Why You Should
Be a Trade Unionist
LEN McCLUSKEY
First published by Verso 2020
© Len McCluskey 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-787-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-788-3 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-789-0 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress LCCN: 2019952254
Typeset in Monotype Fournier by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
CONTENTS
4. A World without Unions
5. We Are Family
6. Playing Our Part in Politics
7. Fighting for Equality
8. Conclusion: Rise like Lions
Postscript
Notes
A number of people have helped me with the writing of this book, but I would primarily like to thank Jennie Walsh, who worked closely with me for nearly two years, and without whom it would not have been possible. Any errors in the history I tell here are, however, entirely mine, as are the views I express.
Thanks to Howard Beckett, Charlotte Bence, Louisa Bull, Tony Burke, Gail Cartmail, Pauline Doyle, Victoria Egerton, Alex Flynn, Diana Holland, Sharon Graham, Liane Groves, Asif Mohammed, Jim Mowatt, Andrew Murray, Frances O’Grady, Mick Rix, Lauren Townsend, Steve Turner, Tony Woodhouse, John Usher and everyone else who helped me to focus my thoughts, recall memories, check facts and express why I believe we all should be trade unionists. My apologies to those colleagues and comrades who, over the decades of my own trade union activism, have been influential in shaping my politics, but whom I have not named. No one is forgotten.
Leo Hollis at Verso gave invaluable feedback and support in helping to shape the structure and direction of the book, as did Andrew Murray. Thanks, too, to Mark Martin and Tim Clark at Verso for their skilful copy editing. It was a remarkably pain-free experience.
This book has been researched and written during extraordinary and polarised times in British politics. As it goes to press, we are in full general election campaign mode. I sincerely hope that by the time Why You Should Be a Trade Unionist reaches bookshops that this nation has achieved a lasting, credible settlement, one that heals our divisions and gives hope of a fairer future for all the people of this country.
Len McCluskeyNovember 2019
Just look him in his eyes and sayWe’re gonna do it anyway
Labi Siffre
I joined the Transport and General Workers’ Union (T&G) more than fifty years ago, when at the age of eighteen I started work as a plan man on the Liverpool docks. As I walked through the dock gates on my first day, someone gave me a form and said: ‘You join the union here, son.’
At the time, I had a choice of jobs and the expectation of job security. In fact, I was only intending to work on the docks for a year. I had been accepted at a teaching college in Birmingham. My mate, John Foley, who was coming with me to college, decided to take a year off (long before gap years had been invented), and I did not want to go without him. He went on to become a brilliant head teacher, for forty years. I got a job and waited for him. I actually got three job offers and only made up my mind which one to take the day before I was due to start. The other jobs were in insurance, a much safer bet in those days. But I chose the path less trodden and started work for the Port of Liverpool Stevedoring Company.
Liverpool was a trade union city and I knew what unions were. I came from a working-class family, living in a two-up-two-down house, with parents who used to say they’d cut their arms off before they’d ever vote Tory. I didn’t have to fight for my right to join a union – others had done that before me – and I was soon actively involved in mine.
I was a child of the 1960s. Revolution was in the air: in dress, music and politics, and, of course, with the civil rights movement in America, Northern Ireland and Vietnam. The docks were a brilliant and vibrant place to be a young man; they were filled with the most knowledgeable and funny people who taught me a lot. Not all of them were sympathetic to the long-haired, left-wing students protesting in Paris and the United States, but the Liverpool dockers understood class issues. These included what was happening in Chile and South Africa, and our debates were informed by the feeling that an attack on one trade unionist was an attack on all of us.
Not long after getting involved in the union, and winning a fight for younger workers to be paid the same as their older colleagues, I was persuaded to become a shop steward, a position I held for the next ten years, quickly reaching senior shop steward. People then started suggesting I should become a union officer. I didn’t really know what this involved, other than it meant working full-time for the union and would take me away from my beloved Liverpool docks after eleven very happy years working there. But I hoped I might be good at it, so
