['Give an inch and they'll take mile and…]

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'Give an inch and they'll take mile and hypocrisies of the TUC's declaral ing the lories have now turned into s capitulation. Now Len Murray openly pretence of fighting the Tories, and i to promote such marginal changes in they could accept without changing ti John Mallroy looks at how we got her fight to rearm the labour movement union collaboration with the Tories. 1984, Margaret Thatcher insists, will be a year of hope and a year of liberty.

Far from losing our way, she declares, we are just getting into our stride.

She certainly has grounds for optimism as far as the state of the trade unions goes. Less than four million working days were lost through strikes in 1983.

Apart from 1976, at the height of Labour incomes policy, this is the lowest figure since 1967, when 2.79 million were lost.

As recently as 1979 the figure was 30 million striker-days. The trendiis downwards.

Trade union membership is declining, too. Half a million members dropped out in 1982, bringing overall TUC membership below ten million for the first time since 1971. Four years of Thatcherism have wiped more than two million members out of labour's 1979 army of 12.2 million troops.

per If the TGWU figures, for example, are adjusted for mergers then it has lost around 5 per cent of its members, falling to 1.42 million. In steel and some other industries, union membership has suffered drastically. Even the public sector unions are in trouble now.

The town hall workers' union NALGO claims to have maintained its membership at the 1982 figure of 784,000, but NUPE (council manual workers, health workers, etc.) lost 8,392 members last year, and the CPSA (civil service clerical workers) has lost 5 per cent.

The decline, however, is limit ed. Even taking into account the fact that these figures are on the optimistic side, half the workforce is still in unions. There has been no 1920s-style exodus of those still in work. There is a drift, not a flood, out of the The closed shop, too, has seen only a limited decline. Almost five and a half million union members were covered by closed shop arrangements when Thatcher took office. It is still 4.5 million today. This is a tribte to the resilience of the closed abop, for the industries in whict i had the firmest roots have been blitzed by the slump.

The real attack on the closed shop is just beginning. We have seen it ripped up in the water industry and in British Rail.

The introduction of new and tighter laws in November this year will mean employers are only protected against legal action by dismissed workers if they can show that 80% of those covered by the closed shop voted for it in a secret ballot.

In the aftermath of the NGA dispute, many employers will simply suspend closed shops in practice. A further decline in trade union membership can be expected.

The slump and the Tory offensive have also hit shop stewards' organisation. A recent estimate is that the number of shop stewards in certain manufacturing industries has dropped from 130,000 to 80,000. In metal mechanical metal goods production, the number of full time stewards has fallen from 4,000 to 2,000.

"One large engineering company in the North now holds meetings with stewards at 4pm with no overtime availabie for the union negotiators if discussions go past clocking-off time. Previously meetings began at 10am and went on all day...

'One company director said, 'Past custom and practice was for shop stewards to deal only with a relatively senior member of management, which was often a sore point with foremen ... Now I ask if the matter has been raised with the foreman, and if the answer is no I show them the door'." (Financial Times, January 20 1984).

Managers are more and confident.

On defensive The Left in the unions is on the defensive. The tide, as 1984 begins, is running strongly not only against the unions but against socialists in the unions. The defeats and sell outs of the Peoples last few years all contributed to the General Election defeat, march which in turn gave the right wing the confidence to root out for jobs the residues of left policies which embarrassed them in their attempts to collaborate with the Tories.

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