On Saturday I chaired a Progress conference session on Labour and the unions asking how we set about modernising the link. Blessed with a superb roll call of speakers and a packed room our debate was lively, pragmatic, honest and pretty much unanimous; the current relationship is not good for Labour and it’s not good for trade unions. Criticism was levelled not just at the political levy and electoral college, but also at the structural malaise that had allowed union backed political candidates to only engage when the cheque book was out.
Also unanimous was agreement on just how integral the link was and the commitment to maintaining it. Labour is the party of working people, ensuring that the mutually beneficial aims of promoting economic growth, tackling unemployment, fairness at work, supporting public services, and making sure skills and education are open to all workers throughout their careers are achieved. Agreeing on these aims is not the issue in contention. Our issue is ensuring that people outside the movement know this too.
The recently released BIS figures show that trade union membership has continued to fall, with a loss of 143,000 members in the last year. Although this is of concern, this is a much shallower decline than we saw in the 1980s and 1990s, and we have seen an increase of 43,000 members in the private sector. We need to be honest about the perceptions that current and future workers have about unions and how that feeds into their wider political engagement.
We need to modernize and we know it. Union branch meetings get just as much of a kicking in union debates about our image as CLP meetings received during the recent Refounding Labour consultations. But I do think today’s unions are finding new ways to listen to their members and support their activists be it through text and internet polls, social media campaigns or e-branches.
Unions are supporting activists by putting care and effort into training, advice and information. Equality reps, union learning reps and environment reps are meeting the new workplace priorities and are more likely to be younger.
A strong sense of fairness motivates most members and activists. Not just in the workplace, but also for wider social justice aims against racism, and for international campaigns. People join unions not just for better conditions at work, but to be part of an organisation that campaigns on these issues.
A recently published pamphlet for the think tank Demos made the case for the Conservative party to ‘stop the union bashing’, concluding that the Tory party and trade unions could become ‘soulmates’. Well, as you would expect from inappropriate bedfellows, their talk is cheap. The Tory-led coalition has implemented a systematic attack on workers since taking office through the scaling back of employment rights, the proposal to reduce facilities time and introduce a fees regime for employment tribunals as well as their forced unpaid work schemes. Workers are facing new insecurities and new pressures and this means that the Labour and trade union link is as important as ever. We need unions to be more active in constituencies to reclaim community campaigning by building organisational links and we need to use Labour support networks within unions to politicise those links.
As often happens in these sessions, the old Jack Jones line concerning the relationship between the unions and Labour, ‘murder maybe, divorce never’ was rolled out, but I like to think of our debate as being more of a weekend appointment with Relate.
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Jenny Simms is director of Unions21
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Photo: Toban Black