European Labor in Retreat

At 9 a.m. last Tuesday, 2,000 men marched through the black tarmac streets of Grimethorpe (pop. 5,237), a proud coal-mining town in the north of England. Led by the Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band, in blue blazers with shiny brass buttons, the marchers filed past rows of two-story red brick houses darkened by decades of coal dust. Lining the streets to watch and join the procession were 1,500 of the miners’ supporters–wives, mothers, fathers and, after a half-day school holiday had been declared, most of the town’s children. Though the band boomed out stirring oompah strains and the miners walked with heads held high, an air of sadness marched with them. They had fought the good fight –and lost.

Across Britain, in towns much like Grimethorpe, tens of thousands of miners were striding back to work, ending a 51-week strike that ranks among the most bitter, violent and costly labor battles in the country’s history. Before it was over, the dispute had resulted in at least 14 deaths (including two suicides and the killing of a taxi driver who was taking a strikebreaker to work), 9,808 arrests, countless injuries on the picket lines, as well as an estimated $3 billion in lost output and other economic consequences.

Perhaps the biggest losers were the mine workers and their stubborn, militantly Marxist leader, Arthur Scargill, 47. Despite nearly a year on strike, the miners failed to achieve anything resembling their key demand, the end of a British government plan to close unprofitable mines. As their members’ resolve began to crumble in the face of the authorities’ continued unwillingness to compromise on the closures, the delegates of the National Union of Mineworkers two weeks ago voted 98 to 91 to overrule Scargill and end the walkout.

The surrender was a stunning setback for British miners, but it was also much more. It symbolized a new era of turmoil and austerity for organized labor throughout Western Europe. After years of slow economic growth, high unemployment and sweeping industrial change that has closed hundreds of mills and mines forever, unions in France, Italy, West Germany, Belgium and other West European nations are on the defensive–and perhaps on the wane. Says Franz Steinkuhler, second chairman of IG Metall, the 2.5 million-member West German metalworkers’ organization: “One hundred years ago, when trade unions were first formed, their songs were about dawn and the rising sun. Now, suddenly, we seem to have lost faith in a bright future.”

Union leaders are watching helplessly as their membership rolls dwindle and their political clout withers. In Britain, the number of workers represented by the Trades Union Congress, an umbrella organization, has dropped 20% since 1979, to about 9.6 million. Membership in France’s Communist-led General Confederation of Labor has dropped in the past five years by at least 40%, to an estimated 1.2 million.

Many of those union members fell from the rolls because their jobs simply disappeared during the recession. Unemployment in the European Community has jumped from 6.1% to 11.8% since 1980. Moreover, the nature of many of the available jobs is changing. Like the U.S., Western Europe is undergoing a fundamental transformation in its economic mix. Old-line industries such as steel and coal are shrinking, while fields like computers and telecommunications expand.

As mines and factories shut down, job growth is becoming concentrated among service workers, from secretaries to financial planners to laboratory technicians. Labor leaders find these predominantly young white-collar workers hard to recruit and unreceptive to the gospel of union solidarity and militancy. Says John Edmonds, an official of Britain’s General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trades Union: “We’re dealing with better-educated people doing more diverse jobs, people who aren’t impressed by battle metaphors and all that macho stuff.”

The specter of unemployment has forced unions to rein in their wage demands. Between 1972 and 1982, workers in the European Community reaped average annual wage gains of 3.5% after inflation (vs. an average .5% drop in the U.S.). Last year the increase fell to 1.5%. Even in Scandinavia, where unusually strong unions still represent up to 90% of workers, pay hikes have been skimpy. In Denmark, for example, wages in 1984 actually declined 1.3% after inflation.

In the 1960s and ’70s, European unions often enjoyed cozy partnerships with governments, but now relations have turned chilly. Conservative leaders have come to power in Britain and West Germany, and even Socialist regimes in Italy, France, Spain and Portugal have been forced by poor economic conditions to tighten their budgets and trim benefits.

Since her election as Britain’s Prime Minister in 1979, Margaret Thatcher has stood firm in the face of union power, as she did against the miners. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl sided with industry last year against striking metal-workers and printers, who demanded a 35-hour workweek, but settled for 38 1/2 hours. Italy’s Prime Minister Bettino Craxi last year pushed into law a change in the scala mobile, a complex wageindexation formula, to give workers slightly less protection from inflation. French President Francois Mitterrand has launched an industrial restructuring that calls for the elimination of 60,000 of 207,000 jobs in the state-supported mining, steel and shipbuilding companies.

European labor leaders hope that healthier economies will soon bring hard times to an end. Growth in the European Community was an encouraging 2.3% last year, up from 1.1% in 1983. One reason: the high value of the dollar has created a boom for many export industries.

Even so, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predicts that West European unemployment will rise at least until 1986. Union bosses consider the joblessness a waste of human resources and blame governments for pursuing misguided conservative policies. Steinkuhler of the German metalworkers’ union argues that the $15 billion to $18 billion that his government spends annually for unemployment relief could be better used to create jobs. Says he: “It is more reasonable to finance work than to finance idleness.” Detlef Hensche, an official of the German printers union, blames the “capitalistic system” for not generating enough jobs for teachers, social workers and other public servants because that is not the most “profitable” way to invest capital.

Critics of unions respond that the workers themselves are partly responsible for high unemployment. Reasons: in years past they have resisted automation, refused to move to new jobs in different cities and demanded fat pay hikes that put European companies at a disadvantage against U.S. and Japanese competitors. While not accepting the responsibility for joblessness, many labor leaders recognize that their unions must adapt to the new realities of international competition. Says Giorgio Benvenuto, head of the Italian Union of Labor: “If the old unions fail to modernize their antiquated policies, they will be out of the mainstream.”

But that message has not yet filtered down to enough factory floors. Observes Robert d’Hondt, secretary-general of Belgium’s Confederation of Christian Trade Unions: “The difficulty for us as leaders is to make our members understand that times have changed and that unions must change too.” In December several French union officials reached a precedent-setting accord with the national employers’ association that would have allowed companies greater flexibility in such matters as layoffs and working hours. No sooner had the agreement been signed than union militants at the local level forced their leaders to renege on it.

Despite such setbacks, many union officials are optimistic about the future of organized labor. Typical of that attitude is Wim Kok, leader of the Netherlands Trade Union Confederation. Says he: “I see a growing realism in the European trade union movement, a growing tendency to be basically positive about the introduction of new technologies as the only way to compete with the U.S. and Japan.”

Western Europe’s unions are, of course, a long way from extinction. The spirit of solidarity still burns brightly in the hearts and imaginations of many Europeans, decades after unions first began to stand up for the working man and woman. But labor’s problems–chronic unemployment, dwindling membership, the shifting nature of work, waning public support–are immense. If the failure of the British coal miners’ strike holds a lesson for European labor, it may be this: the future of unionized workers is inextricably bound up with the health of the companies and industries in which they work. Unions, like companies and industries, cannot survive unless they learn how to change.