Having a reasonable working day and holidays to enjoy leisure time; high standards of health and safety as the norm; laws giving basic rights to workers for protection against unfairness and inequality; decent jobs with good rates of pay where there had only been exploitation and poverty; the right to retire and have a pension to live off. It is hard to believe that anyone could question the contribution trade unions have made to basic advances in society. Advances that everybody benefits from, whether shopfloor workers or managers, whether fans of unions or not. Even from critics there is a grudging, reluctant acceptance that perhaps unions have been a force for good – but that is merely used to reinforce the argument that the basic achievements have all been won and unions now are just self-serving bureaucracies for union barons to play politics and send their members out on strike. Not true and I will explain why not.
First, the charge that union achievements are all in the past and basically everything is pretty much all right now. You might just as well argue that everybody understands the rules of the road so we can take away road signs and traffic lights. Without unions constantly policing the world of work I have no doubt that employers would react to the freedom by pursuing wholesale reductions to pay and conditions, safety standards and generally reversing all the advances made. The evidence is all there in the unchecked growth of practices like zero-hours contracts and fake self-employment – albeit in largely non-unionised sections of the economy, which tells you everything – and the inequality cause by greed and excess at the top versus restraint and minimum wages at the bottom.
Second, the idea that unions are just playthings for union barons’ own political and industrial agendas, at least that seems to be all that gets reported about. From 30 years’ experience as a union professional my observation is that even in the largest unions perhaps one per cent of activity at most can be attributed to strikes and politics. As little as that. And in the other 150 trade unions it is negligible. For the other 99 per cent of their time trade unions are advising and representing individual members, working with employers to reach sensible agreements, educating and training existing and new employees and ensuring standards of health and safety for employees and customers alike. The truth is that almost all the day-to-day work done by trade unions is the complete antithesis of the image of barons, politics and strikes and what is more most of it is carried out by volunteers – shop stewards, branch secretaries, activists, call them what you will. Again my experience is that these unsung heroes are almost always dedicated to the success of the enterprises they work with because they understand that is also what brings job security and benefits for their members.
Although few employers feel it is their place to speak up, nearly all of the hundreds of thousands of companies that have unionised workplaces choose to do business with unions entirely voluntarily and value the positive relations they have. Millions of ordinary working people choose to pay to be union members to further their interests and protect them at work. Both sides of industry show by their actions that unions remain as important today as they have always been. That is why we can be confident that, despite the best efforts of the present Conservative administration, trade unions have always survived longer than governments and will outlive this one too.
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Brian Strutton is national secretary of the GMB. He tweets @BrianStrutton