As the TUC meets in Bournemouth, Stephen Bush discovers that the early history of the trade unions may offer the best route to their future

The trade unions did not just found the Labour party. They built the modern world. In 1868, when the Trades Union Congress first met, there was no old-age pension, no unemployment benefit, no recognised working day, no right to leave or holiday, and no minimum wage either.

And during the labour movement’s first half-century, for many workers, joining a trade union felt like an imperative, not just because of working conditions, but because of the services that trade unions offered. They provided support for widows, laid on technical and academic education for their members, and provided for their members in old age.

But from 1910 onwards, the trade union movement suffered a series of victories. The old-age pension and unemployment allowance were introduced, the welfare state erected, agreements on working time and paid leave established, a minimum wage introduced. Each of these victories could not have happened without the trade unions, but each of them chipped away at the movement.

Small wonder, then, that for people of my generation, trade unions are rather like vinyl records: the associations are almost entirely positive but largely historical, the cost feels prohibitive, and the people who do actually buy into it seem, on the whole, to be engaging in a minority pursuit.

The trade union movement has the same problem as the Conservative party, the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats, and the National Trust: Generation Y does not join anything. The same decline that has afflicted all the old parties and institutions presents a similarly existential threat to the unions.

Research for Unions21 and the TUC (see box) makes pretty dispiriting reading. The trade unions exert no great ‘pull factors’ – contributors were mostly unable to find any real reason why they might join a union – while the workplace offers no mitigating ‘push factors’.

But John Hannett, general secretary of USDAW, does not accept that the future of the trade unions is one of well-respected decline. The era of Tony Blair, he tells me, ‘presents a challenge for the trade union movement, and the challenge is: why didn’t they grow?’ The former governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, called this period ‘the nice decade’, a time of no inflation and constant expansion. New Labour in office began with a bonfire of some of the more restrictive Thatcherite trade union regulations, and ended with the introduction of the Trade Union Modernisation Fund, which had as its aim providing financial support to trade unions by supporting ‘innovative modernisation projects which contribute to a transformational change in the organisational effectiveness of a trade union’. But, instead of growth, the reality for most the movement was decline.

One of the trade unions that has managed to escape decline is Community, a union with links right to the beginning of the movement’s history. Steelworkers were among the first to form trade unions, and it was a merger between the steelworkers’ union – the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation – and the garment-workers’ union that brought Community into being.

That means that Community has been grappling with two kinds of decline: the first, the general malaise that has afflicted the trade union movement, and the second within the manufacturing sector. A cooperative and mature working relationship with employers has meant that Community members have always been able to rely on their union as a source of news and support; when rumours appeared in the Indian media that Tata Steel was set to sell or close their British factories, general secretary Michael Leahy was able to move swiftly to quash them.

Community also provides a wide range of technical education and re-training, just as the ISTC would have done in the earliest days of the movement. Then, as now, the purchasing power of trade unions is used to reduce the costs borne by individual members. Both inside and outside the Labour tent, membership deals – ranging from discounts at restaurants to new cars – have been a great success for unions across the movement.

For Community, though, growth – and organic growth, not just through merger – had to come through growing its membership pool, recruiting people who had never joined trade unions before. Working with Labour, as Community’s political director John Paul McHugh explains, they saw ‘thousands of our members who weren’t engaged with their party and thousands of Labour party members who weren’t engaged with a trade union’. That recruitment drive has been particularly successful when focused on young people, in contrast to the wider movement’s general struggles in recruiting the young.

Moving from steelworkers to students might seem a counterintuitive move, but the days of one employer – or even one career path – are over for all but a tiny minority, and, as McHugh argues, ‘bringing young people into the trade union movement is likely to see them grow up as lifelong union members’.

Appealing to members through not just one employer but multiple ones is a familiar challenge at USDAW, which operates largely within the retail sector, where staff turnover means that the union has to recruit 70,000 new members a year just to stand still. When USDAW received its share of the modernisation fund, it set itself targets and benchmarks, just like one of the PLCs that its members work for might do.

‘The big political struggles might animate and excite us,’ Hannett suggests, ‘but the really important thing for a trade union is that it speaks to the everyday experience of its members.’ Of course, throughout the history of the trade union movement, speaking to the everyday experience of trade union members has led to huge progressive victories: whether on maternity leave or safety at work. While, when you visit USDAW’s building, or click on the USDAW website, the impression might be of modernity and innovation, the reality is one of a campaigning union that speaks to its foundational values, and it has been rewarded with continuous growth: not just standing still, but still enjoying its own decade of constant expansion.

The lesson here might be that collective purchasing, sector-specific campaigning, and delivering local victories are the best way to grow and modernise a trade union: a programme as radical and relevant in 2013 as it was back in 1868.

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The trade unions and Generation Y

Two years ago, Unions21 and the TUC held a focus group of 16-to-24-year-olds on their attitudes to the trade unions. The findings revealed a combination of complete ignorance and well-disposed apathy, although one participant did describe trade unions as being for ‘people who wear brown shirts and go on caravan holidays’.

In contrast to older members of the workforce outside of a union, there are few negative historical associations made by the young about the trade unions. Among this demographic, unions have a great deal of ‘soft power’, with values like ‘solidarity’ ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’ highly likely to form people’s first impressions of them. The problem lies in convincing people that unions have any ‘hard power’, and that such power is particularly useful or relevant to them today.

Most respondents simply thought that their workplace relations were sufficiently pleasant for them not to need a union mediator. Most young people in the workplace consulted Google or their parents before a trade union. The image of a happy workplace may be illusory, however. Michael Wheeler, a researcher at USDAW, writes: ‘If you asked many young people whether they had any issues at work or if they felt they were being badly treated by their company many of them said no [but] if you asked them about specific rights … it became clear that they did have problems at work, they just didn’t know enough about what they were entitled to in order to realise that they were being exploited.’ Or, as Gus Baker, an official at BECTU, puts it: ‘Without unions, too many workers don’t know their rights, and too many employers take no notice of them.’

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Stephen Bush is a contributing editor to Progress

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Photo: Toban Black