THE POLITICAL SYSTEM OF THE POST OFFICE ENGINEERING UNION
| Author | Frank Bealey |
| Published date | 01 November 1977 |
| Date | 01 November 1977 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1977.tb01141.x |
British Journal
of
Industrial Relations
Vol.
XV
No.
3
THE
POLITICAL
SYSTEM OF THE
POST
OFFICE
ENGINEERING UNION
FRANK BEALEY
*
IT
was Sidney and Beatrice Webb who first noticed the obvious analogy between the
political system of a trade union and that of a state.’ Comparing the institutions of the
British state, as they perceived them, to the Amalgamated Association of Operative
Cotton-Spinners with its ‘Cotton-Spinners’ Parliament’, they argued that:
.
. .
the association is a fully equipped democratic state
of
the modern type.
It
has an elected
parliament, exercising supreme and controlled power.
It
has a cabinet appointed by and
responsible only to that parliament. And
its
chief executive officer, appointed once for all
on
grounds
of
efficiency, enjoys the Civil Service permanence
of
tenure.2
Aware that demands for more efficiency were leading to an increasing pro-
fessionalisation
of
trade-union leadership the Webbs conceived their task as assessing
.
. .
to what extent the constitutional problemsof Trade Union democracy are analogous
to
those
of
national
or
municipal politics. The requisites
of
government are the same in the democratic
state as in the Trade Union. In both cases the problem
is
how to combine administrative
efficiency with popular control?
Ben Roberts also accepted the analogy: ‘Trade union are in many respects like the
state in miniature,
.
.
.
Unions have their electorate, legislature, cabinet and civil
service’.
He
went on, however, to stress the abhorrence
of
trade unions for collective
opposition organised in parties. In this respect unions ‘differed sharply’ from states4
The same tradition can
be
identified in the USA. Sumner
H.
Schlicter wrote, in a
foreword to William
H.
Leiserson’s study, based on the same formal framework,
‘Trade-union governments perform the three underlying functions
of
government-the
legislative, the executive and the judicial5
.
.
.’
Thus earlier literature about trade
unions, more concerned with structure, tended to equate ’democracy’ with rep-
resentative institutions and constitutional arrangements.
In the last two or three decades a more sociological approach has been adopted
by
writers more concerned with internal forces
in
unions such as the clashing values
of
bureaucracy and democracy and the relationship between leaders and led. This ten-
dency has been consistent with the trend in political science generally, away from the
study
of
institutions, towards an examination of political behaviour. The realisation that
representative institutions were no necessary guarantee
of
democracy, and that power is
often wielded through informal processes rather than constitutional procedures, very
much widened the field of enquiry. It produced a literature of disenchantment generally
inspired by the Michelsian analysiss in which ‘oligarchy’ inevitably triumphs over
‘democracy’. In these writings there is usually a good deal less confidence in leadership
and the ability of followers to control leaders; and ‘democracy’ tends to be equated with
circumstances, perhaps unlikely to
be
attained, in which leaders can
be
made properly
accountable and their policies effectively opposed.
In work
on
trade unions this form
of
treatment, perhaps heralded by Joseph Gold-
stein’s study of the T.G.W.U.,’ is more critical of trade-union officials than were the
Webbs. Philip Taft,8 who certainly did not neglect institutional frameworks, neverthe-
less emphasised the internal power structures
of
American trade unions. Lipset and his
associates, in their classic case study: identify ‘democracy’ with the existence
of
opposing factions contending
for
leadership of a union. They are much more interested
*
Professor
of
Politics, University of Aberdeen.
374
THE
POLITICAL
SYSTEM
OF
THE
POST OFFICE
ENGINEERING
UNION
375
in explaining the two-party system in the International Typographical Union than in
delineating its constitutional structure. Roderick Martin more recently has examined
the conditions likely to favour the organisation
of
opposition to trade-union official-
dom.IO In doing
so
he was concerned with far more than institutional constraints on the
leadership.
J.
D.
Edelstein, rejecting Michels, has produced an organisational theory of
union democracy which, to some extent, takes account
of
structural factors.I1
He
perceives electoral behaviour within unions as a most important criterion. The degree of
membership participation has been seen as an indicator
of
the extent
of
union demo-
cracy by many writers, including John Hughes.
He
issuspiciousof ‘the criteria that might
be imported from the functioning of our political system’ and contends that: ‘Trade
union democracy cannot be analysed simply by analogy from, or in terms of, the accepted
norms
of
the political democracy of nation states’.12
It would be misleading to make too much
of
the distinction between these two
approaches to the study of trade unions. Most scholars use both and merely emphasise,
to a greater
or
lesser degree, one or the other; and this
is
hardly surprising because they
are naturally complementary. The institutional framework
of
any association provides
a
framework within which internal forces co-operate and/or contend and policies are
formulated and implemented, Policy-makers and politicians need to
be
aware
of
pro-
cedural rules and constitutional forms. Political systems can thus only be understood
properly through the study
of
the interplay between internal power relationships and
institutional
arrangement^.'^
In this article
I
shall try to examine the political system
of
the Post Office Engineering Union (P.O.E.U.) in terms
of
both sets of factors.
The P.O.E.U. organises on the telecommunications side of the Post Office
all
those
grades, below first-line supervisory level, which were formerly in the old Post Office
Engineering Department. This does not include all the telecommunications personnel
as the telephone operators are mostly organised by the Union of Post Office Workers.
The P.O.E.U. also organises the engineers
on
the postal side
of
the Post Office, the
motor transport maintenance men, grades in the Post Office supplies and factories and
crews
of
the Post Office cable ships. This rather heterogeneouscollection of occupations
prevents it from fitting neatly into any ‘category’. It would not be grossly incorrect to
characterise the P.O.E.U. as a ‘craft’ union as most
of
its members have to undergo
a
considerable period
of
training. Certainly Post Office engineers are highly skilled in the
sense
of
being obliged to acquire technical knowledge throughout their career. On the
other hand, the union still organises labourers and semi-skilled men; and until 1954 it
suffered from breakaway unionism among its highly skilled automatic exchange men
who felt that their expertise was not receiving sufficient consideration. It would be
inaccurate also to describe the P.O.E.U. as an ‘industrial’ union because it
does
not
include
all
the grades within the Post Office engineering framework. Nor would the
union fit
H.
A. Turner’s category,14 ‘closed’, very precisely for it has tried to increase its
strength and
to
expand the industry. Its membership was 45,000 in 1950. By 1967 it
reached the 100,000 mark and in 1974 it was 127,000, the fourteenth largest union
affiliated to the T.U.C.
Permanent organisation
of
the telegraph linemen began in 1896; but the present
union was virtually founded in 1915 when, following the purchase
of
the telephones by
the State, the older Engineering and Stores Association’s
5,000
members joined with
the Amalgamated Society
of
Telephone Employees’ 1 1,000. In 191
9
this amalgamation
re-christened itself the Post Office Engineering Union.
The union was at first dominated by the linemen who worked on maintenance out of
doors. But with the expansion
of
telecommunications, and especially with the coming of
the automatic exchanges, the men who worked indoors became more and more impor-
tant. By
1970
56
per
cent of union members were internal engineering grades and only
24 per cent were external. The other 20 per cent consisted
of
the so-called ‘minority’
grades.
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