Читать книгу Why You Should be a Trade Unionist - Len McCluskey - Страница 7

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HOPE IN MY HEART

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 in 1979 I applied, and a fortnight later I was appointed a T&G regional officer. I was based in Merseyside, but my remit increasingly spread throughout the North West.

As a regional officer I was involved with just about every sector in which the T&G represented workers. I was active in every trade group, from transport to auto manufacturing to agriculture and the voluntary sector. After ten years I had risen to the position of national secretary, and then in 2004 I was named assistant general secretary. Finally, seven years later, I was appointed general secretary of Unite the Union, which had been formed in 2007 as a result of a merger between the T&G and Amicus.

This was a period of tremendous upheaval. Some of the responsibility for that turbulence has to go to a person who got a promotion the same year I became a regional officer. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher was elected as prime minister, famously declaring that there is ‘no such thing as society’. Or rather: ‘I’m all right, Jack.’ The idea that the only reason any of us are on this earth is just to look after ourselves was, to me, a repellent creed, alien to how I was brought up and to the world I wanted to see flourish. As I started my work across Merseyside and the North West, I saw a region, and a community, increasingly devastated by Thatcher’s vindictive policies towards ordinary working people, their industries and their unions.

I was very much in the middle of that storm. This was during the so-called Militant years of Liverpool City Council, and I was deeply involved in the Broad Left of my union at both regional and national levels. I was passionate about developing resistance to the onslaught of Thatcherism. For me, that kind of political work, alongside our industrial work, was fundamental to why we should be trade unionists. And today, having been a union general secretary through the long years of Tory austerity, I’ve become ever more convinced that the trade union movement offers the only pathway to ensuring a better, more united future.

Without doubt, my experiences in my first job on the docks were far removed from the realities of the world of work faced by young people today. The industrial landscape has been changed fundamentally by the decimation of our great manufacturing industries. It is over ten years since the bankers broke the economy, and now we have an emerging workforce that has only known austerity. Furthermore, over the last three decades, government policy has created a world hostile to trade unions and a society that treats working people with a distinct lack of dignity and respect. Today, more than 80 per cent of our economy is in the service sector, bringing with it insecure, low-paid employment and precarious zero-hour contracts. With impunity, bosses feel empowered to tell workers, illegally, that they have no right to join a trade union, or threaten that they will be sacked if they do so.

Not long before I started work on the Liverpool docks, dockers used to gather at the beginning of the working day in what were called pens, such was the casualised nature of dock labour then. The comparison to cattle pens was apt, as they were treated like animals. The workers were hoping for a day or a half-day’s work, just to put food on the table. Often they had to fight each other to get hold of the brass tally – which they needed in order to work – thrown down on the floor by the bosses. My union won its victory against this casualisation in 1967, when the Devlin Report heralded the outlawing of such demeaning practices and the decasualisation of dock labour, making a permanent difference to the dockers’ and their families’ lives.

Victories like this, won by the unions, should be a lesson to all of us as we face the challenges of overturning the new, unregulated, casualised labour practices that are so pervasive today. It is absolutely shameful that the rights of the worker continue to be so ruthlessly undermined. This is precisely why trade unions were so important back then, and why they are more necessary today than they ever have been. It is crucial then, in making the case for being a trade unionist to those who may never have encountered or considered joining one, to explain just what a trade union is and does.

In 2018, trade union membership stood at 6.3 million, an increase of 100,000 on the previous year and more than in any year since the turn of the century. There are now forty-eight trade unions in the UK affiliated to the Trades Union Congress (TUC), representing workers across all sectors of the economy, from manufacturing to banking, agriculture to midwifery, hospitality to social media, and the NHS to professional football. We are a long way from our peak membership of 13 million in 1979, and the causes of that decline are also an important story to tell.

A trade union is an organisation made up of members who are workers. It brings people together to make their lives better: to win better pay, to ensure safer and more inclusive workplaces, and to improve access to skills and training. Trade unionists look out for each other, and when a group of workers act and speak together, their employer has to listen.

Anyone who has a job, or even anyone looking for one, should be in a union. Unions negotiate with employers on pay and conditions. They fight to protect the workforce when major changes, such as large-scale job losses, are proposed. They represent individual members at disciplinary and grievance hearings. Unions also provide members with legal and financial advice, and a wide range of other benefits. For example, National Union of Journalists (NUJ) members can get into museums and galleries around the world for free using the NUJ press card. On average, union members receive higher pay than non-members. They are also likely to get better sickness and pension benefits, more paid holiday, and more control over things like shifts and working hours.

Trade unionism has a long and deep history. In 1834 a group of agricultural workers in the Dorset village of Tolpuddle – James Brine, James Hammett, George Loveless, James Loveless, John Standfield and Thomas Standfield – formed the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers in response to decreasing wages. Collectively, they demanded ten shillings a week. They were punished for their activities and charged with taking an illegal oath. All six men were transported to the penal colonies. But their real ‘crime’, in the eyes of the ruling class, and in particular for their landed employers, was their attempt to form a trade union. In response, over 800,000 people signed a petition demanding the release of the abused heroes. The Tolpuddle Martyrs were among the pioneers of the early trade union and workers’ rights movements, and we celebrate them each year with a festival in their Dorset village.

Such bravery resonates still. In more recent times, another group of workers said loud and clear that enough was enough and joined together to campaign for their rights. Sick of having their card tips taken by their employer, front-of-house staff at the high street restaurant chain TGI Fridays decided they would form a trade union in order to defend their rights at work. They were soon joined by staff at the pub chain Wetherspoons and by McDonald’s workers demanding an end to zero-hour contracts, low pay and youth rates. Together they recruited, organised, mobilised – and walked out. They became trade unionists in order to win their collective rights. And while they didn’t achieve all their demands, they won significant improvements.

To some, such collective action might appear to be rather out of date. The decline in trade union membership – which has taken place in parallel with deliberate deindustrialisation policies, anti-union laws and the changing nature of work – has to an extent created a vicious circle in which unions are portrayed in the mainstream media as irrelevant. At the same time, workers, and particularly young workers, have been given the impression that unions do not or, worse, cannot represent them. The precarious nature of much of today’s work often makes it difficult for those in insecure, zero-hour jobs to see what unions might do for them.

When the BBC journalist Nick Robinson put it to me during his Political Thinking podcast that gig economy jobs are great because they’re ‘no hassle, no bother, an easy way [for people] to top up their wages, especially for students and the recently retired’, my reaction was one of anger.¹ Robinson’s implication was that such jobs are a convenient option because they offer flexible work. What he refused to acknowledge was that most of the millions of people working in insecure jobs and on zero-hour contracts have little choice but to be subjected to such precarious flexibility. Most workers want proper wages and an employment contract that gives them rights. Which is why they need trade unions.

The TGI Fridays dispute undoubtedly countered Robinson’s argument. The workers’ achievements gave the lie to the assumption that there is no point in joining a trade union if you’re young, working in the precarious gig economy, and if your employer doesn’t recognise a union.

This campaign also reminded us that unions need to adapt to remain relevant in giving working people the courage to fight injustice. Every time a journalist challenges me on the relevance of unions to today’s so-called gig economy, I agree: unions have to be relevant to each and every sector, and not just to try to recruit in them, but actually organise and win victories for the workers. Through its campaigning, organising and political, community and educational work, the trade union movement must continually adapt and modernise in order to make itself relevant to today’s world of work.

My trade union hero, Jack Jones, made such an impact on me when, as a young shop steward on the docks, I read his pamphlet ‘A World to Win’.² In it he evoked a world where bigotry, injustice and oppression had been eliminated for the common good. It stirred a fire in me, a flame of hope and determination to achieve a better, fairer society, a flame which still burns brightly. Working people today need that hope as much as they ever did.

Consider what a world without unions would be like, whether in the past, the present or the uncertain future. This is perhaps the most powerful argument there is for being a trade unionist. In writing this short book, I’ve set out to demonstrate why people today should be trade union members. It is told through my personal experiences, as well as through a study of the history of trade unions and of the work they have done, and are doing, to make our workplaces and society fairer. This is work that is rarely portrayed positively by the press, if at all. The history of trade unions – of when and why they emerged in the UK as democratic organisations giving a voice to working people, and of why opposition to them developed – is fundamental to making the case for trade unionism today.

But trade unionism is not just about pay and conditions. It’s about diversity, putting equality at work and in society front and centre stage; it’s about community, politics, internationalism and much more. I believe strongly in rebuilding the traditional, if at present weakened, links between trade unions and communities. Being a trade unionist is as much a political as it is an industrial role. This is why the historic links between the labour movement and the Labour Party matter.

This book is intended as a bold reminder of how trade unions have achieved justice through their collective, united strength. It is also a call to arms for the struggles that lie ahead.