THE trade union conference season is now under way. Regional TUCs are assessing the challenges facing workers in their areas.
Since it is the first spring under a Labour government since 2010, this should be an optimistic process, with unions able to set out which policies they have won ministerial support to implement.
Unfortunately it is anything but. Labour has attacked pensioners, children in poverty and Waspi women. It has just announced sweeping attacks on the sick and disabled.
These are all attacks on working-class people. But Labour has refused to stand up for workers however narrowly you define the term. The private interests of billionaires from Ineos boss Jim Ratcliffe to Tata Steel’s reigning tycoons are allowed to override the interests of workforces and the wider economy when they toy with the futures of strategic assets like steel in Port Talbot or oil and chemicals at Grangemouth.
The landscape is not totally barren.
Labour is renationalising the railway, though with caveats such as continuing to lease rolling stock from extortionate private providers.
It is moving away from the academisation programme for schools, and seeking to standardise teachers’ terms and conditions. It is restoring collective bargaining structures for school support staff and plans to do so for social care workers.
Most celebrated by unions is the Employment Rights Bill, which strengthens key rights for casualised workers, including to sick pay and protection from unfair dismissal. However, this legislation is a pale imitation of the New Deal for Workers fought for through the TUC and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, providing very limited protection against workers being fired and rehired on worse pay and unenforceable access rights to workplaces. Tomorrow’s Campaign for Trade Union Freedom rally on strengthening the Bill is a call to arms.
But if in Labour’s first weeks in office unions had the refreshing experience of ministers inviting them for discussions, recent events show organised labour is not truly at the table.
Labour’s very biggest affiliates, huge funders of the party, were blindsided by sudden announcements of sweeping job cuts at NHS England, followed by news of its abolition. Labour’s local government reorganisation has similarly been announced without proper consultation, and risks chaos as authorities are merged and responsibilities shredded. Hundreds of thousands of NHS and local government workers deserve better — as do the tens of millions who rely on them.
When Britain ousted the Tories it was because people wanted change. Labour’s own vote, which fell compared to 2019, shows it was not trusted to deliver that change, but if unions are to convince working-class people the party they founded is still worthy of support they need to make it.
Public and municipal services struggling after 14 years of Tory cuts cannot be repaired while Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules suffocate spending. Councils collapsing into bankruptcy are now confronted with a mammoth reorganisation when they need more money and a fairer funding model — one that allows taxation of wealth rather than forcing up council taxes that pay for ever-worsening services.
Unions must go on the offensive. The post-Covid strike wave raised the profile of the movement, and won significant pay increases.
Now we should take the lead in mobilising communities to fight attacks on our class by the government.
Such campaigns, especially at municipal level, will introduce trade unionism to new generations of workers and provide a political opposition from the left, preventing nasties like Nigel Farage from posing as the alternative to a government of privatisation and cuts.
Nor should they be purely defensive, though the blows rained on us keep coming. Why wait for privatising ministers like Wes Streeting to say what he plans for the NHS? The new strategy for our services, what they should look like and how they should be funded, are questions for the labour movement to answer — and for us to take into battle.
