I admire Prentis. He is basically a pragmatist who has quietly taken on the ultra-left, such as the Socialist party (previously Militant), within the union, and works hard to deliver the best deal for his members.
I support Unison’s cause of trying to defend their members’ pension rights.
But his speech yesterday seemed entirely aimed at the activist audience inside the hall rather than the public audience seeing clips of it on TV or reading about it in the press.
Unison has a good message but it is a tricky one to sell to the majority of the public who don’t work in the public sector. While admiring the work done by some categories of public worker like nurses, many people are extremely sceptical of the value of, for instance, most local government workers. Many more are boiling with resentment that their taxes are providing what they think is gold-plated pay, conditions and pensions to public sector workers in the middle of a bleak economic time when the rest of the population is having their pay and conditions trimmed back. In the Labour party we are acutely aware of the job losses and pay freezes public sector workers have faced and the low pay many of Dave’s members, particularly women, have always suffered, but these facts are not common knowledge to the wider electorate.
I think it is possible to win the public round through careful and sustained argument but Unison may have underestimated the scale of the task. YouGov on Sunday showed 38 per cent of people think that public sector pensions are too generous, 14 per cent not generous enough, 25 per cent about right.
The problem is that passionate speeches fire up the already supportive but actually turn off the centre ground as they allow the tabloid media to slide back into lazy, but still resonant, stereotypes of trade union militancy from the era of the Winter of Discontent and the miners’ strike.
The question of whether strike action should be part of the package of tools used is a particularly fraught one. It is the ultimate weapon that workers have – withdrawing their labour. But it’s supposed to be a deterrent. If you use it then you have lost. I simply cannot envisage circumstances when a modern British government would ever allow its policy to be changed by a strike, because the consequences of doing so would be to look as weak as a Heath-era government and to signal an industrial relations free for all. Ultimately the government is stronger than any combination of unions, and has a massive political disincentive to making concessions to strikers.
If Unison is going to win anything on pensions for its members, it will win at the negotiation stage and by building and demonstrating public support for its cause, so that the government realises it will lose votes by pushing ahead. Getting as far as striking means you have already lost.
That public support is not there yet, which is why I think Dave Prentis should have used his speech as a rational appeal to the wider public, not a ‘call to arms’ to his own troops. He should have been damping down his members’ readiness for a scrap, not firing them up.
I also have some fundamental issues with the general ‘left’ tone of his wider remarks – is it really necessary in the face of an existential crisis for the public sector to pepper a speech with 1980s multi-cause leftist claptrap attacking Trident, cheerleading for the Palestinian cause and praising Brian Haw? Given the public perception of trade unions, associating yourself with a dude wearing lots of badges, who spent 11 futile years shouting slogans through a megaphone in the middle of a roundabout doesn’t really place you in the mainstream of political discourse.
To win public support the unions need to look mainstream and normal, not countercultural.
I appreciate that Dave is in a difficult place. Fools to the left of him, whose answer to everything is a general strike. Jokers to the right, Danny Alexander and George Osborne who also want strikes so they can re-enact Margaret Thatcher’s greatest confrontations with the unions.
I hope he will find a way to steer Unison to a victory in the court of public opinion and thence at the negotiating table rather than lead an industrial version of the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Just two quick points in response to this. In appealing to Unsion to appeal to the ‘centre ground’ Luke appears to forget that Unsion has 1.25 million members. Who does he think these people are? If the Labour party had this number of members my guess is that Luke would be confidently asserting that they represented ordinary men and women. Secondly, was he awake on Friday when the interventions of Danny Alexander appeared to pre-empt the negotiations that Unison have been key players in and which drew condemnation from across the movement? It is a source of acute frustration to me when people like Luke, who I usually respect for his insight, take any opportunity to lecture unions facing unprecedented assaults on their members pay, conditions and livelihoods and appeal to them to play by a set of rules that the government appear to have long since cast aside.
Carl anyone who works in the public sector is in a minority, as is anyone who is a trade unionist. By definition a minority cannot include the centre ground as that is the people immediately either side of 50% of the population. If it did include the centre ground we would have won the General Election. We didn’t. Unison’s members are indeed “ordinary men and women” and very fine ones who do the jobs that keep society running. But we have to win over people who have never been trade unionists and never worked in the public sector if we are to win on this issue or to get a Labour government that can protect trade unionists and public services. I defend Unison or any other union’s right to strike as a last resort, but strike action carries a heavy political price and is likely to turn people against the union striking, and against Labour. Luke
What’s the point of a union that is unwilling to defend workers who want to stirke? What’s the point of of a Labour party that is not prepared to defend unionists who have the courage to assert their right to strike. Luke criticises activists who want to build a ‘counterculture’. It was precisely because Labour was incapable of presenting itself as in any way countercultural at the last election that youth deserted it in droves. Labour will never win unless people believe it represents an alternative. Luke’s policy of sitting quitely while Tory cuts are imposed is the equivalent of doing nothing.
“By definition a minority cannot include the centre ground as that is the people immediately either side of 50% of the population.” What utter codswallop. I’m gay, black and a union member yet stand on the centre ground. Try thinking first before concocting dubious definitions