Leading article: Unions must show the strength to change

Given the welter of industrial, political and organisational change in recent years, how odd it is that the TUC should still be gathering at the seaside in September, let alone parading Prime Minister and Primate as its principal speakers.

That individual trade unions survived the locust years is less surprising, however depleted their membership. The need of employees in certain jobs to organise for protection or to bargain for a fairer share of the proceeds of their labour has not disappeared - the capitalist system is not so benign. Market forces have triumphed, intellectually. We all now have to recognise that without enterprise and profit, the engine of production will simply not produce jobs and income. But what function does the TUC fulfil nowadays? Never again to be the squat estate of the realm it became in the corporatist Seventies, the TUC is both more than a talking shop and less than a necessary rendezvous for governments. So why then was Tony Blair speaking to the brothers yesterday - surely his absence from Brighton would have been far more eloquent about the stated intentions of Labour both to emancipate itself from the embrace of this interest group and to govern with business and growth as central foci?

The Prime Minister did need to visit. He has a two-part message which needs to get through with some urgency. The gist of it is that those unions affiliated to the Labour Party and the TUC together have a considerable distance yet to travel before the relationship of state, employee organisations and principal party of the left is in equilibrium.

Yet Mr Blair appeared to come bearing gifts. He promised legislation that would force employers to recognise unions, provided certain thresholds of numbers desiring representation had been passed and ballots properly conducted. In an ideal world, of course, such use of state power would be otiose. A good employer would not need to be cajoled into accepting that staff have collective interests - perhaps an even better employer would never even see their staff reaching for the protection of trades unionism. A good employer might welcome a union as a means of articulating staff needs and providing an additional communications channel. But not all employers reach the gold standard. For Labour to recognise employees' rights to representation need not be interpreted as some aping of Continental European practice or payback time for the unions which supported it financially and practically on 1 May: it is justified as a way of securing greater fairness in employment and probably also enhancing productivity and output.

New law on statutory recognition opens the door to employees with a grievance and unions with energy and reputation to find one another out. Yet it must not become a pretext for disruption or provocative claims by unions which can attract only a minority of a work-force. Yesterday's clamour by the Manufacturing, Science and Technology Union must not be indicative. The MSF, having the Archbishop of Canterbury in its midst, made a song and dance about the Church of England refusing to recognise its claim to speak for priests even though only a small fraction of clergy has joined. What is objectionable here is not just the arrogance of unrepresentativeness but the face of unionism which seems unconcerned about total employment, future prospects or that flexibility which is a necessary ingredient in future employment, whether in public, private or voluntary sector.

Economic growth has to mean economic change, jobs lost here, jobs gained there. The state has a role in easing such passages, providing for re- training, assisting mobility. Trade unionism, too, has to reconstruct itself with the grain of the modern economy. A bad employer is, especially in the present political climate, deeply vulnerable to market pressures, which a trade union movement decked in moral credits could apply with vigour. John Monks, the TUC's able public face, seems to be moving in this direction, towards reconfiguring unions for the pattern of work available - and it is noteworthy how economic recovery has gainsaid all those who predicted permanent mass joblessness. This is the time for unions to show their mettle - not just by accepting that there does now appear to be a formula for low inflation and jobs but by working on what kind of practical services members need, from credit cards to redundancy counselling. This new world is one in which secondary picketing and associated abuses of collective power have no place.

The second part of Mr Blair's message was about unions and his party. The Labour Party which won in May, the party he personifies, the party that has middle England's interests at heart cannot also be the party of one sectional interest, whatever the weight of history. He would be ungracious if he did not recognise that union muscle and money have helped him modernise and played a role in electoral success. But gratitude must not stop the process of remodelling the relationship of unions and the Labour Party. One analogue is that of the AFL-CIO in the United States. A glance at, say, Germany shows leaders of the Social Democrats keenly aware that they will need to put yet more distance between their party and the unions if they are to win next year.

We can, thanks to Labour's victory, abandon for good and all the false historicism audible during the Tory era which tried to say that trades unionism was dead and buried. Conflicts between those who create employment and those who take jobs are ineluctable. They can be ameliorated and better regulated but the idea that employees will cease to need the support of colleagues in collective organisations is wrong, however the pattern of employment continues to alter. In that future unions will need to be ever more professional, sharp, practical, less and less "political", trying to capture the powers of the state to right the battles of the shop floor.