Unions face a problem these days, in that their raison d'etre is no longer self evident. In the early days of union power, it was plain what the union role was - fighting to protect the welfare of their members; ensuring that their members worked in a safe working environment and should they suffer a work related injury they were protected. This evolved over the years as the major battles were won and the union took on the role of fighting for a better standard of living.
Something went wrong with British Trade Unionism in the postwar era, they started to try to dictate to management who could work on what job and what equipment could be bought by management and how it would be operated. By the seventies we had the ridiculous situation where a union was dictating to the government. They had made British manufacturing uneconomic and uncompetitive, believing that somehow the competition from abroad could be ignored and that it was irrelevant.
The union reform acts of the 1980's were inevitable to curb this nonsense. The period of structural change within the UK employment market was unavoidable.
So, after a period of unparalleled growth, economic stability and relatively low unemployment during the 1990s and 2000's the youngsters who grew up in the era of union power, see an opportunity to grasp the reins of power again. UNITE fund the Labour Party heavily and use that financial muscle to attempt to bend policy to their will. We are seeing the re-emergence of the left wing union militants - Len McLusky et al.
Arthur Scargill was a passionate and effective union man when he was looking after the welfare of the miners, dealing with industrial injuries and their aftermath. He excelled in fighting for measures to ease the suffering of miners affected by illness due to the hazardous nature of mining. He was also the man who effectively destroyed the mining industry through his political naivety. He was good at doing what unions should be doing, he was a disaster in the political arena and effectively destroyed the NUM and union power for 25 years.
Given the background of all of this UNITE are now once again allowing themselves to pick the wrong fight. CC do not need their "welfare" protecting, they are not in a job that is potentially life threatening in the same way that ship yard workers did in the 1930's. Fighting to protect priviliged cheap travel perks of of a few relatively well paid employees is the wrong fight for a union and as such will never garner public support.
Last edited by Juan Tugoh; 1st Aug 2010 at 08:54.