LESSONS FROM OTHER CONFLICTS  (3): WORKING TO RULE

In the late 1970s the UK was a very sick nation. Its economy was in a mess. For those on one side of politics, the cause of that mess was the trades unions; who seemed to call out their members on strike at the slightest excuse. For those on the other side of politics, the cause of that mess was the rising cost of living that forced workers to strike for wage increases. Whichever view was taken however, one thing was clear: trades unions were a political force to be reckoned with.

It wasn't always so. 150 years before their power in the 1970s, trades unions didn't even exist. At that time, working people, including children, laboured under conditions of exploitation, danger and job insecurity. Not surprisingly, workers then began to fight back. They banded together and formed 'combinations' that became known as trades unions. These were able to gradually gain more power: in the 1920s they had their first members of parliament; in the 1940s their members were part of a radical government; and by the 1970s they could even force a goverment out of power. Then in the early 1980s, and in less than a decade, their power nearly vanished.

How did this complete reversal of trades union power happen? The answer is simple: striking workers do not get paid. When the trades unions were strong, like in the 1970s, this wasn't a significant problem; because employers usually conceded a pay rise before the workers ran out of cash. But all this changed under Prime Minister Thatcher's government of the early 1980s. She refused to give in to a strike by the most powerful trades union of them all: the National Union of Mineworkers. As a result, the strike went on so long that some of the miners were literally starved into submission. This incident, plus high unemployment, reduced the size and power of the trades unions to a level that was unthinkable only half a decade before. Like the French in the Peninsula war, the trades unions were large organizations bogged down by the constipation of a fixed structure and inflexibility of action. They seemed to see their decision as whether to strike or not to strike. That was a low variety choice of action in an attempt to control the situation. Once they met another inflexible but more powerful organization, in the form of Thatcher's government, it was a simple clash of the clumsy giants; and Thatcher's giant had a bigger club to bash the miners with than they had to bash her back; so they lost.

That story is now history. What is less well known is another way in which workers could, and sometimes did, force their rights against the opposition of the large corporations that employed them. This way did not require workers to reduce their effective variety by putting their pay at risk with a strike. Instead, there was a high variety approach to the conflict like the guerillas had in the Peninsula War.

I first found out about this when I worked as an employee of a bus company. At that time, a dispute was warming up between us workers and the company. I thought that we would go on strike, but our trades union representative explained that we wouldn't do that. Instead, he said: 'Why lose our wages? We don't go on strike. We work to rule'. He was an ordinary guy who didn't know anything about control systems, Ross Ashby, or Requisite Variety; but he understood the situation perfectly. What he did know was that the only control weapon that the employers had was 'the rules'. These rules could never be complex enough, or have enough variety, to cover all the ways employees had to work to make the buses run successfully. In real life, the workers had to judge for themselves, and select, which rules were important in any particular situation; and which could be temporarily ignored. So the workers flexibility provided the high variety needed to meet the high variety of the situations that they dealt with and make the system work; in a way that the low variety of 'the rules' alone could not.

But then; if the 4Plague tyranny is very severe,then you may have to 'go underground' and hide  in terms of who you are and what you believe. In this case, a final choice of action may be to AVOID FIXED BATTLES