THE TUC has been called the workers’ parliament, and it faces serious strategic questions as it begins its annual Congress this weekend.
Many union delegations represent battle-hardened memberships compared to last year. Employers lost 3.9 million work days to strike action in the 12 months to May: the biggest number of strike days since the 1980s, and around nine times the average figure for the 2010s.
For huge numbers of workers where national strikes took place, this was their first experience of industrial action.
The same applies to hundreds of thousands employed in the private sector, by outsourcers supplying services to schools or hospitals, or working for councils.
They will have learned that strikes work. Not in every case of course. Not all disputes have been won, some settlements have been against the wishes of some of the unions involved.
But in sector after sector workers can see what strikes have won them. The government was forced — after adopting a public position of extreme intransigence, and in many cases refusing even to talk before workers walked out — to significantly improve its offers across health, education and public services. Bigger wins still, in many cases above inflation, have been won in more localised disputes which taken together involved very large numbers of workers.
It’s been an inspiring year of workers standing up — “refusing to be poor any more” — and of the “trade union movement being reborn,” to quote the leaders of RMT and Unite, two unions that have been in the thick of the industrial struggle over the last year.
At the same time, unions gathering at the TUC have to be clear about the limitations of what has been achieved — and the mounting challenges.
In 2022, the trade union movement declined in size despite an uptick in industrial action, losing around 200,000 members. More than three-quarters of workers are not in a trade union.
Motions like one from the CWU calling for a co-ordinated recruitment strategy focused on people currently outside the labour movement seek to address that dilemma, while the whole movement has a stake in the efforts of the GMB to unionise Amazon, a giant of the modern, super-exploitative gig economy.
Publicising the way unions have forced pay up during a brutal cost-of-living crisis to grow the movement overall is crucial to strengthening it for the next push.
And a next push is needed. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and the Bank of England might complain that wages are rising too fast, but for most workers they have still not kept pace with inflation.
That’s following 15 years of falling real-terms pay, so the trend by which workers in Britain get a smaller slice of the pie each year has continued despite the strikes.
Even those gains made have provoked the Conservatives into viciously repressive legislation, with the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act presenting a real threat to unions’ ability to mount effective strikes like this year’s unless a united strategy can be pursued to overcome it.
That strategy cannot be waiting for Labour to repeal it. Labour has comprehensively abandoned the commitments it made between 2015 and 2020 on wealth redistribution and public ownership, even as the crises mount across privatised and part-privatised services and majority support for these union-backed policies is shown in every poll.
We need an overhaul of the British economy precisely when Westminster parties insist that all the obvious and popular solutions, all the solutions unions campaign for and have in many cases set out in costed detail, are off the table.
Putting those back on the table is going to require more militancy, more confidence and a clear message to Labour that it cannot take the support of our movement — the largest democratic movement in the country by far — for granted.
