Jack Jones - Telegraph Politics Obituaries Jack Jones Jack Jones, who died on April 21 aged 96, was general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union from 1969 to 1978, when he exercised more power over government economic policy than any other trades union leader in British history. Jones greets pensioners and trade unionists in Trafalgar Square, 25th February 1974 Photo: GETTY 1:58PM BST 22 Apr 2009 A crusading socialist, dedicated to the collectivist ideal of Each for All and All for Each, Jones was able to bend both Labour and Conservative administrations to his agenda. He proved far more fundamentalist in his approach than previous leaders of the TGWU, such as Ernest Bevin and Arthur Deakin. They had been great barons of unionism, paternally exercising the privileges of their fiefdom for the general good. Jones, by contrast, saw himself as the workers’ tribune, deriving his authority directly from the shop floor. Throughout his career he strove to increase the power and influence of shop stewards.

He seemed wholly, indeed ostentatiously incorruptible, though he later faced allegations of being a KGB agent. He was certainly contemptuous of luxury — to the very end he lived in a council house . Yet it was at once his strength and his weakness that he operated in blinkers. While he could be genial enough so long as nothing was at stake, his puritanical sense of righteousness tended to exclude any compromise. Jones’s insistence on seeing issues in black and white — for instance, in dividing the world between “those who work” (virtuous) and “those who make money” (evil) — rendered it fatally easy for him to conclude that intransigence was a moral duty. His hot temper left him impatient of anyone, even fellow unionists, who doubted his good intentions. “I regarded every trade unionist as my brother or sister,” he recalled, “unless” — ominous rider — “they acted in an unco-operative way.” Related Articles Norman Willis 25 Jun 2014 His own co-operation, by contrast, was sparingly conferred. In 1969, when Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle attempted to subject the unions to legal sanctions, Jones led the opposition against the Labour government.

As the debate raged, he organised a strike against the management of Ford, which was bent on introducing penalties for breaking contracts, and on securing “cooling off” periods before strikes. In Whitehall, Jones helped to ensure that endless sessions of “beer and sandwiches” at No 10 Downing Street failed to assuage union opposition to Labour’s plans. (“The beer was not very cold,” complained one of the miners, “and the sandwiches were so dry they were turned up at the edges.”) In the end, the Labour government had to be content with a “solemn and binding” voluntary agreement with the unions. This made it easy for the Tories to claim that Harold Wilson lacked the will to deal with Britain’s industrial problems. No one did more than Jack Jones to secure Labour’s defeat in the general election of 1970. The new prime minister, Edward Heath, had done what he could while in opposition to establish good relations with union leaders. There had even been an evening at his flat in Albany, when he had played The Red Flag — “not very well”, as Jack Jones remembered. But the men who had resisted Labour’s attempt to tame the unions were hardly going to support a Tory measure of the same kind.

Brushing aside union leaders who seemed inclined to trim, Jones led the protest against the Conservatives’ Industrial Relations Bill. Some 120,000 took part in a march from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square. Nevertheless the Bill became law, and in 1972 the TGWU was fined £55,000 by the new Industrial Relations Court after unofficial action in the docks against the container revolution. Jones had not originally supported this action; nevertheless, in July, after five dockers had been sent to prison, he was able to use the threat of a national dock strike to secure a general inquiry into working conditions in the ports, chaired by himself and Lord Aldington. Their report suggested measures which would guarantee the dockers a job for life, irrespective of whether there was any work for them to do. Heath felt obliged to accept the recommendations. Meanwhile, the unions had discovered that it was easy enough to circumvent the Industrial Relations Act. It sufficed to add the clause “This is not a legally enforceable agreement” to contracts, or simply to refuse to register under the Act.

Later in 1972, with inflation out of control, Heath abandoned his defence of free wage bargaining, and sought a voluntary agreement with the unions on the control of prices and the restraint of wages. Vic Feather, the general secretary of the TUC, seemed prepared to accommodate him, but Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, president of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, remained obdurate, however hard Heath tried to win them round. The prime minister, Jones conceded, was “a very decent man... He was prepared to be patient and listen to our point of view and our arguments, and, within his limits as a Conservative prime minister, I think he did try to respond.” In his memoirs, Union Man (1986), Jones observed that Heath gained more respect from union leaders than Harold Wilson or Jim Callaghan. Much good it did him. Jones and Scanlon, “the terrible twins”, were all in favour of statutory control of prices; they utterly refused, though, to contemplate any curb on wage bargaining. Rather, they campaigned for frozen rents and higher pensions — one of their successes was the introduction of the £10 Christmas bonus for pensioners.

In truth, Jones had no intention of accommodating Heath when he knew he could win a better deal from a Labour government. Early in 1972 a committee had been set up to liaise between the TUC and the Labour Party in determining the policy of the next Labour administration. This was the origin of the “Social Contract”, through which the unions would virtually dictate Labour’s domestic policy. So, although Jones conceded that Stage Three of the statutory incomes policy which Heath introduced at the end of 1973 had been specially designed to help the working man, there was never any question that he would support it. Instead, he helped to drum up TUC support for the miners’ strike which led to the Conservatives’ defeat in the election of February 1974. Harold Wilson returned to No 10 Downing Street; Jones, however, was running the country. The Industrial Relations Act was repealed; pensions were increased; an Act was passed to improve health and safety at work; the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) was set up; and employment legislation was drafted to reinforce the closed shop and to enhance the rights and privileges of shop stewards.

The polls duly recorded that most Britons considered Jack Jones the most powerful man in the land. At the same time, though, the narrow margin of Labour’s victory in the election of October 1974 suggested that there was developing resistance to the rule of “Emperor Jones” (as Paul Johnson would dub him). In theory, Labour and the unions were working together for the general good; in practice, the government was legislating at the unions’ behest without gaining any advantage in return. By the beginning of 1975 the going rate for wage increases was about 30 per cent. Now it was Labour’s turn to be forced into a statutory incomes policy. Of course, Jones disliked this; he had learnt, though, that the destruction of a Labour government hardly served his ends. He proposed, therefore, that income increases should be limited to the same amount for all, a scheme designed to favour the lower paid. After much haggling with the Chancellor, Denis Healey, this sum was fixed at £6. By this time, though, Jones was losing control of the Left-wingers in his own union, whose ambitions he had so assiduously fostered.

The Labour government, for its part, was showing increasing scepticism about his ability, and his desire, to hold down wage claims. It was significant that Healey, in his budget of 1976, took care to make his tax concessions for the low-paid dependent on TUC agreement to the next stage of the incomes policy. The decline of Jones’s influence was also evident in his failure to persuade the government to implement workers’ representation in the boardrooms or his plan for a 35-hour week. Opposition to Jones within the TGWU surfaced in 1977, when his plea for the union’s continued adherence to the Social Contract was decisively rejected. So when he retired as general secretary the next year, having reached the age of 65, his power was already in decline. The subsequent “Winter of Discontent”, in which striking workers allowed rubbish to pile up in the streets, and the dead to remain unburied, showed how right Jones had been to warn that the undermining of the Social Contract risked bringing Margaret Thatcher to power. Yet he himself had played a decisive part in ushering in 18 years of Tory rule.

James Larkin Jones was born at Garston, south Liverpool, on March 29 1913. His mother had originally been married to a seaman, with whom she had had a daughter and two sons; after he died she went through a hard time fending for her family until she married a docker. She then had two more sons, of whom Jack (as he was always known) was the younger. Life was tough, and tuberculosis rife, in York Road, where Jack was brought up. From infancy he was steeped in the mythology of unionism; indeed, his second name reflected his father’s friendship with Jim Larkin, the revolutionary Irish trades unionist. At the local elementary school, Jack was more interested in football than study, though one of his brothers involved him in the Sea Scouts and even persuaded him to take an interest in Sunday School. Jack would reject Christian dogma, though he would later teach in socialist Sunday Schools. Aged 13 at the time of the General Strike in 1926, he shared in the sense of betrayal when the strike was called off. Shortly afterwards he was apprenticed to a firm making components for Harland & Wolff, the shipbuilders.

Paid five shillings a week to work in appalling conditions, he was soon active in the TGWU, his father’s union, becoming a branch delegate at the age of 17. He had been secretary of his Labour Party ward from the age of 15. After his firm went bankrupt, he followed his father into the docks, where he began a long struggle against the system of casual employment. Another early and enduring campaign was that for safety at work, originally inspired by the sight of injured dockers being taken away on handcarts. He discovered, though, that “to speak your mind in the union then was like walking on glass”. His puritanical instincts were particularly offended by the TGWU area secretary, Harry Pugh, who wore a bowler hat, sported a flower in his buttonhole, smoked a cigar and found union jobs for his family — just the kind of man, in short, to inspire his opponents with a devotion to grass-roots democracy. To prepare himself for future responsibilities, Jack read Marx and Engels, and applied himself to Ruskin College correspondence courses on industrial law and workmen’s compensation. In 1934 he took part in the National Hunger March to London.

Later, having been elected Labour councillor for Croxteth Ward, he worked with Bessie Braddock on the public assistance committee. He joined the Territorial Army, and was shocked to discover that some of the officers were Mosleyites. Soon, however, he was involved in military activity of another kind. Life in the docks brought him into contact with foreign sailors, fostering in him a lifelong concern for the struggle of workers in other countries. In 1937 he left for Spain to fight with the International Brigade in the Civil War — and in addition to act as an emissary from Ernest Bevin to Spanish unions. The reckless courage of the badly armed and ill-trained men with whom he fought made a deep impression on him. He became a commissar in the Major Attlee Company of the British Battalion, responsible for “political and moral education and vigilance”. Jones remembered chatting to an earnest undergraduate who was visiting Spain as part of a student delegation invited by the Republican Party. His name was Ted Heath. Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB’s highest ranking defector, later said that it was also in Spain that Jones was recruited by Soviet intelligence, an allegation Jones always denied.

Gordievsky insisted that he was regarded by the KGB as a “very disciplined, useful agent”. Under fire while attacking Hill 481 on the Ebro river, Jones was surprised to receive a copy of the TGWU’s annual report and accounts from Ernest Bevin. Shortly afterwards shrapnel hit him in the right shoulder. The wound took some time to heal, and he returned to Britain. Back in Liverpool, he raised supplies for the Republican cause, earning the sobriquet “Potato” Jones. That same year, 1938, he married Evelyn Brown (née Taylor), whose first husband had been killed in Spain. The daughter of a soldier, Evelyn was also an active socialist and trades unionist who would give Jack Jones vital support. His career took a leap forward in 1939, when he was appointed TGWU district organiser at Coventry. He found union organisation there in a comatose state, for the TGWU boasted only 2,000 members in the city. The outbreak of war, however, gave him an opportunity which he did not intend to miss.

(Ernest Bevin had arranged, against Jones’s “strong objections”, for him to be exempted from military service.) The emergency wartime labour legislation introduced by the government, while restricting the right to strike, offered potential for union activity through the appointment of conciliation officers before whom the workers could make their case. Jones persuaded union activists to seek employment in the factories, and soon built up a network of shop stewards who rapidly increased membership of the TGWU. His efforts took place against the background of 57 German air raids on Coventry, culminating in the great blitz on the night of November 14/15 1940, when some 600 people were killed and much of the town’s centre reduced to rubble. Jones and his family survived in the cellar of their house, though the rest of the building was destroyed. His baby son slept throughout. Jones helped see the city through the emergency, without ever relaxing his aim to better working conditions. Though on decent terms with some bosses, such as Sir John Black, the chairman of Standard Motors, he showed no disposition to make matters easy for employers; and when Black offered him the post of labour director at Standard he angrily turned him down.

Illegitimis non carborundum became his motto — workshop Latin for “Don’t let the bastards grind you down”. After the war “the Coventry rate” gave TGWU members the highest wages in the country for shop floor workers. In 1946 an agreement with Standard Motors broke new ground by introducing a five-day week of 42.5 hours; next year this came into force nationally, so that for the first time the working class enjoyed a full weekend — to the deep concern of some moralists. In 1951 another agreement with Standard established two weeks’ paid holiday. By 1948 Jones had to all intents and purposes created a closed shop at Standard, the first in the engineering industry. The appointments he made frequently flouted the TGWU rule that no communist should hold office in the union, and incurred the wrath of Arthur Deakin, the general secretary, who also disapproved of his elevation of shop stewards. So when Jones was shortlisted in 1948 for the post of assistant general secretary, he discovered that another candidate had been appointed before he was even interviewed.

By 1955, however, he had built up TGWU membership in Coventry to 40,000. That year he was made secretary for the entire Midlands region, at the head of some 250,000 members. With Frank Cousins becoming general secretary later that year, the union had moved decisively to the Left. In 1963, after Cousins suffered a heart attack, Jones was appointed assistant general secretary. He moved to London, and helped persuade Cousins to convalesce abroad. From that time Jones was the leading figure in the TGWU; and in 1964, after Cousins was appointed minister of technology, he became acting general secretary. Even when Cousins returned to the general secretaryship in 1966, Jones remained the dominating force in the union. At the end of 1968, he was elected general secretary by a majority of 520,000 to 28,000. His power base had been widened in 1964 when he was elected to the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee. He also served as the Labour Party’s representative on the economic committee of the TUC.

Yet when Labour attained power in 1964, Jones rapidly made clear his opposition to the attempt of the economic affairs minister George Brown (whose loud-mouthed drunkenness excited his deepest contempt) to introduce a voluntary prices and incomes policy. Jones also contested the Labour government’s policy on the Vietnam War; demanded more effective measures to combat unemployment; and supported Cousins’s efforts to ban the bomb. He lost his seat on the NEC in 1967. In truth, Jones was never much interested in power outside the union movement, and showed no disposition to accept offers to join the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation, or to become a governor of the BBC. He was delighted, however, to be elected in 1968 to the general council of the TUC, on which he would serve for the next 10 years. Within the TGWU he still worked unflaggingly to increase membership, which had reached more than two million by the time of his retirement in 1978. Jack Jones was so eager to lead in every dispute that, by his own admission, he sometimes antagonised his own colleagues.

In 1964 his aggressive involvement in a dispute in the docks resulted in the appointment of an inquiry under Lord Devlin which not only recommended substantial wage increases, but also provided the TGWU with ammunition for its campaign to end piecework. Yet when Devlin’s ideas were applied to end casual labour in 1967, many dockers objected to the new scheme, not least in Liverpool. Jones went to Merseyside, and exploited the situation to obtain better pay and working conditions. TGWU officials inclined to see the bosses’ point of view were apt to lose their jobs. Jones was shocked when, in 1968, 200 London dockers marched in support of Enoch Powell’s speech (“I see the river Tiber foaming with much blood”) against immigration. All his life he had fought any hint of racism. Equally he was an early protagonist of equal rights for women. At the Labour Conference of 1977, Jones inveighed against the buying of “grand country houses” by some Labour leaders. He also secured approval for the abolition of the House of Lords.

Although this policy did not appear in the party’s manifesto for the general election of 1979, Jones was able to make a personal point when he refused the peerage offered to him on his retirement in 1978. He did, however, accept an appointment as a Companion of Honour in the same year. When he went to Windsor to be invested, an overtime ban among tanker drivers (members of the TGWU) had caused a delay in the delivery of oil to Windsor Castle. “We had to walk about with our overcoats on to keep warm, thanks to your members,” the Queen told him. For once in his life, though, Jones was impressed by privilege, noting that the Queen displayed “a remarkable awareness of human problems that I thought would be outside her ken”. Less happy was his observation, when shown round the treasures of the Castle, that one of the paintings looked a bit amateurish. “That’s mine,” said the Duke of Edinburgh. In 1982, Colonel Oleg Gordievsky was posted to London as the KGB rezident, the Soviet Union’s intelligence-gathering and espionage chief in Britain.

He said that he asked Jones to provide information about prominent figures in the British trades union movement — specifically, which were potential recruits for the KGB. “For that I paid him £200,” Gordievsky asserted. Gordievsky also claimed that while he was rezident, he learned that Russian intelligence headquarters, Moscow Centre, had “asked Jones for 'technological information’ about the industries with which he was concerned”, information which was wanted for “military purposes”. Jones also allegedly passed on intelligence about what was happening in No 10 Downing Street, about the leadership of the Labour Party, and about the trades union movement. Jack Jones always staunchly denied Gordievsky’s charge, describing the idea that he was a KGB agent “a slur and an outrage”. He did concede, however, that he had “met Soviet officials at embassies and on visits to Russia on behalf of my members. They might have been KGB. I did not realise I was a target. If I had known I was a target for the KGB, or the CIA, I would have had nothing to do with them.” Jack Jones was appointed MBE in 1950.

But the award he appreciated above all others was the Gold Medal awarded to him by the TUC. His flinty, selfless integrity never wavered. When the staff of the TGWU collected money for his retirement present, he put every penny towards the establishment of a Retired Members’ Association. He continued to work hard for pensioners, as vice-president of Age Concern, as president of the Retired Members’ Association, and as chairman of the National Pensioners’ Convention. His campaigning played an important part in the introduction of the Freedom Pass, which allows pensioners to use local public transport without paying. Jack Jones’s wife died in 1998. They had two sons. Frank Cousins F Frank Cousins Frank Cousins PC (8 September 1904 – 11 June 1986) was a British trade union leader and Labour politician. He was born in Bulwell, Nottinghamshire, and became a full-time official in the road transport section of the Transport and General Workers' Union in July 1938.

He was appointed National Secretary of Road Transport (Commercial) Group in October 1948, contested the TGWU Assistant General Secretaryship in 1948 and 1955, securing the position on the latter attempt. He was also elected to the Labour Party's National Executive Committee the same year, but resigned in March 1956. Cousins was appointed acting General Secretary of the TGWU in February 1956, due to poor health on the part of Jock Tiffin. He was elected General Secretary in May 1956, following Tiffin's death, and held the position until 1969. From 1956 to 1969, he was a member of the General Council of the Trades Union Congress and was President of the International Transport Workers' Federation from 1958 to 1960 and 1962 to 1964. Cousins served as Minister of Technology in Harold Wilson's Labour government from October 1964 until his resignation in July 1966. He was also made a Privy Counsellor in 1964.

He was elected Member of Parliament for Nuneaton from a by-election in January 1965 until November 1966. During this period Harry Nicholas took over as acting general secretary of the TGWU. He married Annie Judd ('Nance') in December 1930 and had four children: John, Brenda, Michael and Frances. Frank Cousins sat for sculptor Alan Thornhill for a portrait in clay. The correspondence file relating to the Frank Cousins bust is held in the archive of the Henry Moore Foundation's Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and the terracotta remains in the collection of the artist. (Wikipedia) Papers of Frank Cousins Collection Description Files relating to Cousins' work for the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU), as MP for Nuneaton, 1965-6, and as Minister of Technology, 1964-6; on various public bodies, e.g. ACAS and NEDC; personal correspondence, including papers of Alderman P. Judd, his father-in-law, photographs. Extent 44 boxes Admin history Frank Cousins was born in Bulwell, Nottinghamshire, on 8 September 1904, the son of a miner.

In 1918 he left school and joined his father down the pit, joining the Yorkshire Miners' Association. After five years he left to drive a coal lorry and then, in 1931, became a long-distance lorry driver, carrying meat between Scotland and London, by which time he had already joined the Transport and General Workers' Union. In 1938 Cousins became a full-time official for the T&G in Doncaster. During the Second World War he transferred to Sheffield, and in 1944 he was appointed National Officer of the Road Transport Commercial National Trade Group. In 1948 he became National Secretary of the group. In 1955 he was appointed Assistant General Secretary, and on Jock Tiffin's premature death six months later he was appointed Acting General Secretary in January 1956, being elected to the post of General Secretary in May. Cousins provided great help to Harold Wilson in his bid to become Labour Party leader, and when Wilson became Prime Minister in October 1964 he invited Cousins to join the Cabinet as the first Minister of Technology. He was elected MP for Nuneaton in a by-election.

However, he clashed with Wilson over the introduction of a statutory incomes policy and resigned both his office and his seat in July 1966. He retired from the T&G in September 1969, whereupon he became founding chairman of the Community Relations Commission, holding the post until November 1970. He refused a peerage, retired to Wrington, Somerset, and died on 11 June 1986. Appraisal This collection has been weeded for duplicates. Access status Open Related Material The Centre also holds the records of the Transport and General Workers' Union (MSS.126); the Internatonal Trransport Workers' Federation (MSS.159); Geoffrey Goodman (MSS.169); and the London Busmen's Movement (MSS.62).

About: Harry Nicholas About: Harry Nicholas An Entity of Type : person , from Named Graph : , within Data Space : dbpedia.org Sir Herbert Richard Nicholas OBE (13 March 1905 – 15 April 1997) was a trade unionist and political organiser.Born in Bristol, Nicholas worked for the Port of Bristol Authority until 1936, when he took a full-time post in the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU). He moved to London to become National Officer in 1940, and in 1956 rose to become Assistant General Secretary. In the same year, he was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, and from 1960 to 1964 he was the party treasurer, appointed in order to maximise trade union donations. Property abstract Sir Herbert Richard Nicholas OBE (13 March 1905 – 15 April 1997) was a trade unionist and political organiser. Born in Bristol, Nicholas worked for the Port of Bristol Authority until 1936, when he took a full-time post in the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU).

He moved to London to become National Officer in 1940, and in 1956 rose to become Assistant General Secretary. In the same year, he was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, and from 1960 to 1964 he was the party treasurer, appointed in order to maximise trade union donations. Frank Cousins, General Secretary of the TGWU, served as Minister of Technology from 1964 to 1966, and during this period, Nicholas became Acting General Secretary, also serving on the General Council of the Trades Union Congress. In 1967, he returned to the Labour NEC. He took early retirement from the union in 1968 to become General Secretary of the Labour Party, having been offered the post by Harold Wilson after several other candidates refused the position. Nicholas was criticised after Labour lost the 1970 UK general election, and he stood down in 1972.

(en) Obituary: Jack Jones, trade union leader | Politics | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close The remarkable story of Jack Jones, who has died aged 96, has to open with his achievements as general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union for nine crucial years, 1969-78. It was under his leadership that the TGWU, already Britain's biggest trade union, reached a membership of more than 2 million – the first British union to achieve that figure, making it, at the time, the largest in the non-communist world. This phenomenal achievement led to him being described by his foes and critics as "Emperor Jones", a ruthless labour leader, but by his many admirers, including Gordon Brown (a TGWU member), as "one of the world's greatest trade union leaders". The truth lies with both descriptions. His power and influence, in trade union politics and throughout the labour movement, was unique. It can be compared with that of Ernest Bevin (founder of the TGWU) during the second world war as minister of labour.

Indeed, Jones's impact on the national scene was so great that an opinion poll taken during the period of James Callaghan's government in the mid-1970s reflected a popular, if misplaced, view that he had more power than the prime minister – hence the "Emperor Jones" label. It was Jones more than any other figure in the labour movement who was responsible for the "social contract" on wages (1975-79) and a partnership between the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and Callaghan and the TUC which collapsed after Jones's retirement in 1978. Even so, it covered an extraordinary period of cooperation between government, employers and unions in pre-Margaret Thatcher days, and almost certainly sustained the life of the Callaghan government through to 1979. In fact, Callaghan invited Jones to join his cabinet and offered him a peerage to allow his entry into the government. Characteristically, Jones refused both. He had no time for the House of Lords. Jones was born in Garston, Mersey-side. His father was a Liverpool docker who christened his youngest son James Larkin in honour of the Irish republican socialist and trade union leader of that name.

But once he began working at the docks, James Larkin became Jack. He left school at 14 to take a job as an engineering apprentice at five shillings a week but soon left, cutting his political teeth in the docks. He joined the TGWU in 1927, becoming shop steward and, by 1930, was a member of the docks branch committee. In 1934 he helped organise a Merseyside contingent for one of the hunger marches on London. From 1936 to 1939 he served as a Labour councillor in Liverpool, even though in 1937 he volunteered to fight for the International Brigade against Franco's fascists in the Spanish civil war. Towards the end of 1938, he was badly wounded in the shoulder while fighting on the Ebro front – one of the critical battles of the war in which many of his closest friends and comrades were killed, including George Brown, the first husband of his future wife, Evelyn. In fact, it was when Jones returned to England that he met Evelyn, herself an active and one-time militant socialist, to deliver her husband's last words.

He had pledged to his dying friend to report back personally, and the encounter led to a marriage lasting 60 years. At the outbreak of the second world war, Jones applied for a job as a full-time TGWU organiser and was appointed to the Coventry district – a posting personally approved by Bevin. It was in that role that he established himself as a union official of exceptional ability. He developed a policy that was later to become his trademark – "shop-floor power". That agenda was based on encouraging shop stewards to in effect assume the role and influence of factory floor managers – giving greater authority to the trade unions. Local employers at first resisted his plea to give the shop floor more influence fiercely. But Jones used the argument of the war effort to persuade them that such a move would boost production and was therefore in the national interest. His success in that campaign laid the foundation of his later reputation. By the end of the war, he had established a powerful union base in Coventry as well as a national reputation which became the forerunner of a powerful shop stewards movement across the car industry.

It also provoked envy and opposition from his union's national leaders, notably the then general secretary, Arthur Deakin, who effectively blacklisted Jones as a near-communist. It was Deakin who effectively blocked his promotion within the union because of his radical politics and his commitment to shop steward power – a policy fiercely rejected not only by Deakin but many other national union leaders. Deakin was convinced that Jones was an undercover communist – something Jones always denied. Jones remained in Coventry as a district official until the leftwinger Frank Cousins was surprisingly elected TGWU general secretary after Deakin's death, leading to a dramatic change of scene. One of Cousins' first moves was to promote his old friend Jones, whom he had long admired, appointing him Midland region engineering secretary and then secretary of region 5. It was Cousins who picked him out as his eventual successor and inheritor of his own radical policies. Jones was brought to London in 1963 to fill a newly created post of executive national officer – effectively third in the union hierarchy after Harry Nicholas, who was nominally Cousins' deputy – with the clear intention of succeeding to the top job.

Jones was then elected to the Labour party's national executive and when Cousins joined the Wilson cabinet (in 1964), Jones became deputy to Nicholas, who took the role of acting general secretary. When Cousins resigned from the cabinet in July 1966 (in opposition to the government's wages policy) and returned to his former TGWU role, he then ensured Jones's succession on his retirement in 1969. Jones quickly became the most prominent figure on the TUC general council, as was then the practice for leaders of the TGWU. He chaired most of the TUC's main committees and became a dominant figure. When Wilson returned to office in February 1974, Jones was by then the most influential political figure outside the cabinet, able to persuade the government to create various new bodies, including the industrial dispute body, Acas, the Health and Safety Executive and the Manpower Services Commission in charge of work training. Even before Wilson handed over to Callaghan, there was virtually an open invitation to Jones to join the cabinet had he wished, following in the tradition of both Bevin and Cousins.

By the time of his retirement in 1978, Jones was a household name, sometimes referred to with favour, even affection, but in some quarters with irritation or even notoriety. He and Hugh Scanlon, president of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, were dubbed by the press as the "terrible twins". No aspect of his reputation seemed to trouble Jones. Nor did public honours, titles or baubles – all of which were on offer, had he chosen to accept. He rejected them all – until offered the Companion of Honour by the Queen, which he accepted, arguing it was bestowed on his union, rather than on him personally. Jones spent his long retirement years as he had spent all his life – agitating to help improve the lives and conditions of his former union members. He set out to organise the National Pensioners Convention, of which he became president, expanding it from the base of the TGWU's own pensioners' organisation. He handed over the running of the convention in 2001 to his friend Rodney Bickerstaffe, the retired leader of Unison.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Jones's life is how unchanged in character and style it remained from the time he was first appointed an official in Coventry through to his retirement as leader of what was then still Britain's most powerful trade union. He never shifted from his commitment to socialist ideals, immovably determined, sometimes difficult even with his closest friends, rarely disposed to take criticisms lightly, sometimes lacking charitable humour, but always with unflinching integrity. He was not the easiest companion, yet he was the kind of man anyone would respect. Evelyn died in 1998. Their two sons, Jack and Michael, survive him. • James Larkin (Jack) Jones, trade unionist, born 29 March 1913, died 21 April 2009 Colin Sparks: The Bureaucracy in the TGWU (February 1977) The Bureaucracy in the TGWU Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL. This month Jack Jones’s successor as General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union will be elected. The winner will succeed to one of the most powerful positions in the British labour movement.

In this article, The bureaucracy in the TGWU, Colin Sparks analyses the power structure of Britain’s biggest union. See also the pamphlet by the TGWU Right to Work Campaign, TGWU – Who Rules (obtainable from 265 Seven Sisters Road, London N4). NOWHERE is the power of the trade union bureaucracy more dramatically evident than in the Transport and General Workers Union. And the TGWU is the largest and most powerful trade union in Britain, with nearly two million members. Its only rival in size and influence is the AUEW. When these two giants change course, the whole of the labour movement feels the pull. The leaders of the TGWU and the AUEW, Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, have headed the trade union bureaucracy’s shift to the right since the Labour victory in 1974. From the self-proclaimed grave diggers of capitalism they have become two of its staunchest defenders. Their latest project is a drive to raise productivity in the motor industry together with Eric Varley, the Industry Secretary, and the managers of the four major car companies.

[1] The contrast between these two darlings of the Broad Left tells us a lot about the different ways the two unions work. In Scanlon’s case, the shifts inside the AUEW are there for all to see. There have been electoral victories for the re-emergent right wing; there has been the atrophy of the Broad Left, and the public humiliation of its standard bearer, Bob Wright; every election, every national committee, every court case, has had tremendous publicity. [2] There has been a debate inside the AUEW, there have been elections, there have been decisions – and the policy has shifted. But what about the TGWU? There Jack Jones’s emergence as the salesman of the Social Contract within the Labour movement has not been accompanied by major internal changes or debates. The 1975 Biennial Conference – by rule ‘the government of the Union’ [3] – endorsed the Social Contract by a huge majority. Until now there have been no elections which might have rocked the boat, and the General Executive Council, has only once, in December 1976, challenged the course that Jones has set for the union.

The current election for the post of General Secretary is the first time in a good many years that the membership have had any opportunity to demonstrate their opinion. How is it that policies that affect the lives of two million workers have been drastically altered, with apparently no organised opposition. The Power of the Officials One fundamental cause is the structure of the TGWU. There has been no debate because there is no channel for debate. The General Secretary is the only full-time official elected by the membership, and once elected he is there till he retires. All other full-timers are appointed by the Executive. The TGWU is one of the most bureaucratic of British unions. The reason why so little attention is paid to this fact is that the last two General Secretaries, Frank Cousins and Jack Jones, have been judged ‘progressive’ by the Broad Left and so a blind eye has been cast on the way the union is run. In theory, the TGWU does not seem that undemocratic. After all, the Biennial Delegate Conference, the governing body of the union, is made up of lay members.

So also is the General Executive Council which runs the union between Conferences, and its subcommittee, the Finance and General Purposes Committee, which sees to the day-to-day affairs of the union. Cutting across this structure are the trade groups, which carry out negotiations with the employers on behalf of the members. For example, dockers, car workers, transport workers are all organised in separate sections of the union from national to district level. Within each trade group and right at the bottom, are the branches, which elect lay delegates to various bodies like the district committees. The rules of the union can be changed only by a Rules Conference, made up of lay members, which meets once every six years. But whatever the rules may say, the running of the TGWU is securely in the hands of the full-time officials, who make up a bureaucracy both willing and able to ride roughshod over the wishes of even a highly organised and militant section like the dockers, as during the 1972 docks strike. To understand the nature of this bureaucracy and its power, we must look at the union’s history.

The Origins of the Bureaucracy The TGWU was founded in 1922 from a group of 14 transport unions. Amalgamation with other unions has always been a major source of growth ever since. By 1954 the union had gone through 58 amalgamations. [4] Between the two world wars trade unionism was on the defensive, with membership falling and major battles being lost. Unemployment put a big strain on union finances, and on their bargaining power. In the circumstances amalgamation made very good sense. But the drive to amalgamation often came from paid officials seeing at as a means of maintaining their power and privileges. For many officials the drive to amalgamation was founded on the realisation that their little union would collapse otherwise. An example is the 1929 amalgamation between the TGWU and the Workers’ Union. The Workers’ Union, which started as a militant union open to all workers, had, by the early 1920s reached a crisis point.

In 1927 an approach was made to the TGWU and a scheme was worked out which allowed the Workers’ Union to remain as a national group inside the TGWU for two years, when the bulk of its membership went into the General Workers’ Trade Group. The former officials of the Workers’ Union fared well out of amalgamation. According to Richard Hyman: ‘It would be wrong ... to suggest that there was general dissatisfaction among the former Workers’ Union officials. All valued the consolidation of trade-union strength which the amalgamation achieved, and most found scope for organising initiative at least as great as within the Workers’ Union itself.’ [5] There was some friction as the officials learned that they were now junior partners in a bigger union, but the preservation of their organisation allowed them to adjust to the fact that they were now one pressure group among others. The pattern of trade groups allowed the TGWU to absorb other unions, and in particular their officials, without too much trouble. The full-timers retained considerable bargaining rights with the employers, and representation on the Executive allowed them to argue their case within the union. The price, of course, was and is subordination to the General Secretary.

As the only elected officer of the union, and as the only representative of the union as a whole, the General Secretary can claim an obvious authority over the various, appointed, representatives of the various sectional pressure groups. The General Secretary of the TGWU is like a feudal king, playing off the sectional interests of the different barons in order to wield for himself supreme power. There have been only five General Secretaries in the 55-year history of the union, and four of them, Ernest Bevin, Arthur Deakin, Frank Cousins and Jack Jones, have played central roles in the labour movement as well as being masters inside the TGWU. Bevin’s Reign Ernest Bevin, the first General Secretary was the pivotal figure in the history of the British working class in this century. He was also a class traitor on a scale that makes Jones or Chapple look like Little Red Riding Hood.

Among Bevin’s major contributions to class treachery were: a key role in the sell out of the miners on Black Friday (April 15 1921) and also in the sell out of the General Strike in 1926; as Minister of Labour in Churchill’s wartime coalition government the remarkable feat of agreeing ‘dilution’ with the major unions within 24 hours of his appointment [6] ; the role as Foreign Secretary in Attlee’s Labour government of an architect of NATO and one of the prime movers of the Cold War. The list is endless. Bevin’s career as a full-time official began in 1910 at the age of 29, six months after joining a union for the first time – the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers Union. In 1922 he became first General Secretary of the TGWU. He never participated in a strike in his life, although he led some, and broke some, as a full-timer. He was never elected to office in the trade union movement. The election as General Secretary was unanimous, as Bevin had spent several months beforehand carving up possible rivals.

The special form of the TGWU, and the special power of the General Secretary, are very much Bevin’s creation. He told the union’s founding conference in 1922: ‘I hate strikes.’ and then continued, ‘but as a leader it is my duty to lead.’ [7] There was no contradiction in this. In order to retain his hold on the membership he had to show them from time to time that he was prepared to fight on their behalf; also, the occasional display of muscle serves to remind the employers what the price of ignoring Bevin would be. All the same, Bevin was always happier with class collaboration. After the defeat of the General Strike he was one of the moving figures in opening talks with ‘progressive employers’ like Sir Alfred Mond. When appointed Minister of Labour in 1940 he said that he would hold the office for 50 years. In a sense, he was right, for his appointment by Churchill to this post was a formal recognition by the ruling class that they needed to come to terms with the trade union bureaucracy and integrate it into the state machine. Jack Jones in championing the Social Contract is merely following in Bevin’s footsteps.

The major danger facing a bureaucrat with these policies is that rank-and-file workers will get out of hand. The classic example of how Bevin dealt with this threat was the 1937 Coronation strike by London Busmen. Bevin let the Communist-led London busmen’s rank-and-file movement organise the strike while blocking the extension of the strike necessary for victory. [8] He consciously used the strike to smash the rank-and-file movement. During the strike, Bevin was having a meal in an expensive restaurant with a journalist, and they could hear other customers blaming him for the strike. Bevin said: ‘These people think that this is an ordinary sort of industrial dispute which ought to be stopped because it inconveniences them ... They never try to put themselves in the bus drivers’ place and they don’t give a damn that what is really going on now is a struggle to get hold of the London Busmen’s organisation.

They’ve got to walk but I’m fighting for my life and the life of my union and I’m not going to stop until I’ve crushed them once and for all, flat, finished.’ [9] It was not, of course, the employers that Bevin was going to crush flat, but rather his own members’ rank-and-file movement. Bevin’s Heirs Bevin’s successors left the power structure intact. Deakin, Bevin’s chosen heir and a full-time TGWU official for 26 years before his election in 1946, completed Bevin’s work. His rabid anti-communism fitted the Cold War atmosphere of the time and, with the pace of amalgamation slowing down, it was possible to unite the officials more closely under his leadership. The role of the full-timers changed somewhat. They were no longer reluctant junior partners in an amalgamation, but now depended entirely on the favour of the General Secretary for their future. The bureaucracy finally emerged in its present form as a separate and distinct group cut off from the membership and answerable only to the General Secretary. Deakin died in 1955, but his chosen successor, A.E. Tiffin, only survived him by a year.

In 1956 Frank Cousins as elected General Secretary almost without opposition. Cousins’ biographer wrote: ‘As a regular attender at TGWU conferences, both in Deakin’s and in Cousins’ time, I have always been amazed at the ease with which both leaders commanded the conference. Even more amazing is the way in which union policy switched between General Secretaries. Up to Deakin’s death it was consistently to the right. [1*] After Cousins took over it was equally consistently to the left.’ [10] In 1958 Cousins, virtually alone in the TUC, opposed the Tory government’s attempt to freeze wages in the public sector, and supported the London busmen’s strike. But then he retreated under TUC pressure not to spread the dispute and allowed the strike to be lost. Like Bevin before him and Jones today, Cousins was obsessed with the role the TGWU could play under a Labour government. In 1964 Harold Wilson appointed him Minister of Technology. Cousins resigned in 1966 in protest against the pay freeze imposed by Wilson and George Brown.

Cousins’ left policies certainly stopped short of any change in the structure of the union aimed at permitting democratic rank-and-file control. He once allowed the TGWU delegates to the Labour Party Conference to vote on how the union’s block vote should be cast in a particular debate (in this case over unilateral nuclear disarmament, which Cousins supported), but when the vote went against him ‘Cousins saw to it that it never happened again.’ [11] Much of Jack Jones’s surviving reputation as a ‘left’ derives from his record in the 1960s in leading the opposition to Labour’s pay freezes and anti-union legislation. However, even during the most openly right-wing phase of the 1970-74 Tory government, Jones was far more cautious in his opposition to the Industrial Relations Act than even Scanlon. Even before becoming architect of the Social Contract, he played an increasingly reactionary role, selling out the dockers’ strike in 1972 and negotiating with Heath over his wage controls. Since Labour came to power in 1974, Jones has of course, placed the survival of the Labour government before his members’ jobs and living standards.

The peculiar power of the bureaucracy in the TGWU involves more than simply the role of the General Secretary. The bureaucracy is especially capable of policing its rank and file. In 1959 the TGWU had one full-time official for every 2,222 members, compared with one per 6,345 of the AEU, one per 5,236 of the NUGMW, and one per 16,152 of the NUR. The national average was one per 3,793 members. [l2] While the General Secretary keeps a tight hold on the full-timers, they in turn keep a tight hold on the members. In addition, the Executive has the power to appoint a full-time secretary for a branch and ‘the branch shall not, as long as such arrangement continues, be entitled to elect a branch secretary.’ [13] Branch secretaries, even elected ones, receive 12½ per cent of all dues collected. Contributions range from 18p to 26p, and some branches have over 5,000 members.

This acts as a powerful pressure on even elected local officials to behave like a privileged elite, more interested in staying in office than in representing the members. Changing the Union The TGWU is firmly led and controlled by its full-time bureaucracy under the direction of the General Secretary. It cannot be changed by any individual official (even the General Secretary) or section of the bureaucracy, forming as they do a closely-integrated group committed to collaboration with the employers and the capitalist state. Any change within the TGWU will have to come from the rank and file, and will have to involve a thorough democratisation of the union, in particular the election and regular re-election of all full-time officials. The problem of changing the TGWU will not be an easy one. The diversity of the membership, and their organisation into semi-independent trade groups, means that a union-wide rank-and-file opposition will be very difficult to build. All previous oppositions, like the London busmen and the dockers, have been defeated. They found themselves easily isolated within a union with large numbers of passive members. It is very difficult to build a rank-and-file movement that unites the docker, the carworker and the food, drink and tobacco worker.

However, today the machine is likely to be under increasing strain under the impact of the crisis. Traditionally ill-organised sections like the food, drink and tobacco workers will have to fight or go under. Traditionally militant groups like carworkers and dockers will find the old sectional methods of struggle inadequate when they are faced with the national bureaucracy and the state. Meanwhile, the union leadership can no longer preside over rising living standards as in the palmy days of the boom. All it has to offer its membership is falling real wages and rising unemployment. The situation is one that is favourable to rank-and-file politics within the TGWU. However, this will mean operating at different levels. A number of rank-and-file movements can be built among specific sections of the membership and often including members of other unions (e.g. in the car industry). The immediate aim for the union as a whole, however, is the more modest one of a campaign around issues such as union democracy and the right to work. Note by ETOL 1*. In the printed text the word is “left”, but from the context it is clear that it should be “right”. Notes 1. Financial Times, December 29 1976. 2.

See J. Deason, The Broad Left in the AUEW, International Socialism 79. 3. Rules of the TGWU, 1976, Rule 4.1, p.10. 4. V.L. Allen, Power in Trade Unions, p.23. 5. R. Hyman, The Workers’ Union, pp.165-66. 6. Dilution was one of the key issues in the origins of the shop stewards’ movement during the First World War. See J. Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement. The fact that no such opposition developed during the Second World War is only partly a result of Bevin’s role as Minister of Labour: ‘The political situation in the 1939-45 War was much more settled and it was difficult to impute strikes to political motives.

The Labour Party was a full coalition partner; a trade union leader, Ernest Bevin, held a Cabinet post which in terms of power was second only to that of the Prime Minister; and, after Russia entered the War in 1941, Communists in industry who would have been the natural leaders of unofficial movements lent all their energies to supporting the war ... ‘It is significant that the only political strike worth recording in World War II was attributed to Trotskyists ... Mr Bevin, however, believed that many of the strikes ... were politically inspired, and it was in this belief that he obtained the agreement of the Cabinet to make it an indictable offence to incite and instigate strikes.’ V.L. Allen, Trade Unions and the Government, p.43. The strike in question was in March 1944 and started among engineering apprentices on Tyneside, spreading to involve some 11,000 apprentices. 7. Quoted in F. Williams, Ernest Bevin: Portrait of a Great Englishman, p.109. 8. See P. Glatter, London Busmen: Rise and fall of a rank-and-file movement, International Socialism 74. 9.

Quoted in Williams, op. cit., p.115. 10. M. Stewart, Frank Cousins: A study, p.22. 12. Clegg, Killick and Adams, Trade Union Officers, pp.38-9. 13. Rules, Rule 11.3 (a), p.27.

Question: Who was appointed the first Minister of Technology in 1964 – he was General Secretary of the TGWU at the time?
Answer: FRANK COUSINS