Questions are sometimes raised about UNISON's strategy of conditional co-operation with management to secure and improve the public delivery of public services. The concern is that by collaborating with management the union is effectively 'managing the pain for the bosses as they sack workers' as an article in Socialist Worker about Newcastle UNISON and the UNISON book 'Public service reform but not as we know it! (http://www.socialistworker.org.uk/art.php?id=18042)
This argument counterposes 'a fightback' to any form of co-operation with management to secure and improve public provision.
Co-operation with management to defend and reform publicly provided public services undoubtedly takes the union on to new, and therefore sometimes uncertain and controversial, territory. The strategy pioneered by the Newcastle council UNISON branch, originally to prevent outsourcing in local government, is now being developed and adapted across the public sector. It moves public sector trade unionism beyond the traditional model based on the nature of the struggle with management in the private, profit-driven, sector. Doubts about it are not normally expressed as polemically as in Socialist Worker but they exist nonetheless. It would be a contribution to developing the strategy (which is not a fixed template) to try to explore doubts and answer questions. It would stimulate a necessary deepening of our strategic thinking.
Much is at stake in developing effective alternatives to privatization, in a context where deference to the private sector is the unquestioned orthodoxy of both the main political parties at Westminster, without any effective challenge the Lib-Dems. In mainstream debate there is no conception of a driver of change other than the market; let alone any serious consideration of how to strengthen democracy as a means of transformation. It is only across the borders in Scotland and Wales that there is any effective political challenge to the idea of the market/private sector as the prime source of efficiency and innovation. Moreover, the commissioning processes that are now central to the delivery of most public services in England, have an inbuilt bias in favour of private business. The future of publicly delivered public services is on the line.
Strengthening the union
It is important to be aware from the outset that the strategy of conditional co-operation with management to secure public provision is as much about building the organisation of the union and strengthening members' participation in it, as it is about co-operation with management. Indeed the union's judgement on the nature of the co-operation – what they push for and what they accept in negotiating the terms of this co-operation (there is always more than one way of co-operating) is based in part on the importance of constantly strengthening union participation and organisation. (An example came up at a seminar on procurement recently, when a rep reported the offer of co-operation in the procurement process on condition that he treated all information as confidential. He quite rightly refused. Such co-operation obviously would have weakened the union). Moreover, the co-operation with management is conditional. It is conditional on: no outsourcing, on avoiding compulsory redundancies, on transparency and openness, including openness to management’s plans and on increased investment in staff learning and development. The strategy is based on maintaining wages and conditions.
http://www.compassonline.org.uk/news/item.asp?n=4425
The argument of this briefing note is that the strategy of conditional trade union engagement with public sector transformation now being developed by UNISON is an effective way to defend and improve public services and protect staff jobs and conditions. Indeed far from being counterposed to a fightback, it is potentially a strong basis for a sustained and successful resistance to the government's attack on public services. It also promotes a clear alternative to the Tories approach to public service 'reform'. (And an important element of an alternative economic strategy/model of society –see below) There are several assumptions and implications of this argument which need explicitly to be explored and debated.
How distinct is public sector management?
The strategy depends on an understanding of what is specific to the public sector as distinct from the private; and what is therefore the structurally distinct position of public from private sector management, and what the distinct goals that public management pursue, at any rate in theory, compared with private sector management. The assumption is that the interests of the management of the public sector potentially and under certain conditions, converge with those of public sector staff. (The experiences of the NHS, in Scotland and Wales illustrates this convergence of interests) This lays the basis of the co-operation that is vital to an effective strategy against privatisation.
But the strategy also recognises that this convergence of interests is not automatic – it has to be struggled for. Public sector management and public authorities are pulled in many directions and can develop political, bureaucratic, and even personal interests that lead them to take action against the interests of both the public sector staff and/or the general public. This recognition underpins UNISON'S strategy of emphasis on constantly developing the union's organisation, including the capacity and participation of the members and the maintenance of its autonomy and capacity to challenge management even while committed to a strategic co-operation. (The Newcastle story contained several examples of such conflict as a necessary part of keeping management, as a senior manager put it, looking back, ‘accountable to the change to which we’ve both signed up’).Thus the co-operation with management to secure public provision is a double sided strategy. What binds the two elements together is the centrality of the capacity, consciousness and common values of public sector staff/union members.
It is this emphasis on staff capacity, as a source of added value for the efficiency of the public sector in satisfying the needs of the public, that is what the union brings to the table with management. At the same time, it is this development of the capacity of the staff as union members, that is the foundation of the organised strength of the union, the source of its bargaining power and potential bargaining power to achieve its goals.
In what follows, I will look at
i) the structural basis of the convergence of interests between public management and public sector staff on securing and improving public provision and also the fundamental conditions for realising this common interest;
ii) the constant possibility that interests might conflict and the fact that the conditions for convergence have to be fought for, including at a national, (and ideally international) macroeconomic and political level
iii) the implications of this mix of potentiality and risk for the development of the strategy and the kind of alliances that are necessary for its success.
I. Common public sector interests in the face of privatisation
Privatisation involves handing over public services to organisations driven by the maximisation of private profit. A proportion of public money invariably therefore leaves the public sector into the coffers of private capital. Moreover, when private companies take over they tend to try to make their savings through cutting the wage bill – i.e increasing the rate of exploitation. By contrast, the goals of public sector, whose management as public servants are accountable to the public in theory if not always in practice, is the maximisation of public benefit.
This organisation of public services through non-market institutions funded through re-distributive taxation and under formally at least, democratic control, was a gain for working class people, as citizens benefiting from what was/to a diminished extent is, in effect a social wage. Workers, as staff and as management in the public sector, developed an additional and mutual interest in these public institutions through being employed, to deliver these public goods. This is structurally where their genuinely shared goal lies.
On the one hand, public sector staff contribute to ensuring a quality of service which benefits themselves and their fellow citizens (rather than contributing – and thus selling their power to labour - to the profits of a private company). Thus as both public sector workers and as citizens they have a vested in ensuring the good stewardship of public money i.e. good management where good is defined by meeting social need/public benefit.
On the other hand public sector management as public servants accountable to the public have an interest in ensuring conditions – training, pay, full involvement in decisions regarding the content of their work – that enable the staff to realise their full potential in their service to the public.
This at any rate is the theory. It is also the rationale for aiming, through union action internally and widely based campaigning to build public pressure on the elected politicians, to involve management in alternatives to privatisation - internal improvement plans, if necessary in-house bids and whatever options for public delivery can be devised. And where privatization has been – invariably ‘for the time being’, never to be taken for granted – defeated, this common interest in public delivery is the basis for co-operation with management to improve services and where appropriate make savings to re-allocate to more needy services, avoiding outsourcing and compulsory redundancies. Halting privatisation and rejecting the outsourcing option implies running the public sector for public benefit and that involves management putting their position as public servants before any private or bureaucratic self-interest.
2. The democratic conditions for this common interest – rarely met!
In reality, however, this idea of public sector managers as genuinely servants of the public depends on there being effective means of defining and articulating public need, strong relationships of accountability, transparency and public control to implement electoral mandates. In other words, to become a reality, the ideal of public servants depends political and institutional mechanisms that are sufficiently democratic to ensure that both public sector managers and public sector staff are in fact working for the public benefit, as defined by the public authority's electoral mandate.
During the first years of the welfare state, one could argue that some of these conditions, these democratic pressures, were provided by the high expectations of the post-war reconstruction; the strong political mobilisation around social conditions fit for heroes; the public’s strong sense of their social rights and of majority of public sector workers’ commitment to public service ethics. Moreover, the Labour Party was very active at a local level, a kind of self-appointed custodian of the welfare state and a pressure for its defence and expansion. But there were few attempts to institutionalise mechanisms of more participatory democracy and egalitarian co-operation, going beyond the institutions of representative democracy.
The absence of a dynamic of democracy-driven change
As we discovered in the 60's when a new generation emerged wanting change, institutions of the 1945 welfare state were essentially paternalistic and unable to respond adequately to either new demands or the new capacities and self-awareness of the post 45 generation. In other words, when new challenges and a new generation came of age in the 60's and 70's – with the massive expansion of higher education, the emergence of feminism and numerous other movements organised to push beyond the limits of the post-war settlement - there were no built in mechanisms of public sector democracy-driven change which these new actors could activate or build on.
One should not exaggerate the problems and now is n't the time to rehearse them. The point is that in the absence of consciously created and embedded dynamics of democratic pressure, vested interests grew up amongst many public sector managers, whether for a quiet life, for a petty empire or in various sorts of more or less corrupt relationships with the private business. Public service values were taken for granted and allowed to lie dormant. Rather than being constantly updated and renewed through being recognised as a key impetus for improvement and change, these values became ritualistic, losing their active, material influence. The skills and capacities of the staff were left undeveloped, in silos and beneath the heavy weight of hierarchy. The narrow range of views reflected in the political system and the weakness of systems of scrutiny also meant an absence of political pressures to innovate after the founding generation of the welfare state retired and the initial momentum waned.
This is no time to go into the story, but in the 1970’s numerous movements and initiatives tried to pioneer such democracy driven changes but were they were eventually overtaken – and sometimes appropriated by the market driven politics surrounding Mrs Thatcher and then New Labour.
We all know the story and its impact on public sector trade unionism, narrowing it's horizons and putting it on the defensive.
In sum, the extent of democratic control and independence of the market of the public sector has thus proved significantly limited and these limits are what we now have to overcome if public services are to remain public. It has been the weakness of the democratic engine that should have been driving the provision of public goods, that made the welfare state vulnerable to privatisation.
Against this background, it is clear that what Newcastle UNISON did , working closely with a group of councillors who opposed privatisation and building a city wide community and union coalition – 'Our city is not for sale', was in effect to rebuild, in a matter of months, the public, democratic pressures inside and outside the council, which are a condition for a common interest between public sector managements and staff.
It should be noted that in the early days of best value when Labour had just been elected and it was brought in to replace competitive tendering and before it became little more than a pressure to outsource, there were attempts at all kinds of community forums which briefly had an active influence. This experience might be worth some investigation for lessons for the kinds of community/ staff alliances needed today.
3. The wider context of industrial democracy in the public sector
It’s useful to put the significance of the Newcastle experience and other equally creative but less publicized experiences of union led public service transformation, in a wider context. For this purpose, it is interesting to glance very briefly at what happened in the private sector in the past decades, especially the 1990’s. There are several thoroughly documented analyses of the return to profitability in much of the private sector on an international scale after the 70's and following the neo-liberal attack on the unions- led by the example of Mrs Thatcher’s UK. Their argument is that what was going on in the private sector in these years was not only about the weakening of the unions; it was also about management methods which attempted to harness workers' creativity and commitment, at the same time as blocking their autonomous trade union organization. The Japanese, the trend setters in this regard, talked about mined 'the gold in the workers mind' and created forms of management that attempted to do just this.
There is much evidence, especially in an important book, 'The New Spirit of Capitalism' on how the more advanced sections of capital took over the cultural themes of the movements of the 60's and 70's, with their emphasis on horizontality, networked forms of co-operation and other conditions for creativity and transformed them into a renewed spirit of capitalist enterprise, restoring profits in the process. Key to the success of this process of capitalist renewal was a wrenching of the cultural, anti-bureaucratic, anti-heirarchical critique of capitalism made by the social and labour movements of the ‘70s from their social, egalitarian critique – through the simultaneous process of political defeat of these movements, especially the trade union movement.
This process coincided with a shift away from a corporatist and moderately expansionary macro-economic framework- a violent shift in the case of the UK and Italy, more a more gradual and more nuanced shift to neo-liberalism in France and some other parts of Europe.
Why I mention this historical background is that one way of understanding what has happened in Newcastle and elsewhere is that the creativity that has its roots in the ambiguous anti-authoritarian critiques of the 1960’s and 70’s was combined with – rather than separated from – the egalitarian principles and organizational strength of the trade unions. The result has been and could be more widely a dynamic of transformation produced by realizing the creativity of the staff on the basis of -rather than as an alternative to – secure employment, wages and conditions
Conclusion – for now
What are wider conditions for this to be sustained? In particular, where do these ruminations go in the context of the coming – and present – attack on public services?
Obviously this question is connected to a wider debate, taking place as we campaign through the 'One million voices' campaign and learn from the creative initiatives that this campaign will encourage. But here are is my immediate two pennyworth (a bit stream of consciousness, I'm afraid).
The Newcastle story was set in the first seven years of the 21st century, when privatization was rampant but public spending was steady (albeit much of it going to private contractors). We are now in the extraordinary situation in which the crisis of the financial markets has become a crisis of public spending. Public servants are going to be scrutinised down to the last paperclip, while bankers are not going to be scrutinised down to the last million they have received from the government
Underlying this politically driven turn of events is a highly ideological attack on the public sector as profligate, unproductive, parasitic (the cheek of it!) implicitly evoking the themes of Thatcher and Blair’s attack on the public sector and public servants. The cuts therefore will be accompanied, whether under the Tories and Labour, by outsourcing to the private sector as the default ‘ means of achieving efficiencies.’ (With little regard to the evidence)
Others are better placed than I to develop the detailed implications of ‘democracy-driven public service reform’ discussed here ( we need a name for it – this is just a suggestion!) for negotiation and campaigning – the opening up procurement, developing community- staff alliances etc. I want to draw out three points about the wider political importance of generalizing from/building on this strategy.
A living counter-argument
First, if it is developed and widely spread it provides a living counter argument to both the open and the subliminal attack on the public sector which plays on people’s worst experiences or hearsay of public services. We can expect the ideological anti to be massively jacked up in the run up to the election (and we can equally accept that it will not be strongly answered by Labour) The noise of this attack will be amplified to continue to divert attention from the public money squandered on propping up – rather than transforming - the banking system. As an element in a coherent vision or ‘narrative’, democracy-driven reform provides a model of money well spent in terms of public benefit and of public services as a productive sector with ‘productive’ measured and projected in terms of social well-being (the later transforming of our measures of productivity being an essential part of the positive alternative vision)
Secondly, if it is widely spread and promoted, involving users as well as staff, the democracy-driven reform strategy generates practical experiences and models of responsive and actively co-operative public institutions and also glimpses of day to day workplace and user democracy – albeit to be struggled for rather than necessarily achieved. Imaginatively promoted, these experiences could help to reinforce and deepen wider arguments for public institutions as servants of the public good, so that people can see themselves as represented in that ‘public.’ This would contribute to a wider reclaiming and rethinking of state intervention and regulation in the context of climate change, corporate globalisation and an alternative economic strategy which could turn the spotlight back on the financial sector with a case for how, in reality, to turn it into a servant of the real economy.
In this way, especially at a regional level where wide political and social alliances are often possible, struggles for democracy-driven public service change could be an important and feasible foundation stone for a alternative political economy that can be built on an using and extending whatever spaces open up for public led economic and political transformation: the green new deal, the ‘total place’ initiatives etc.
Exploring new political and economic models
Finally and more ambitiously, this strategy now being developed by UNISON has the potential - if the Newcastle experience and many smaller union led campaigns that secured and improved services across the country are anything to go by - to make an original contribution to new models of an egalitarian and democratic society in which ‘the fulfilment of each is a condition for the fulfilment of all’.
The argument here is exploratory, exploring the full potential of the experiments in democracy-led public service reform that UNISON is promoting. It goes like this:
The kinds of democracy driven transformation achieved through co-operation with management to secure public provision are about a lot more than ‘voice’, ‘consultation’ ‘alternative plans’ . Rather, they redesign the ‘production’ process of providing and delivering public service . Fundamental to this has been an entirely new – or least previously unrecognized and certainly untheorised approach to the issue of knowledge and human capacity.
Open public debate about knowledge is rare. Yet questions of fundamental importance such as, what constitutes legitimate knowledge for public policy/social change? what is the character of this knowledge? whose knowledge or know-how matters for public policy? how is it organized? underpin different models of society. Take the two models of economic and social organization which still implicitly dominate mainstream political debate: the free market and the intervening state. Both are based on distinct understandings of knowledge, its character and its organization. Traditional social democratic notions of state intervention have placed much faith in basing public policy on scientific laws of society that can be codified , centralized and made the basis of planning and regulation. On this model, knowledge is social rather than individual (see the free market model below) but it is the excusive property of experts. As Beatrice Webb famously put it: ‘We have little faith in the “the average sensual man.” We do not believe that he can do more than describe his grievances, we do not think he can prescribe his remedies…We wish to introduce the professional expert.’ This model has been adapted somewhat to take account of ‘local knowledge’ through a variety of forms of consultation but always on plans drawn up ‘from above,’ by some part of the state, the professional experts.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, the free market ideology which rhetorically at least inspired the revival of neo-liberalism was based on Hayek’s head on attack on this notion of knowledge and his extolling of the practical, tacit knowledge of the entrepreneur. For Hayek and neo-liberals this tacit and practical knowledge is essentially individual. Any economic order must be the result of the haphazard interactions of entrepreneurs serving their own interests, following their own hunches through the medium of the market and price mechanism. Any attempt at regulation, planning, state intervention in the economy is bound to distort the fragile workings of this spontaneous mechanism.
It is from the legacy of these two contrasting models underpinned by very different theories of knowledge that the different policy priorities dominating public debate flow. Here is not the place to make detailed critiques of both: the inbuilt inconsistency/hypocrisy, for example, of the free market model in the face of corporate monopolies that in many ways mirror the knowledge systems of the state and of course exploit the tacit, practical and social knowledge of their employees.
What I want to suggest and very briefly explore as a contribution to debate about alternatives is the idea that the public sector industrial democracy at the core of democracy-led public service reform illustrates a distinct approach to knowledge which is potentially part of the basis for both reclaiming rethinking /democratising the state.
Knowledge and know – how of industrial democracy
First, consider the character of the knowledge and know-how evident in the example of industrial democracy / engagement with management to secure and improve public services:
*It is plural and inclusive with the practical, tacit knowledge of frontline staff valued as important as codified scientific knowledge of policy staff.
*It is social and shared: the tacit and practical knowledge is exchanged in practice and in problem solving collaboration on the basis of relations of trust.
* It is material. This is where the kind of sharing and development oof knowledge and know how goes beyond ‘consultation’ , even beyond many forms of stronger ‘participation’ in plans and budget decisions. It is actually about the sharing and realizing of knowledge (including knowledge previously unrecognised and under-used) in material production, in the experiences we are discussing the production of services.
The social relations underlying a social and plural understanding of knowledge
Second, consider the social relations that make possible this plural, inclusive, social and material knowledge possible:
The relations have neither the atomistic, socially blindfold character which free marketers imply is a necessary feature of tacit skill and practical know how , nor the hierarchical, command relations which is the corollorary of a presumption that the only valid knowledge is that of the professional experts..acting in the interests of the people.
These social relations could be best described as relations of mutuality –or at least relations which aspire to mutuality.
The question then is how do the implications of achieving or more realistically struggling for, relations of mutuality relate to a wider systemic vision? How does it relate to using the perspective of knowledge and capacity to think beyond the dichotomies of state and market?
These concluding thoughts are only intended to be suggestive so I pose this question without being able to answer it.
I would bear in mind the following in trying to answer it:
- the answer has to involve a hybridity of relationships. For example, clearly representative democracy will be necessary to frame and set the broader goals of the shared knowledge realized through the mutuality. In regard to participatory forms of democracy, mutuality in the organization of public services will enhance the effectiveness of participatory democracy in the setting of investment budgets or the drawing up of land use plans; participatory budgets and participatory planning is always limited if the actual administration of state institutions remains hierarchical and secretive on the one hand or outsourced and unaccountable on the other.
- mutuality depends significantly on economic equality and security
- we have to think and talk a little differently about the basis of economic strategy. When we talk about 'putting people first' we should be thinking both about people's needs (as we do now and the social democratic, more state dominated traditions of socialism have tended to do) but also explicitly and systematically about people's capacity. Their capacities as workers to improve the efficiency of a service (and an enterprise – but that's another discussion) from the standpoint of public benefit and their capacity as citizens able to make judgements, deliberate, take account of wider needs beyond their neighbourhoods.
- to develop a wider vision of which mutuality in the running of public services is a key part, we need to draw on both historic and modern experiences of mutuality: I’m thinking here of on the one hand the co-operative movement and on the other hand the open software movements and the experience of open and mutually driven web communities like wikipedia.
This has taken us a long way from attacks on co-operation with management to secure public provision. But there is a connection. Caution about a new experiment can be wise if it leads to deeper thought, a dismissal of these creative experiments in alternatives to outsourcing often stems from an elitist politics which sees the role of workers as simply to protest and to resist and which keeps the role of proposing as the monopoly of the party. (a kind of Leninist version of the Beatrice Webb approach). These experiments are in co-operation to defend and improve public service are about a new kind of politics as well as a new more strategic kind of public sector trade unionism. Let’s continue the debate!
Hilary Wainwright, International Centre for Participation Studies, Bradford University (and Transnational Institute, Amsterdam. http://www.tni.org/ and co-editor Red Pepper http://www.redpepper.org.uk/)
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