a T&G regional officer. I was based in Merseyside, but my remit increasingly spread throughout the North West.
As a regional officer I was involved with just about every sector in which the T&G represented workers. I was active in every trade group, from transport to auto manufacturing to agriculture and the voluntary sector. After ten years I had risen to the position of national secretary, and then in 2004 I was named assistant general secretary. Finally, seven years later, I was appointed general secretary of Unite the Union, which had been formed in 2007 as a result of a merger between the T&G and Amicus.
This was a period of tremendous upheaval. Some of the responsibility for that turbulence has to go to a person who got a promotion the same year I became a regional officer. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher was elected as prime minister, famously declaring that there is ‘no such thing as society’. Or rather: ‘I’m all right, Jack.’ The idea that the only reason any of us are on this earth is just to look after ourselves was, to me, a repellent creed, alien to how I was brought up and to the world I wanted to see flourish. As I started my work across Merseyside and the North West, I saw a region, and a community, increasingly devastated by Thatcher’s vindictive policies towards ordinary working people, their industries and their unions.
I was very much in the middle of that storm. This was during the so-called Militant years of Liverpool City Council, and I was deeply involved in the Broad Left of my union at both regional and national levels. I was passionate about developing resistance to the onslaught of Thatcherism. For me, that kind of political work, alongside our industrial work, was fundamental to why we should be trade unionists. And today, having been a union general secretary through the long years of Tory austerity, I’ve become ever more convinced that the trade union movement offers the only pathway to ensuring a better, more united future.
Without doubt, my experiences in my first job on the docks were far removed from the realities of the world of work faced by young people today. The industrial landscape has been changed fundamentally by the decimation of our great manufacturing industries. It is over ten years since the bankers broke the economy, and now we have an emerging workforce that has only known austerity. Furthermore, over the last three decades, government policy has created a world hostile to trade unions and a society that treats working people with a distinct lack of dignity and respect. Today, more than 80 per cent of our economy is in the service sector, bringing with it insecure, low-paid employment and precarious zero-hour contracts. With impunity, bosses feel empowered to tell workers, illegally, that they have no right to join a trade union, or threaten that they will be sacked if they do so.
Not long before I started work on the Liverpool docks, dockers used to gather at the beginning of the working day in what were called pens, such was the casualised nature of dock labour then. The comparison to cattle pens was apt, as they were treated like animals. The workers were hoping for a day or a half-day’s work, just to put food on the table. Often they had to fight each other to get hold of the brass tally – which they needed in order to work – thrown down on the floor by the bosses. My union won its victory against this casualisation in 1967, when the Devlin Report heralded the outlawing of such demeaning practices and the decasualisation of dock labour, making a permanent difference to the dockers’ and their families’ lives.
Victories like this, won by the unions, should be a lesson to all of us as we face the challenges of overturning the new, unregulated, casualised labour practices that are so pervasive today. It is absolutely shameful that the rights of the worker continue to be so ruthlessly undermined. This is precisely why trade unions were so important back then, and why they are more necessary today than they ever have been. It is crucial then, in making the case for being a trade unionist to those who may never have encountered or considered joining one, to explain just what a trade union is and does.
In 2018, trade union membership stood at 6.3 million, an increase of 100,000 on the previous year and more than in any year since the turn of the century. There are now forty-eight trade unions in the UK affiliated to the Trades Union Congress (TUC), representing workers across all sectors of the economy, from manufacturing to banking, agriculture to midwifery, hospitality to social media, and the NHS to professional football. We are a long way from our peak membership of 13 million in 1979, and the causes of that decline are also an important story to tell.
A trade union is an organisation made up of members who are workers. It brings people together to make their lives better: to win better pay, to ensure safer and more inclusive workplaces, and to improve access to skills and training. Trade unionists look out for each other, and when a group of workers act and speak together, their employer has to listen.
Anyone who has a job, or even anyone looking for one, should be in a union. Unions negotiate with employers on pay and conditions. They fight to protect the workforce when major changes, such as large-scale job losses, are proposed. They represent individual members at disciplinary and grievance hearings. Unions also provide members with legal and financial advice, and a wide range of other benefits. For example, National Union of Journalists (NUJ) members can get into museums and galleries around the world for free using the NUJ press card. On average, union members receive higher pay than non-members. They are also likely to get better sickness and pension benefits, more paid holiday, and more control over things like shifts and working hours.
Trade unionism has a long and deep history. In 1834 a group of agricultural workers in the Dorset village of Tolpuddle – James Brine, James Hammett, George Loveless, James Loveless, John Standfield and Thomas Standfield – formed the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers in response to decreasing wages. Collectively, they demanded ten shillings a week. They were punished for their activities and charged with taking an illegal oath. All six men were transported to the penal colonies. But their real ‘crime’, in the eyes of the ruling class, and in particular for their landed employers, was their attempt to form a trade union. In response, over 800,000 people signed a petition demanding the release of the abused heroes. The Tolpuddle Martyrs were among the pioneers of the early trade union and workers’ rights movements, and we celebrate them each year with a festival in their Dorset village.
Such bravery resonates still. In more recent times, another group of workers said loud and clear that enough was enough and joined together to campaign for their rights. Sick of having their card tips taken by their employer, front-of-house staff at the high street restaurant chain TGI Fridays decided they would form a trade union in order to defend their rights at work. They were soon joined by staff at the pub chain Wetherspoons and by McDonald’s workers demanding an end to zero-hour contracts, low pay and youth rates. Together they recruited, organised, mobilised – and walked out. They became trade unionists in order to win their collective rights. And while they didn’t achieve all their demands, they won significant improvements.
To some, such collective action might appear to be rather out of date. The decline in trade union membership – which has taken place in parallel with deliberate deindustrialisation policies, anti-union laws and the changing nature of work – has to an extent created a vicious circle in which unions are portrayed in the mainstream media as irrelevant. At the same time, workers, and particularly young workers, have been given the impression that unions do not or, worse, cannot represent them. The precarious nature of much of today’s work often makes it difficult for those in insecure, zero-hour jobs to see what unions might do for them.
When the BBC journalist Nick Robinson put it to me during his Political Thinking podcast that gig economy jobs are great because they’re ‘no hassle, no bother, an easy way [for people] to top up their wages, especially for students and the recently retired’, my reaction was one of anger.1 Robinson’s implication was that such jobs are a convenient option because they offer flexible work. What he refused to acknowledge was that most of the millions of people working in insecure jobs and on zero-hour contracts have little choice but to be subjected to such precarious flexibility. Most workers want proper wages and an employment contract that gives them rights. Which is why they need trade unions.
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