A born organiser

Frances O’Grady has trade unionism in her blood. Her grandfather was a founder member of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, while her father was a TGWU shop steward at the Leyland car plant in Cowley, Oxford, where she grew up.
One of five children, she got a job as a researcher specialising in equality issues at the TGWU after doing a degree in politics and modern history at Manchester University. She also obtained a diploma in industrial relations and trade union studies at Middlesex Polytechnic.
She left the TGWU for the TUC in 1994, where her many responsibilities included setting up the TUC organising academy in 1997. She was elected as deputy general secretary in 2003 and took over as general secretary at the beginning of 2013.
O’Grady was ranked as the 11th most powerful woman in Britain on the Radio 4 Woman’s Hour ‘Power List 2013’, ahead of Harriet Harman at 14th but behind Elisabeth Murdoch (5th), Theresa May (2nd) and the queen (1st).

‘It’s wonderful, it feels like it gives you power, it gives you a voice, it protects you. We’ve never had that before – it’s empowering.’ Nicole, OUR Walmart organiser

On ‘Black Friday’ last year, the busiest shopping day of the year, Walmart workers staged their first nationwide strike. 500 members of the Organisation United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) walked out and joined 30,000 demonstrators across 47 states protesting against poverty pay, irregular hours and poor working conditions. OUR Walmart has built up a membership of thousands of current and former hourly workers, hundreds of whom hundreds of whom will be joining mass demonstrations at Walmart’s Shareholders’ meeting on 7 June in Arkansas.
Unionisation in the US private sector has fallen drastically over the past two decades. It is now below 7 per cent – lower than at any point since 1932. Out of this slump, however, has come a willingness to embrace new methods.
Walmart is the world’s largest corporation and the biggest private sector employer with a global workforce of 2.2 million. It has always opposed the accommodation of unions, so much so that as it rapidly expanded in the 1970s and 1980s it determinedly avoided the metropolitan markets where unions were strongest. It wasn’t until 2003 that the company felt unionisation was low enough to allow it to expand into cities such as Los Angeles. Despite the lack of recognition, therefore, unions shaped Walmart’s development by placing barriers upon its expansion as well as pushing up minimum acceptable standards.
As unions have declined, so too have working conditions at Walmart, especially since the mid-2000s. The modus operandi is to squeeze more productivity out of less and less labour. This has been aided by the economic crisis and high unemployment. Starting wages at Walmart are close to the legal minimum, well below a living wage, and many workers don’t receive real annual pay rises. Departments are under-staffed, while work has intensified to such an extent that severe injuries are common.
This squeezing of labour is achieved through harsh disciplinary procedures. Workers have no recourse to appeal and are refused an advocate or even a non-managerial witness. Walmart’s power is underpinned by labour laws that allow employers to terminate ‘permanent’ employment without notice. There is no security of hours, which vary by 50-100 per cent week-on-week, often with no regular shift patterns or days off. This makes it impossible for workers to have a steady income or plan their family and social lives. Managerial control over hours not only facilitates the matching of labour supply to short-term changes in demand but also translates into direct control of individual workers: displease a manager and you’ll find your hours suddenly cut or shifted. Managers have no qualms about employing such methods to get rid of workers who are not deemed productive enough, especially those with medical conditions – many of whom cannot access health insurance through Walmart. In one recent case, a manager sought to dispose of an employee with pancreatic cancer (he died before he could be fired). In another a 70 year-old woman suffering from incontinence was fired for going to the toilet too frequently.
Building collective power
Walmart workers are clearly in a position of structural weakness; they lack ‘scare skills’, a tight labour market or a strategically important industry. This means they are highly expendable. Walmart has made use of and reinforced this weakness in its willingness to close down stores and even entire divisions across North America, rather than accept unionisation.
Despite this, the OUR Walmart campaign has shown that workers can build associational power through collective organisation. OUR Walmart has done this by focusing on four interconnected elements of organising: organisational, legal, technological and tactical.
Although the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Union (UFCW) provides crucial resources and expertise, the OUR Walmart campaign is not aiming for unionisation. It remains an aspiration, but everybody involved accepts that, in the short term, it’s an unrealistic one. US labour law requires a formal workplace ballot for a union to be recognised, even if a majority of workers have joined. Walmart has proved extremely adept at winning such ballots, flying in expert union-busters to run intensive anti-union campaigns. So relentless is the company’s approach that Human Rights Watch states it ‘violates workers’ internationally recognised right to freedom of association’. Instead of being a union, therefore, OUR Walmart is an association. This avoids having to fight union ballots that, for the time being, it would certainly lose.

Being an association also allows workers to re-frame collective organisation in a country where there is a high level of antipathy and distrust towards unions. Members stress to their co-workers that it is run by and for Walmart workers and not outsiders or union hacks. This requires the campaign to be genuinely empowering and participatory.
When any organisation has full-time staff working on behalf of others, centralisation and bureaucratisation are a concern. But at the meetings I attended, I was reminded more of Climate Camp discussions than a typical union meeting. People were prompted to follow the ‘step up-step down’ principle, so that everybody had an equal chance to contribute. The facilitators (who were full-time organisers) would actively seek out the views of workers and encourage participation. When I spoke one-to-one with workers the first thing they would tell me was how empowered they felt and would express a clear sense of ownership of the association and the decisions it made.
The strike as a symbol
The bypassing of in-store union elections isn’t the campaign’s only innovative tactic. Labour law has also been used to workers’ advantage in taking ‘unfair labour practice’ (ULP) strike action. Workers have the legal right to take strike action individually, without needing to be a member of a recognised union, if a ULP claim is submitted to the Labor Board. As Walmart is a serial ULP offender workers can strike at will without needing to form a union, have an election or hold a ballot and are protected by the Labor Board against retaliation or replacement.
OUR Walmart has also made extensive use of social media. Many workers told me about the significance of organising through Facebook as they took their first steps towards becoming active. OUR Walmart campaigner Brad explains: ‘You’re used to dealing with your individual store and then when you see it is nationwide and you’re talking to other people, it kinda blows your mind away.’
Workers can feel isolated in their own Walmart store, especially as the punitive conditions discourage the discussion of workplace grievances. Without the need for intermediaries, workers are able to connect with more than 22,500 other employees and supporters who are currently signed up to the OUR Walmart group on Facebook (www.facebook.com/OURWMT) and understand that the problems they face are far from isolated examples. New members can witness the huge support the campaign generates and its media impact. The association also employs a former Walmart worker to provide training and support via telecommunications and online tools to members located too remotely to be supported face-to-face. Video conferencing helps build a collective identity among workers dispersed across the country, as well as allowing people in all areas to participate in decision-making.
The combined use of ULP regulations and social media has allowed OUR Walmart to develop innovative strike tactics. Strikes usually aim to hit the company wallet but OUR Walmart doesn’t yet have the numbers to make a significant dent on profits. On Black Friday only a handful of workers at each store of 200-plus employees took action, so it was easy for the company to find cover for striking workers.
For the OUR Walmart campaign, strikes instead function mainly as a symbolic protest. Going on strike demonstrates a worker’s commitment and determination. This effect is amplified through a sophisticated media strategy. On Black Friday a relatively small number of workers gained a large amount of media attention from stopping work for a relatively short period of time. The strike’s impact was accentuated by its combination with large demonstrations of community allies – which the association puts a lot of effort into forming. More than 1,000 people joined the LA store picket, for example.

This makes the experience of taking strike action particularly empowering. Ashlyn, who went on strike on Black Friday, recalls that they ‘had a lot of people backing us up . . . When I turned round and saw all those people I was like, oh my God, this is something and I’ll keep on doing it and I love it and I’m not backing down.’
OUR Walmart has transformed the strike from a mass economic tactic into something more akin to the affinity group nonviolent direct action and skilled media management methods of UK Uncut. Black Friday also saw a group of LA workers, family members and a member of the clergy shut down the road leading to a store for two hours in a pre-planned illegal blockade before being arrested. The risks involved in taking such actions strengthen the members’ commitment to the association.
Reorganising labour
Reputational damage hits Walmart particularly hard as it has reached market saturation in its traditional areas and is stifled by competition internationally. Expansion into the metropolitan areas it previously avoided is crucial but this is often blocked by concerned local authorities. As a result, the company has failed to open any stores in New York and there is only one in LA.
Constraining Walmart’s growth into these areas, until it improves working conditions, forms an important prong of OUR Walmart’s strategy. This includes mobilising mass protests and sending current employees to speak against the company at media and city council events. In 2012, for example, OUR Walmart and the UFCW mobilised 10,000 people to march against plans for a Walmart in LA’s China Town, while a store application in New York was rejected thanks in part to OUR Walmart’s campaign. This strategy has the additional upside for the UFCW of protecting unionised stores from competition with non-unionised Walmarts.
OUR Walmart is having a significant impact on labour struggles in the US. It is finding new ways for workers with almost no structural power to take effective collective action. If only one in ten hourly workers joined OUR Walmart, this would constitute a membership of 100,000 workers, providing serious human and financial clout.
Such a target is entirely realistic. Where OUR Walmart has concentrated organisational effort it has consistently had one tenth of workers joining the campaign, and in some stores the numbers are as high as 20 to 40 per cent. In response, Walmart has already made some initial moves to improve work scheduling and the campaign looks set to win other improvements – as long as they aren’t too costly. Even support for raising the federal minimum wage isn’t inconceivable, as it would boost consumption while not competitively disadvantaging Walmart. Such victories could propel OUR Walmart into winning more concessions and perhaps one day even recognition.
The situation facing traditional unions in the US is grim but it’s important to recognise that new forms of labour organisation have always arisen out of old forms. When Ford introduced the assembly line, it was said to herald the death of the labour movement, making the workers’ skills, on which craft unions were based, obsolete while dramatically expanding the potential labour supply. It was only after the successes of unions, following a 30-year militant struggle in which new organisational forms were developed and new tactics embraced, that it become the received wisdom that Fordism, in fact, created a fertile ground on which unions could organise. There is cause to hope that the innovative methods that OUR Walmart has developed make possible a similar reincarnation for 21st-century labour organisation.
Alex Wood is a research student at Cambridge University. He spent a month visiting Californian OUR Walmart members in advance of their strike and planned mass demonstrations at Walmart’s shareholders’ meeting on 7 June. Photographs by OUR Walmart

Brighton and Hove City Council hit the headlines this week after the workforce at their Cityclean department stopped working for two days. This action followed the announcement of proposals to make changes to pay and allowances which will see some employees standing to lose up to £4,000 a year.

In January 2013 the council announced that they would seek to introduce a new pay and allowances system for staff. Importantly, they have provided no proper legal rationale for doing this, and have refused to say what has changed since 2009 when agreements were made which were certified as legally sound at the time.

The council’s framework for implementation of the proposals was contained in a pay modernisation paper submitted to the Policy and Resources committee. The document recommended delegating responsibility for the negotiation and implementation to officers rather than elected representatives.

Councillors present voted by a majority to accept the recommendations of the paper, with Green and Conservative councillors voting in favour and Labour councillors against. This decision was concerning for a number of reasons. GMB felt it was wrong, as councillors were not prepared to face the workers they were treating badly and there was also controversy over whether councillors knew what they were voting for. In the webcast of the meeting (at 03:10) Green Cllr Shanks states that she would be ‘concerned that this is not going to hit our lowest paid workers unfairly…that needs to come back again.’ This statement would seem to indicate that she thought that the final decision would return to elected councillors.

This view was substantiated by Green councillor Alex Phillips who when asked on Twitter ‘Why is Jason (Kitcat) saying that the majority of Green Cllrs supported it?’ responded by saying ‘Because he led them to believe that officers would take their decision to group to be voted on. This was not the case’.

Jason Kitcat is convener of the Green Group of councillors and leader of the City Council. Cllr Phillips’ statement confirms that he misled his own councillors in advance of the vote. This is not the first time he has faced such allegations. In April Kitcat had to apologise for making misleading statements about the effect of the proposals on staff after being challenged by GMB branch secretary Mark Turner.

After the Pay Modernisation Report was passed, council officers began negotiating with recognised unions. Councillors were told not to comment on the negotiations, presumably so as not to undermine their officers’ negotiating positions.

During the negotiations the council issued a press release indicating that the Cityclean Service would operate on bank holidays. They also briefed ward councillors on a planning application to allow this to happen. This is significant, as the effect of doing so means the loss of ‘make up pay’ for employees taking on the additional work and hours after a bank holiday, which is paid if strict conditions are met. This action highlights a blatant lack of meaningful consultation as it is clear a decision had already been made.

As the negotiations progressed it was clear to see that the council were not prepared to budge and that little was to change between their initial proposal and what would became their ‘best and final’ offer. A large number of GMB members would still stand to lose up to £4,000 per year, and 260 members at the Council’s Cityclean department were to be particularly badly affected, with an average loss of £2,000 rising to £4,000 for many.

As such GMB launched a campaign to highlight the affect that such substantial cuts would have on members. We launched a petition on our website, that thousands of members of the public have now signed and we made a video of GMB members at Cityclean talking about the implications of the proposed cuts.

On 8th May the council held a mass meeting with Cityclean staff to brief them on their best and final offer. Staff refused to work for two days, and the value of their work was quickly seen as the city’s streets descended into rubbish-strewn chaos. Staff went back to work on 10 May, on the basis that GMB would conduct an official ballot for industrial action, and formal notice of this ballot will be sent to the council early next week.

The action taken by the workers, while not endorsed by GMB, brought the matter to a head. The Green Party had held a meeting the previous night were they voted by a large majority to support staff and campaign against any cuts. A number of Green councillors also spoke to the workforce and stated that they opposed Kitcat’s proposals and would resign if necessary. The Green MP for Brighton, Caroline Lucas, also visited the workers to express her support, and condemned any measures that would reduce take-home pay.

As a result Cllr Kitcat’s Green administration is now acting in direct violation of his party’s own democratically decided policy and against the position of many of his own councillors and the Green Party’s only MP. His position has become untenable and as a result of his actions in misleading the public, his own councillors and our members, GMB no longer have trust and confidence in him to continue in his role.

Given the situation the Green Party must act. Whilst support is appreciated, they cannot protest against Kitcat’s actions while still allowing them to happen. We are willing to try to resolve this dispute but the Green Group must play its part too.

It is also important that Labour councillors stand up and be counted. Whilst it is noted that they voted against the proposals in January, they must now speak out, and also support any measures by Green councillors who seek to bring the decision back under democratic control. As for the Conservatives, they shouldn’t get away scot free, but at least we know what to expect with them.

I’m sure there will significant developments in the coming weeks, but in the interim Councillors may wish to consider the case of Aberdeenshire Council. They faced exactly the same dispute in January 2013 and withdrew their proposals when agreement could not be reached.

Rob Macey is a GMB Senior Organiser for Legal, Political and Campaigns. You can find updates on the dispute and sign our petition at www.gmb-southern.org.uk/bhcc / twitter @gmbsouthern. You can also follow the workers on twitter on @gmbcityclean

Everywhere you look on the web today, there are appeals for solidarity with GMB union council staff in Brighton & Hove, some of whom face the prospect of huge pay cuts. It seems to be a bizarre situation. How is this possible with a Green-led council that has campaigned harder than any other council in the country against public sector austerity in general and for fairer pay for the low paid in particular? The council was after all one of the first to be accredited as a living wage employer, and just this week became the first council to pledge officially there will be no evictions resulting from the bedroom tax.

It’s a long story and one that is difficult to write for lots of reasons. Let me start by saying unambiguously that I oppose and have consistently argued and campaigned against the stance taken by some senior officers who advise the Green-led council on this pay issue. So has Caroline Lucas, our local and the UK’s only Green MP. So has the local Green Party itself. And so have almost half the local Green councillors, including the deputy leader Phelim McCafferty. But at the same time, it is not as ‘black and white’ as it has been painted in the progressive/left media.

The background

Brighton & Hove City Council was formed in 1997 from the merger of Brighton borough, Hove borough and parts of East Sussex county council. Pay and conditions had to be harmonised. Pay was eventually sorted out, but the allowances have not been. In addition, like dozens of councils up and down the country, Brighton & Hove has had to assess past pay and condition settlements in the light of more recent equal pay legislation. Many councils have found themselves facing bills running into tens of millions of pounds – Birmingham famously faced an £800m+ bill. Almost every council has now sorted out the mess of past settlements but previous Tory and Labour administrations of Brighton & Hove had failed to do so – fearing the financial consequences, and threats of industrial action.

Into this situation came the new Green Party-led council, elected in 2011 – the first ever council with Greens at the helm. It was keen to clear up the mess left behind by previous administrations and to look at past deals the previous councils had struck with the local trade unions.

Note the Greens are a minority administration, as they were elected with 23 councillors out of 54. They can’t simply decide on measures without consulting with other parties. I understand that there are some legal deadlines for sorting out these issues that means the core agreement needs to be signed by autumn 2013. So far, so good. But then, senior council officers intervened, and since then it seems to have gone off the rails, as the council leader Jason Kitcat has accepted at face value – naively in my view – the advice that officers have provided. So what happened?

I do not know exactly the content of council officers’ advice to councillors about what they found about the existing pay and conditions packages at the council – because that advice has remained a closely guarded secret. And the council’s legal advice was that councillors should say absolutely nothing in public about it. Personally, I think this advice was fundamentally wrong. And it has led to councillors being unable to explain what the dispute is about – with disastrous consequences, especially for staff morale, and allowing the media to manipulate the dispute.

My interpretation is that Brighton & Hove council probably found, like most other councils in the country, that some past allowances were at least questionable under the new equal pay laws. Its officers probably found that the sums involved to put things right were huge, and could bring the council to the verge of bankruptcy, adding to the existing budget pressures that the council was already facing due to the government’s cuts in council grants. With looming legal deadlines, and understandably hoping for cross-party support for a solution on such a crucial matter of staff pay, the council leaders passed over responsibility for negotiating a deal with the unions to senior officers. Apparently, this was done with no brief from the Green group of councillors, and no commitment to bring back any offer to councillors for approval before being submitted to staff. I think this was a big mistake.

Green Party members in Brighton & Hove are rightly proud of the council’s achievements on the living wage and its commitment to reducing the gap between the highest and lowest paid. They understandably assumed that any change to allowances would mean levelling pay up with no losses for other groups of workers. It soon became clear that officers were pursuing a different tack – trying to pay for upgrading those whose allowances historically had been too low by reducing those whose allowances had been ‘too high’. This had the effect of pitching one worker against another in a one-off change rather than introducing them over a longer period of time.

There can be little doubt that the sums of money are very high and the temptation for officers to strike such a deal was strong. Rumours suggest that upgrading the allowances would add £30m to the annual council wage bill. Some councillors have voiced fears of ‘financial meltdown’. But I think it was a mistake to let senior council officers take this approach. And it was a huge mistake not to let council staff and others in the city know what the real motivation was for the changes being proposed.

The role of the unions

Frankly, the local trade unions have not exactly covered themselves in glory either in this dispute. Of course, unions rightly fight for their members’ best interests. But much of the publicity and campaigning from the unions has been deliberately misleading and in my view has taken on a politically partisan pro-Labour and anti-Green bias.

The unions have portrayed the dispute as the Greens wanting to reduce the pay bill by cynically attacking the lowest paid. Indeed that is what many of the rank and file staff now sincerely believe – partly because the council has been so useless to communicating with them. But it isn’t true. Equal pay is entirely absent from the union’s narrative. So is the fact that it is low paid women workers who will gain the most from any settlement. So is the fact that the council’s wage bill will go up, not down, as a result of the proposed settlement. The GMB is playing a crafty game with Labour locally, who have pulled out of the initial cross-party consensus trying to resolve the issues.

However, none of that changes the view held by myself, Caroline Lucas and the local Green Party that the stance of the administration is wrong and very damaging.

What has been proposed

A ‘final offer’ – which has never been approved by councillors! – has been put to staff. Nine out of ten staff are unaffected. Some low paid, mainly women workers in Unison, stand to gain significantly. And a few hundred manual staff, mainly male GMB workers in the refuse and street cleaning department, stand to lose. The amount varies – for most it is less than £25 a week. But for a few it is much more.

A compensation package has been proposed which offers for example someone who loses £1,000 per year around £3,500 in a lump sum. The text of the offer is not entirely clear but it seems to imply that if it is not accepted, that the council will impose it – presumably by sacking staff and re-employing them on the new conditions.

The local Green Party has held two packed general meetings of its members to discuss this issue. This is a sovereign decision-making forum for the local party. The arguments of the council leader and his supporters were roundly defeated at both.

The first meeting opposed any attempt to sack and re-employ staff on worse conditions. The second meeting condemned the offer to staff for including significant pay cuts to low paid workers. Myself, Caroline Lucas and around half the Green councillors supported the stance taken by the local party. We have argued that any settlement cannot include threats to sack staff and cannot include pay cuts to low paid workers.

The issue now has become critical for us. Our candidates in last week’s elections were asked why some of our councillors were attacking the low paid. Allies and supporters locally and nationally are deeply troubled by what the council may be doing. And local Green Party members are wondering what they have to do to get councillors to follow national and local Green Party policy, and to withdraw the ‘final offer’ and the sacking threat.

By all means send your support to the GMB workers threatened with pay cuts. I have. But please note that the story is more complicated than it first appears. And it looks increasingly like the story that has been played out in many radical parties here and abroad; it is a conflict between those who want to manage the system better, and those who want to change the system altogether. The story is not yet over.

Council trade unionist Jon Rogers gives an alternative view of the ‘co-op council’
Lambeth Unison shares with Lambeth Labour group an understanding that our borough is being hit by scandalously large reductions in funding and that this is the fault of the Tory-led coalition government.
Where we differ is in our assessment of the role of the local labour movement when working class communities are under attack by a cabinet of millionaires. In Lambeth in 2013, this difference has two dimensions – it’s about cuts and it’s about the ‘co-op council’.
In relation to cuts, it is true that it is the fault of the Tories and their Lib Dem stooges that Lambeth will, on current spending plans, have lost a massive 45 per cent of its central government funding by 2016. The council has made £66 million cuts over the past two years. There are another £108 million to come over the next four.
Since the general election (up to the end of last September) Lambeth had made 550 redundancies. Up to another 1,000 are being spoken of – from a workforce now below 3,000. Further redundancies were outsourced when the Labour group agreed to transfer the job of answering Lambeth’s telephones to Capita in Southampton. This tragic decision, intended to save £1 million, annually has taken far more than that out of the local economy.
No choice?
Ed says they have no choice because if they refuse to set a legal budget ‘the government would appoint commissioners to run the council direct from Whitehall’. This just shows how little effort some comrades have put into considering the current legal position.
It would be more accurate to say that, whereas in the 1980s councillors who put their duty to the voters before their duty to a hostile government risked surcharge and bankruptcy, councillors who took such action now would simply trigger the powers which chief finance officers did not have back then.
The honest truth is that no one really knows how the government would respond if a number of Labour councils stood together to set the budgets that their communities needed, rather than those which George Osborne and Eric Pickles dictate. I suggest Ed goes to Birmingham on 16 March for the ‘Councillors Against the Cuts’ Conference in order to consider this question further.
In Lambeth though it’s not just about cuts – it’s also about “co-ops”.
Unfortunately, because he is a councillor, Ed is not particularly well informed about what is happening on the ground in relation to the ‘drive to become a co-operative council’ of which he is clearly proud. He lauds ‘our Youth Co-operative (which) now has nearly 2,000 members from all sections of the community informing commissioning decisions around youth services and education.’
Check with the officers, Ed. The nascent Youth Co-operative, which hardly even yet exists has, as yet, had no formal role in commissioning decisions. Indeed the so-called ‘early adopters’ of the ‘co-operative council’ were identified from on high by a commission led by cabinet members, and outsourcing decisions were taken by a panel of senior officers with no reference to the Youth Co-operative.
It was the excellent performance of hard working staff in children’s social care delivered the ‘outstanding’ Ofsted result of which the Council – and its workforce – is rightly proud. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the Youth Co-operative and it is shameful to try to co-opt this achievement to justify an unrelated political project.
What the “co-operative council” has delivered so far in Children’s and Young People’s Services has been two years of chaos, confusion and demoralisation followed by the piecemeal outsourcing of some of the services chosen from above for this irresponsible experiment.
‘Co-ops’ and outsourcing
At the same time, the council has broken its promise not to close adventure playgrounds when, having forced out the in-house workforce by proposing untenable cuts in working hours and pay, it then had to terminate, at a moment’s notice, an interim contract with a voluntary group over safeguarding concerns, in relation to which Unison is still waiting for a proper response from the local Safeguaring Children’s Board.
This scandal was part and parcel of the ‘co-operative council’ – as was the decision to reject, on spurious grounds, a workers’ plan to retain in-house the much-loved One O’clock Clubs, and the decisions to transfer at least two of our youth centres into the hands of private companies.
Ed and his comrades in the Labour group may truly believe that ‘our drive to become a co-operative council is not a response to the cuts but an innovative change designed to empower our residents.’ As a socialist who has spent his life in the Labour Party, I’m the last person to knock either idealism or hopeless, unfounded optimism.
However, in the real Lambeth (as opposed to that which is imagined) officers interpret the ‘co-operative council’ as incitement to outsource, so that is what is beginning to happen on the ground, albeit slowly.
Unison hopes that councillors will, as they say they intend to, revise the council’s constitution so that they, rather than officers, take more decisions. The current position is that – for example – the decision to privatise youth centres was taken by senior officers in private as councillors refused to take responsibility for taking the decisions in public.
In future, Lambeth councillors may know more about what they are talking about when they seek to rebut legitimate criticism. I suppose that won’t stop them attacking Ted Knight of course, since a false history of the 1980s is an almost essential element in the threadbare intellectual armoury of the Sainsbury funded Progress faction who have a wholly unhealthy influence.
All I will say in response to the unwarranted attack on Ted is that, nearly thirty years after he sacrificed his political career to defend our borough, Ted Knight is greeted by cheers and ovations at meetings of the council workforce and gatherings of community activists.
If today’s councillors can say the same in the 2040s I’ll eat my zimmer frame…
Jon Rogers is Lambeth Unison branch secretary and secretary of the Lambeth council joint trade unions

Organise!

Seven years ago Unite embarked on a culture-changing programme of organising through grassroots collective action, a return to shop stewards and sectoral national networks of elected representatives who meet regularly to plan strategy and action. Unite’s organising model is based on the US union SEIU’s model of issue-based organising. There are around 88 full-time organisers working for Unite’s national organising unit today. Most are from industrial backgrounds.
Issue-based organising works. It can start with standing outside workplaces stopping workers, getting their details, meeting them in their homes or cafes, and having longer conversations about identifying common concerns. A problem that affects a wide number of people and where action can be won is selected, and a collective action to resolve it is launched.
In the beginning this is usually a collective grievance – a mass workplace petition. As union membership and confidence grows, the actions can become more confrontational, leading up to strike action. Identifying ‘leaders’ – co-ordinators, people who care, stand up to management and are well respected – is essential to carry core organisation forward. Once union membership reaches over 50 per cent, by law the employer must sign a recognition agreement, which allows for the election and recognition of workplace representatives, time off for union duties and negotiations on pay and conditions. It is at this point that organisers withdraw, having helped to create sustainable organisation and a shift in the balance of power.

Power and the people

What does ‘community organising’ really involve? And what might be its pitfalls? Community activist Ellie-Mae O’Hagan reflects
Community organisers believe in building relationships with institutions that already exist. They tap into existing networks of people in order to organise wider communities according to shared self-interest. Once those communities are organised, they can collectivise their power and mount a challenge to the government or the markets.
Community power is not something you have in isolation; it’s a relationship you build with those who share your inequality. Put bluntly, community organisers believe that the more power communities have, the more effectively they can win the war for power. For that reason, contemporary community organisers are not always overly discerning in terms of whom they form alliances with.
That may sound a tad cynical, and perhaps it is. But there’s no denying the successes of community organising. The most salient example in Britain is probably the Living Wage Campaign pioneered by community organisers London Citizens. The campaign calls for every worker in the country to earn enough to provide their family with the essentials of life – a ‘living wage’ set at £7.85 per hour in 2010.
Launched in 2001, by the end of the decade the campaign had persuaded more than 100 employers to pay the living wage, lifting 6,500 families out of working poverty. It succeeded by using a variety of strategies, from organising low-wage workers and wooing high-profile politicians to the public shaming of CEOs. Sir John Bond, executive chairman of HSBC, was left speechless when his cleaner Abdul Durrant stood up in the middle of an AGM and told him, ‘We work in the same office but we live in two different worlds.’
And yet, in my experience at least, community organising is not without its pitfalls. For one thing, the cynical approach to relationship building can sometimes lead to the formation of unholy alliances between organisers and the institutions that are arguably part of the problem.
Take, for example, Citizens UK (the national organisation of which London Citizens is a part) and its CitySafe campaign, which aims to make our streets safer. The campaign works by persuading businesses to become ‘CitySafe havens’, which offer sanctuary to young people in danger, report any crimes they see taking place and develop positive relationships with the local community. Citizens UK has approached numerous multinational companies with a presence on high streets to make the campaign a success, including the likes of McDonalds.
Although there’s no denying the benefits of reducing inner-city crime, a left-wing perspective sees that crime as a symptom of the inequality created by neoliberal capitalism, of which McDonalds is a particularly potent symbol. It’s worth asking, then, whether forming relationships with such organisations in order to alleviate a symptom of the inequality that they create places the community organiser in the position of being unable to criticise them. Indeed, do the communities that are being organised ever get to the point where they take on capitalist businesses as the perpetrators of inequality? Or do they simply see McDonalds as a benevolent company that will offer a sanctuary if young people are in trouble? When it comes to community organising, is a structural criticism of society possible, or simply a hindrance to your short-term goals?
This brings us to the second pitfall of community organising: the theory itself. London Citizens, the biggest alliance of community organisers in the UK, bases its work on the theory of three competing powers: the markets, the government and communities. This strikes me as flawed. The three powers are not competing; the markets are swallowing the government and crushing communities.
Despite the hazards of community organising, it’s a useful place from which to begin activism. The building of solid relationships and the understanding of one’s audience are vital principles for any activist wishing to communicate an important political message. There is a middle ground between ideological purism and arch pragmatism; and that’s where Unite’s decision to set up community membership becomes very interesting. Although Unite’s community membership will follow the pragmatic and inclusive principles of Saul Alinsky’s influential Rules for Radicals, it will do so while remaining loyal to the socialist values of trade unionism. Can community membership revolutionise not just communities, but community organising? Only time will tell.

Mind the pitfalls

Research on community union initiatives has highlighted a number of drawbacks and limitations, write Andrew Mathers and Graham Taylor, who research community unionism at the University of the West of England
There are serious and enduring institutional rivalries between trade union and community organisations based on a mismatch in organisational procedures and priorities. While trade unions are formally structured, community organisations tend to be looser and more ad hoc. These rivalries can reflect an imbalance of power and resources between unions and community groups.
Labour movement organisations tend to emerge as the dominant partners or leaders of ‘vanguard coalitions’, which tends to undermine the development of ‘common cause’ coalitions. ‘Community unionism’ may also lack a political ideology or, more specifically, an ‘ideology of labour’ premised on an independent and oppositional politics without which labour lacks coherence as a movement.
There is an essential ambiguity around the concept of ‘community’. It is used in at least three different ways in relation to community unionism: as a geographical space, as a shared set of interests and as a shared sense of identity. The tension between these diverse meanings highlights the complex nature of the relationship between ‘place’ and ‘space’ in labour movement politics.
The focus on community as ‘place’ leads to a rather static conception of community. This ignores the ways in which communities of interest and identity transcend space, and how solidarities (and divisions) traverse the global, regional, national and local levels. There has been a tendency to conflate the various meanings of ‘community’ into a one-dimensional focus on the ‘local’. While local community initiatives can increase the organisational capacity of trade unions, in an age of neoliberal globalisation they can also blind labour leaders and activists to the importance of building community alliances at the national, transnational and global levels.

Community democracy

Community activist James Holland looks to the development of new institutions from the existing grassroots
The aim of genuine local community organising is the creation of grassroots institutions unique to each area – what you might call ‘community democracy’. This is a delicate thing that can’t be pushed forward by an outside organisation using a ‘one size fits all’ political strategy, but only by very sensitive, flexible arms-length support.
Even when organisations superficially have hierarchical structures they often operate in a collective way. This is frequently at least partly due to the their small scale and the attitudes of the people involved. And while there may be very little discussion of what you might call formal ‘politics’, there is often a lot of common-sense understanding of how we can make things better ourselves from the bottom up and a healthy disrespect for authority, politicians and other power seekers.
There is also an acceptance that you have to start where you are and often work within the dominant structures and assumptions and with all kinds of people and institutions, if they are useful, to make the change you want. This must always be done with thought, care and often some discomfort – a perfect balance of idealism and pragmatism.
The people involved in this sort of organising have often been doing it for decades and have deep connections to the communities in which they work. Individuals can be found doing it in every neighbourhood. They need to work together more and start thinking of themselves collectively as legitimate institutions of real community democracy.
It may take people and organisations coming from outside, or with a slightly bigger, longer-term view, including possibly trade unions, to achieve this. But this will have to be gradual, respectful and take place through the individuals who are already part of the communities. If these grassroots institutions do start to gather confidence they could soon form a model that could really grow and spread.

Response: An amazing day

By striking if we have to, by negotiation if we can. Heather Wakefield responds that working this way is not a ‘weakness’
Midnight, N30. Unison’s president, Eleanor Smith – a nurse – leads workers at the Birmingham Women’s Hospital out on strike. So began a day that saw more than a million public service workers on strike for pension justice.
N30 wasn’t just the biggest strike since 1926 and the biggest public sector strike ever, it was also the UK’s biggest women’s strike. An amazing day, with substantial public support, union recruitment at high levels and a mushrooming of new activists, many young, giving the lie to the view that public sector unionism is being dismantled, like the services our members represent.
Those who did not take part also merit a mention, not least because their absence was felt on N30 and because their abstention from any future action would leave big holes in any strategy underpinned solely by strike action. In the NHS, the BMA, the Royal Colleges of Nursing and Midwives were noticeable for not having balloted, as were some smaller ‘professional’ unions in the NHS. That left the lowest paid and vulnerable fighting for the highest paid with power. The firefighters’ FBU also decided not to ballot, in the light of evident progress in negotiations.
So far, so good. But did the strike achieve its objectives? What happens next? Why has there been no further action? And where does it leave public sector trade unionism?
It’s easy to forget that the government’s initial objective was to do away altogether with defined benefit schemes and replace them with defined contribution schemes – in which your retirement income is only as good as your investments and the market at the time you retire.
The ‘independent’ Hutton report made it clear that he wanted to reduce the level of pensions to the low ‘income replacement’ levels of the earlier Turner report, and the rate at which pensions accrue – generally from 1/60 of salary each year to 1/100. Hutton also wanted to keep workers outsourced from the public sector to private companies and voluntary organisations out of public sector pension schemes altogether.
Dogged negotiation
Dogged negotiation by the TUC team representing all the unions had begun to knock the rough edges off some of the coalition’s plans for these ‘big ticket’ items before the threat of N30 – let alone the actuality. But there is no doubt that the strike threat focused the minds of Francis Maude and Danny Alexander – Cabinet Office minister and chief secretary to the Treasury – who have led for the government on overall pension policy and negotiations.
Shortly after the announcement of Unison’s ballot results – and before some of the more surprising ‘yes’ votes – they produced a new ‘offer’, which included full protection for those within ten years of retirement and beyond, retention of the 1/60 accrual rate and ‘cost ceilings’ that provide scope for serious negotiation. Most workers transferred to the private or voluntary sectors will retain their right to stay in public sector pension schemes.
Those who retort that workers will still have to work longer and receive less are in some senses correct, in others not.
The switch from RPI to CPI indexation was imposed earlier on and the offer includes linkage to the rising state pension age. The former is currently the subject of legal appeal by a number of unions and the nature of the link to state pension age remains an issue in the negotiations.
What also needs to be said is that each scheme currently under review is different and it was inevitable that negotiation within sectoral bargaining groups would follow action – as it would also have to follow any further action, unless HM Government keeled over completely. This is an unlikely scenario, given the low density in many workplaces, lack of organisation in outsourced providers and the non-participation of some big-hitting unions.
The agreements currently under further negotiation and consideration by most unions in the NHS, civil service and schools are detailed ‘heads of agreement’, dealing with contribution increases alongside proposals for new schemes from 2015. The situation in the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS), which also covers support staff in police, probation, schools, further and higher education, the Environment Agency, transport and the voluntary sector, is different.
The LGPS, uniquely, is ‘funded’ to the tune of more than £140 billion, and has a membership that is much lower paid than other schemes – 70 per cent earn less than £21,000 per year. Here we have agreed some principles for negotiation, which provide the potential for no change until 2014, no contribution increases for most members, retention of ‘admitted body status’ for transferees to the private or voluntary sectors and choice over retirement age and contributions. The retirement age has been 65 for some time.
Get to grips
Those who argue that unions wanting to negotiate – the majority – have ‘sold out’ and undermined trade union solidarity need to get to grips with the complexities of public sector pensions, serious areas of weakness in membership density and organisation, sectoral bargaining arrangements in the public sector. Only when they have done that should they decide whether there is a route to getting everything we want through industrial action.
They need also to consider the other issues facing our members and the public – cuts in services, privatisation, reorganisations, redundancies, casualisation and cuts to pay and conditions. Unions need to strike, campaign and negotiate on these issues too – placing ourselves firmly alongside service users and communities – as well as fighting on our unique industrial challenges like pensions.
In the meantime, our dispute with the coalition remains, our ballot is ‘live’ and we will consult our members over further action if negotiations fail to deliver. In that event, industrial action will need to last longer and include unions hitherto not participating. That will be a challenge. But it’s worth looking for a resolution through negotiation first.
Heather Wakefield is the head of local government at Unison.

Nobody takes the decision to strike lightly. Strikes are very expensive – the cost to the unions of 30 November, including ballots, will be millions of pounds. Union members will sacrifice up to £100 million in pay altogether.

The unions are taking action because other options have been blocked by the government. It effectively froze negotiations. It is only the threat of strikes that has led to any change in the government’s position.

When the unions do eventually decide they have to resort to strikes, they discuss with employers to organise emergency cover and ensure that no one is in danger and vulnerable people are not harmed.

Home care for the elderly, urgent operations and accident and emergency departments all continue to function. Unions agree with employers that enough people are exempt from the strike to make sure this is the case.

MYTH: Unions are just a ‘lobby group’ for workers’ selfish interests

Public sector workers are less motivated by their own pay and conditions than by a strong public service ethos. 53 per cent of NHS staff regularly work additional unpaid hours over and above their contract (Annual NHS Staff Survey). The most common reason for working unpaid hours was ‘because I want to provide the best care I can’.

Public sector unions play a key social justice role, campaigning for decent public services for all. They would like to be striking to this end, but that is illegal. They are only allowed to take action over their own pay and conditions.

But good conditions are part of ensuring quality public services – after all, services will be better if the workers providing them are secure about their futures, rather than anxious.

Unions can hardly be accused of representing ‘sectional interests’ when they do so much campaigning on wider issues such as anti-racism and freedom for Palestine.

MYTH: Unions are a thing of the past – a declining minority of the workforce

The unions are constantly renewing themselves. Many trade unions are in fact growing as they reach out to new groups. For example, Unison signed up 160,000 new members last year – 27,000 of them aged under 30. Unions are also on the rise internationally as more of the world is industrialised and workers start to fight for their rights.

Deindustrialisation and legal attacks have reduced the number in unions in the UK since the 1970s. But with nearly seven million members (National Statistics), trade unions are still the largest voluntary organisations in the country.

And another estimated 3.3 million non-union workers are covered by collective agreements negotiated by a union.

MYTH: Unions are a drag on the economy

Government-commissioned research shows that unions bring an identifiable range of benefits to the economy, and the taxpayer, worth up to £1.1 billion every year (‘Workplace representatives: a review of their facilities and facility time’, BERR). This is through their contribution to dispute resolution, reductions in workplace injuries and work-related illnesses, and improved take-up of training.

There are also productivity gains worth up to £12 billion (‘The Facts About Facility Time’, TUC) thanks to improved morale and employee engagement, among other factors.

Even the International Monetary Fund has published research (‘Inequality, Leverage and Crises’, IMF) suggesting that union bargaining helps maintain economic stability, by keeping a lid on inequalities and putting a brake on runaway expansions of household debt.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman says: ‘If we want a society of broadly shared prosperity … we need to restore the bargaining power that labour has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages.’

MYTH: Unions only care about the public sector, where most of their members work

The government talks a lot about how ‘unfair’ unions are for private sector workers – but workers in the private sector won’t benefit one jot from an attack on the public sector.

The public sector’s conditions are better because unions have fought to maintain standards in the face of a race to the bottom. Union members’ hourly earnings are around 17 per cent higher than those of non-union members.

Unions face enormous challenges recruiting and organising in the private sector because of the nature of much employment. But millions of private sector workers are in unions – and millions more who are not in a union would like to join one. Unions want to level up, not race to the bottom.

According to the British Workplace Representation and Participation Survey, 46 per cent of employees in non-unionised workplaces say they would become members if unions were enabled to recruit and organise there. That alone would easily take total union membership above 50 per cent nationally.

MYTH: Unions are pale, male and stale

In fact, unions have been working continually to address inequalities and secure greater participation and representation of women, black and ethnic minorities, disabled and young people ever since the social movements of the 1970s transformed understandings of inequality and work.

Unison, for example, has over a million women members – more than two thirds of the union. Women’s representation is growing across the unions, and many now actively encourage women to get involved and become reps.

It’s taken time and struggle, and there’s still a lot to be done, but unions score higher than most institutions on diversity and equalities – including not just businesses but also political parties. Young people today are far more likely to join a union than a political party.

MYTH: Unions are undemocratic, with ‘union barons’ ordering members to strike

The very role of a trade union is to provide democratic representation of its members in the workplace. The right to form and join trade unions is generally considered to be a fundamental part of any democratic society, and is specifically mentioned in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 23).

Unions spread a culture of democracy. Research suggests high levels of union membership are linked to democratic participation more generally, such as voting in elections and campaigning in the community (‘The Everyday Democracy Index’, Demos).

Union leaders are elected democratically by a ballot of every member. Policy is made through the unions’ democratic structures, such as annual delegate conferences. As with any democratic institution there are flaws, and improvements must be fought for, but in few organisations are the leaders as accountable as they are in the unions.

No strike can take place without the support of at least 50 per cent of those voting by postal ballot. Two out of every three MPs didn’t get 50 per cent of the vote at the last general election.

MYTH: Unions are unpopular

Trade unions’ portrayal in the media could make you think that they are universally despised. But surveys show that this is far from the case.

Even at the height of the attack on the unions, when MORI opinion polls found a majority of people agreeing that unions were ‘run by militants’, 73 per cent still agreed that unions are essential to protect workers’ interests’. Today 76 per cent say they are essential.

A ComRes opinion poll at the time of the smaller pensions strikes in June this year found that a majority of the public thought ‘public sector workers are right to take strike action’. With up to three million set to strike on 30 November, these arguments are ones we can win.

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