ROGER McKENZIE, who is standing to succeed Dave Prentis at the helm of the 1.3 million-strong Unison union, has no doubt that “the government is absolutely intent on making public-service workers pay for its mishandling of the pandemic.”

He is not convinced by Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s announcement on public-sector pay this week.

“A whole bunch of workers have been told they’re going to get a a pay rise. Great – they deserve that and lots more.

“But these are workers who have had their pay effectively reduced for years and years. Then there are workers such as nurses who are left out of the pay rise despite being in the public sector. 

“There are care workers who are left out because they are outsourced and not in the public sector. There are local government workers who are already receiving redundancy notices – these announcements are going to sound pretty hollow to them, but loads of people who work in local government have been on the front line of this pandemic as well.

“The question becomes what are we going to do about it. We can’t just whinge. The pandemic has shown up the broken economic model for what it is. Remember before the pandemic and the things the Tories were saying about who was valued and not valued, who was skilled and unskilled. 

“Then those unskilled workers went through a phase of being the most valued people on the planet. Because they were keeping the country running through the pandemic. And now it seems that the rollercoaster has gone down again and they aren’t valued. Well, that’s what the Tories do, many of us predicted that – but the point is to prevent it.

“And the only way to deal with it is to have strong, campaigning, vibrant trade unionism within workplaces. We can’t rely on anyone else to win the argument for us – we have to be strong enough that workers, often in quite isolated places or in social care often working on their own, can protect themselves. 

“In social care we have some really difficult employers, but we have to be able to reach workers, to help them to organise in their workplaces and build some power.

“That’s how we create the grounds to change the entire sector. We want fundamental change to the sector, but the question is how do we deliver that as trade unions.”

The care sector is riddled with privatisation and subcontracting, meaning there are no common standards or terms and conditions that apply across it. The march of privatisation across public services means Unison now represents hundreds of thousands of private-sector workers.

“That’s a massive massive issue. When I first joined the National Union of Public Employees back in 1981 I was a young – very, very young you understand! – shop steward. And the branch I was in was a social services branch. It organised in care homes, and every single one of those care homes was publicly run, run by the council.

“It’s now something like 90 per cent of care homes are run by the private sector. And we’re not recognised with the vast majority of these private-sector companies – which are running a critical public service.

“And the treatment of workers in the sector is appalling. Lots of people have been instructed, without any say in the matter, to sleep in the establishment they work in, on pain of losing their job for example. We are making sure that social care is one of our organising priorities – but we also have to be fighting to bring these services back in house because we are faced with too many horrible, disgusting employers. There are some good ones for sure, some even want to talk to us, but there’s some really bad ones whose callousness has been shown up by this pandemic. So priority number one is standing up for people in these workplaces but we’ve got to work really hard to bring these services back in house where they belong.

“At the moment we have people employed by the traditional public sector, and people employed by the private sector, and people employed in the community and voluntary sector, all delivering public services. We need a new deal that covers them all – for better terms and conditions, and better pay. People need to get paid better for what they do.”

That means greater investment, and McKenzie notes that many of the same problems – “workers who can’t do the job that they want to do, because they haven’t got the resources” – apply to local government as well as the NHS and social care, and he savages the impact of deep cuts to town hall budgets and the way some authorities are exploiting the pandemic to drive down standards.

“Look at what’s happened in Tower Hamlets where they’ve sacked the workforce and re-engaged them on worse terms and conditions. And by the way loads of black workers are affected by that, though I’m guessing the mayor is happy to say he’s a supporter of Black Lives Matter.”

McKenzie feels there is “something to celebrate” in the speed with which spontaneous Black Lives Matter protests have taken hold across the West.

“This has shown there are lots of folk out there who, with the right issue, will go out and organise – not wait for institutions like the trade union movement to organise things for them. I think Angela Davis got this right – as she always does in my opinion – that this is just an extraordinary moment that brings together a whole number of issues, creating grounds for real hope.

“And lots of people have said that we need to turn that moment into a movement and I believe that, but we need to be clear about what that movement is for, and I think it has to be part of a movement for social change. A movement that pushes, to use a term that was prominent when Jeremy Corbyn led Labour, for an irreversible shift in wealth and power towards working-class people – because one of the most important aspects of the Black Lives Matter movement for me is to reassert that black people, the black community, is part of the working-class movement and cannot be separated out of it.”

Does he feel that the socialist moment represented by Corbyn has passed, that the election result showed people were not interested?

“Not at all. Many of us were arguing for those policies before – I was campaigning with Jeremy on these issues 30 years ago as his constituency party secretary. I think it’s a real tragedy if people think that politics is just about what happens at a general election. That’s important but it’s the work we do to build a society based on social justice, where people are paid properly and valued for what they do, the rest of the time that leads to change.

“One of the reasons I want to be general secretary is because I see the potential in our union to be a strong force for change but also a strong force for public services and the people who work in them.

“To do that, we have to prioritise organising. After Covid it’s going to be so much harder for us to get into workplaces. I mean, think of the discussion we had at the last management committee meeting” (McKenzie is an elected member of the Morning Star’s management committee). “The difficulty you have about balancing people’s work from a workplace and working from home. In public services, employers will be pushing for more home working, in some cases you’ll see buildings being sold off because funds are short, say, in local government. So it’s going to be much harder to reach people if they’re going to be split up in that way.

“We have to have a different approach, to build strong workplace activism to bring the union closer to members, more visible to people on the ground.

“If you want to build an organising union then that means having more people active in the union. I think we should have 100,000 activists in Unison. We should have 5,000 union learning reps – we know that many of our members, me included, had a bad experience at school and that it can be the trade union movement that gives us that confidence to walk back into the classroom.”

McKenzie believes Unison has done “an amazing job” recruiting during the pandemic. “I would say that we were the best recruiting union in western Europe anyway, and of course lots of people have joined us during the pandemic because they’re scared.

“As the person responsible for recruiting and organising and all that I feel the issue is, how do we keep these people, once the fear is dissipated? We can recruit people and provide a service, and I’m not knocking the services we provide at all because they’re very high quality – our legal service is second to none.

“But I’m interested in something more, in a notion of trade unionism in which you feel confident to stand up for the person working next to you, and in fact the person working 300 miles away too – someone they have never met and will probably never meet but who they know has their back and vice versa.

“Increased numbers will come from that strength in the workplace, because the more we are seen to be a force in the workplace that takes no rubbish from some of the bad employers out there, the more people will come to us. They won’t come to an organisation that they don’t see doing anything.”