“I believe in management’s right to manage – and I also believe in the trade unions’ right to stop them.” This combative adage has always been attributed in my experience to Hugh Scanlon, who went from being one of the last of the overmighty trade union barons in the turbulent Britain of the 1970s to spending his later years as an actual baron of the realm before his death in 2004.
The words certainly represent Scanlon’s generally irreconcilable view of industrial relations under capitalism, as I can confirm from an expensive lunch I once had with this deeply interesting man in the 1980s. Many on the Marxist left of Scanlon’s era would have agreed with his words, the miners’ leader Arthur Scargill among them. And there are some union activists who still subscribe to them today.
