criticisms of 1. Transcript of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) programme, Face Your Image, transmitted 21 February 1975, p. 5. Copy at BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, Reading. 2. Face Your Image, p. 10. Jenkins told David Dimbleby, ‘‘I would have thought these other class delineations and boundaries were incredibly old-fashioned. The problem with our country is that it is not modern enough.’’ 3. Interview with Richard Clements, 25 September 2002; interview with Greta Karpin, 22 August 2002. Harold Wilson was a long-standing ASSET member. 4. Richard Hyman, ‘‘White-Collar Workers and Theories of Class’’, in Richard Hyman and Robert Price (eds), The New Working Class? White-Collar Workers and Their Organizations: A Reader (London, 1983), pp. 3–41; Theo Nichols, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Peter Armstrong, Bob Carter, Chris Smith and Theo Nichols, White Collar Workers, Trade Unions and Class (London, 1986) pp. 1–14 and passim, for an evaluation of the earlier literature. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.203.34, on 04 Oct 2021 at 03:57:27, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859003001378 Leading the White-Collar Union 73 sociological studies linking the growth of salaried unionism to the erosion of middle-class status or the emergence of new social forces were developed in this and subsequent studies which stress the importance of specific market, institutional, and political conditions which favoured the growth of the new unionism.5 Marxist scholars were in the forefront of those criticizing Bain’s emphasis on such factors as the benign impact of government regulation in union expansion among white-collar employees. Research by Peter Armstrong, Bob Carter, and others demonstrated the impact of workplace change, industrial conflict, and resistance to statutory wage controls in the mobilization of support for unions such as ASTMS in the 1970s and 1980s.6 Radical assessments of the periodic divergence between officials and the rank-and-file members of trade unions, such as Carter’s detailed investigation of ASTMS and the career of Clive Jenkins, continue to be debated in the literature as scholars differ in their interpretation of the workplace action and institutional traditions among the workforce.7 Much criticized in recent years, the radical analysis of union officials provides a valuable understanding of the ways in which the employees of unions can promote their career interests and pursue recruitment or mergers as a means of furthering personal projects. These exchanges on the class context and orientation of salaried staff have contributed to a reinterpretation of trade-union governance. An important feature of the literature on white-collar unionism which has developed in labour history, as well as in the analysis of contemporary industrial relations, has been the role of the trade-union officer in the governance of the union. In an important study of trade-union growth, governance and leadership, Undy et al. emphasize the binary nature of decision-making in such unions as ASTMS, where bargaining was decentralized but policy-making was largely the province of a National Executive Council (NEC) dominated by Jenkins as General Secretary, with intermittent challenges to this highly centralized control by the 5. G.S. Bain, The Growth of White Collar Unionism (Oxford, 1970), pp. 180–181 and passim. 6. Peter Armstrong, ‘‘Class and Control at the Point of Production: Foremen’’, in Armstrong, et al., White Collar Workers, pp. 19–29 and passim; Bob Carter, Capitalism, Class Conflict and the New Middle Class (London, 1985), pp. 163–167, 200–202, 234–235. Also W.G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 184–200 and passim for social-survey evidence. 7. Bob Carter, ‘‘Trade Unionism and the New Middle Class: The Case of ASTMS’’, in Armstrong, et al., White Collar Workers, pp. 141–147 and passim; Carter, Capitalism, pp. 234– 235; Richard Hyman, Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction (London, 1975); and John McIlroy, ‘‘Still Under Siege: British Trade Unions at the Turn of the Century’’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 3 (1997), pp. 93–112. An alternative model is John Kelly, Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilization, Collectivism and Long Waves
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