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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What’s at stake is not just a new round of concessions. The aftermath of the deepest capitalist crisis since the Great Depression has provided political and economic elites with an opportunity to lock-in two longer-term changes: a reduction and privatization in public services on a scale not seen before, and – with private sector unions devastated by job loss and unable to significantly expand unionization – weakening the remaining stronghold of unionism, public sector workers.

The attack on public services is commonly posed in terms of ‘cutbacks’, but it’s crucial to also link it to privatization. For some time now corporations have been chomping at the bit to profit from public services and this has emerged independent of whether there are deficits or not. Governments have been moving to accommodate this by restructuring how these services are organized and delivered so that they can, piecemeal if necessary, be privatized.

The crisis in government finances is being used to accelerate this trend. The end result will be losing services that aren’t privately profitable and sacrificing quality and access – while paying more – for the health care, garbage collection, utilities, mail, and all the other services we will then need to buy (or still finance through our taxes).

An effective response requires a movement much stronger than what we currently have. This gets to the second issue: the attack on unions. We obviously need to fight back. We know from experience that if we don’t, that only invites the other side to be even more aggressive. But given what we are up against – a state committed to radically changing the rules – it’s also clear that ‘business as usual’, even if more militant, won’t be enough. We need to engage this struggle in new ways and this means re-evaluating everything about our own structures, processes and strategies.

Strategic Choices: Leading the Fight for Public Services

Unions emerged as sectional, not class, organizations. They united workers in a particular workplace or sector and focused on making gains for those particular members. In an earlier time, this achieved important benefits that were subsequently spread to others beyond the unionized sector. But when circumstances changed and corporations and governments concluded that working class gains had to be reversed to preserve profits, we were ill prepared to address their new aggression. The legacy of concentrating on our own compensation and conditions left us fragmented and vulnerable to the latest attacks.

Governments have been exploiting that weakness for some time and are now more aggressively trying to use fiscal deficits to isolate public sector workers. This involves framing the choice as being between the level of worker compensation and the level of public services. With the rest of the working class taking it on the chin, the fact that the public sector remains relatively well-off aggravates the danger of its separation from the rest of the class.  The retreats in the private sector, the cutbacks in employment insurance and increase in precarious work, the continuously falling rates of social assistance, all leave public sector workers open to resentment.

To argue that we’ve always supported better social services, point to our progressive conference resolutions and insist that the rich should be taxed to pay for decent services and fair compensation is all valid, but won’t convince those we need to reach. Our commitment must be proven in practice, through the priorities we set and carry out. This means making a strategic choice: we must re-balance our focus from traditional collective bargaining to identifying the defense of public services as a primary priority and take on – in bargaining, in our relationships to service recipients, in how we carry out strikes, and on the streets – the leadership of the fight for adequate, high-quality and responsive social services.

It’s important to be clear about what such a reorientation means. It will require radical changes to all our strategies, tactics and structures. It implies reallocating union resources, building new local and sectoral as well as national capacities, a profound deepening of membership participation, rethinking how we relate to the community, daring to publicly expose poor services while speaking to how they could be improved, and developing the confidence and vision to move beyond fighting on ‘their’ terrain – a terrain on which competitiveness and keeping bankers happy dominates all other values. It essentially involves, to put it bluntly, a revolution inside our unions.

Many activists and leaders will be nervous about such a transformation in union life. Given the union culture they’ve grown up in, they may view this as ‘trading’ off their entitlements for a worthy but secondary cause. The reality however is that first, the level and quality of public services are hardly a ‘secondary’ issue; they represent the crucial contribution public sector workers make to the rest of society. Second, improving the level and quality of services are inseparable from improving our workloads and working conditions. And third, we need to come to grips with the fact that as things stand, though we need to continue to defend our past gains and may win some short-term battles, we can’t win the war unless we broaden our struggle, no matter how legitimate our demands.

Trade unionism as usual will only lead to public sector workers becoming even more cut off and vulnerable. Developing the strength to defend our jobs and conditions can only come from getting a key part of the public on our side. If we can’t find ways to develop this kind of public support – especially from other sections of the working class, be they unionized or non-unionized, fully employed or precariously employed, unemployed or the poor – we won’t get very far in sustaining our wage demands and benefits, raising the standards of lower-paid members, or defending working conditions.

Moreover, while the primary focus of unions has been on bargaining collective agreements and resolving workplace grievances, the attack is now coming directly from the state. It will come on many fronts at the same time – from attacking seniority rights of teachers, to privatizing health care services, to limiting the right to strike. This reinforces the limits of struggles confined to our own particular workplaces, sectors and unions. Those struggles can only have a chance of widespread success if taken on as a class, alongside the rest of labour and new allies.

Facing Austerity: Social Democracy Won’t Solve our Problems

The social cuts and attacks on union rights that we’ve already seen in Canada from politicians of all stripes are clearly going to get worse. The more aggressive cuts in the US can be expected to bring mounting pressures for the same here. We, of course, already have our own home-grown politicians and economic elites ready to lead that charge. With a right-wing populist as mayor of Canada’s largest city, a confident conservative government having recently won a majority nationally, and a tax-cutting, programme-chopping anti-union party leading in the polls as Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, heads for a fall election, it would be foolish to underestimate what we are about to face.

The Ontario conservatives’ platform includes compulsory tendering of support services across the public sector – everything will be up for sale. Legislation would presumably be introduced to over-ride collective agreement provisions that would otherwise obstruct such tendering. (Since the constitution blocks this being done unilaterally, this would most likely follow a period of so-called ‘consultation’ with public sector unions to protect against a legal challenge.)

Should this become a reality, support workers such as cleaners and food service staff would be ‘allowed’ (encouraged) to bid against corporations for their jobs – which could only be done by agreeing to significantly cut labour costs to compete in this new market, including not just wages but benefits and defined benefit contribution plans. Those who don’t compete lose their jobs under this proposal.  Because the proposed tendering policy targets support workers while at the same time protecting teachers and nurses (for now!), the Conservative’s platform also threatens to divide the unions.

One response from unions may be to simply ignore or downplay the threat. Another response will be to look to political parties as the answer, but past experience and experience elsewhere have already shown that making this central would be a diversion from what truly needs to be done. We can fight within social democratic parties to win more progressive policies and use the moments of heightened political discussion that elections provide to highlight our issues, but very much more is needed.

‘Politics’ needs to be redefined as building the kind of working class organizations and capacities that can ensure that our needs are taken seriously.  This means public sector unions using their significant resources to advance a political agenda that includes the entire working class. No existing party is committed to a fundamental challenge to financial and corporate power. No party is arguing that in a society that is so much richer than it was a generation ago, workers should be raising not lowering their expectations. No party is looking to develop the working class into a powerful social force. No existing political party will save us.

Building a Labour Movement That is Up to the Task

If the only thing that will prevent  public sector workers from being defeated in the coming battles will be our resolve to engage in militant action, intelligently and creatively deployed to build public support, then how do we build that kind of movement?

The crucial starting point is to acknowledge the weaknesses within our own organizations – weaknesses that pre-date the present attacks. (There are of course pockets of impressive strength in our movement, but it seems fair to say that these are exceptions.) Our weaknesses range from debilitating cultures of bureaucratization to thin and ineffective democracy, inadequate expressions of class solidarity and little strategic sense of how to respond to the great changes that have occurred over the past three decades.

This is what workers and worker activists should be discussing now. How do we move into motion to fight the most immediate battles, but do so in a way that also builds the capacities we’ll need to expand our options and fight the larger battles? How do we get this on the agenda of our unions and push them to come up with concrete implementation plans and timetables?

As we struggle with renewing our unions there are past and present trade union experiences and examples that are worth reviewing and learning from.

• In the mid-1990s, the Ontario Days of Action introduced an internationally unique form of protest. Confronted with massive cuts to social programs and the erosion of labour legislation, unions and social movements worked together in an imaginative and disciplined spirit to hold a series of one-day general strikes moving into different communities over a 30-month period.

With workers asked to lose a day’s pay and risk employer retaliation, unions were pushed to explain the importance of issues beyond their members’ immediate bargaining interests. And with the press warning of hordes of union organizers coming to their community, local debates intensified over the Harris government’s cuts. One limit was that, after building new labour-community structures in various cities, we didn’t keep them in place after moving on to the next shutdown. It would be worthwhile returning to that experience to more generally ask what – both positive and negative – it can teach us about becoming more successful next time.

• In the early 1990s, when the government tightened unemployment insurance (as it was then called) and pushed its employees to cut more people off from qualifying, the union – the Public Service Alliance of Canada  - found a way of expressing meaningful solidarity. It put together pamphlets on how to answer questions so it was harder to block people from being disqualified and, since the front-line workers couldn’t distribute them at risk of discipline, the union had other members as well as staff distribute them outside the unemployment insurance offices.

• Also in the early 1990s, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, on strike against their employer, delivered pension checks without pay during that strike to emphasize that that they didn’t consider retirees the enemy. When the government stopped this and forced pensioners to line up at a warehouse to get their checks, the Postal Workers came down not to picket, but to hand out water and offer lawn chairs to pensioners standing in long lines in the heat.

• Could transit workers who are engaged in a dispute show their support for free and accessible transit by not collecting fares before withdrawing their services and refusing to police the paying of fares (in the name of health and safety) if they are denied the right to strike?  Could garbage workers defending the public provision of the essential service they provide take the lead in redirecting garbage bags to the financial district rather than to our parks when their service is interrupted, or selectively picking up the garbage to exclude the richest areas of the city? Such tactics might not be sustainable, but they demonstrate whose side we’re on and that strikes that affect the public as a whole are only reluctantly taken.

It is also worth asking, as the attacks on us escalate, whether it makes sense to leave it to each union in the public sector to go on strike according to their own schedule and strength. In most cases, such strikes will quickly be made illegal or ended through public pressures but even where the occasional union holds its own, they will become the target for isolation and more intensive pressures for rollbacks later. Wouldn’t it be better, in the strategic spirit raised above, of coordinating a larger response of rotating strikes across sectors and creative disruptions in each sector?

 One idea discussed within CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) goes further. Its Ontario hospital division, OCHU has been conducting provincial demonstrations and many community fights against hospital service cuts, but understands that more pressure is essential to defend the hospitals from closure and privatization. Withdrawing labour to defend hospital services seems contradictory, so the question was how to act in a way that avoids or limits negative impacts on patient care and the consequent loss of public support. Union activists are now discussing the possibility of experimenting with a new tactic: a work-in rather than a walk-out – a counter-strike. Members who are off work would to come in to work at a specific time to highlight the crushing workloads and the large cuts to staff and beds in Ontario (19,000 beds over the last 20 years in Ontario, while needs were growing).

This approach would demonstrate the kind of services that could be provided if these services were in fact a social priority.  The actions could be rotated across communities, concretely demonstrating the reluctance of workers to withdraw their services and their commitment to their clients, while putting management on the spot publicly. In placing the level of services on the bargaining table, the union would be both challenging management rights and politicizing bargaining in the sense of challenging the state’s pressure for cutbacks.

The work-in seems to pit the members’ traditional entitlements against the defense of the service. But that is also its strength because it can only be discussed successfully in the context of the austerity agenda and the need for approaches that build alliances with the public.  That activists remain skeptical about this tactic is understandable. Some see it as a betrayal of the basic principle that union strength is about withdrawing labour, not working for free; to others, the contrast with past tactics raises new complexities and uncertainties; and some are uncomfortable with the added pressures this would bring to educate and mobilize the members.

It therefore requires the union to convince activists that it will both provide central coordination and also resources for local mobilization, as members will have to be won over to the tactic in unit and department meetings. In any case, just raising this issue has forced the need for broader membership involvement in the debate over strategy. It will go forward but as an experiment in one community, which will be followed by analysis and more discussion.

One of the key ongoing questions facing the union movement – all the more so as private services expand at the expense of publicly-organized services – is that of unionization.  In the US, unionization in the private sector is now under 7 per cent and even including the public sector it has now fallen below 12 per cent. Though our union density remains much higher than that of the US, the American figures are an uncomfortable warning about our future. Because unionization is approached as a matter of gaining members rather than building the working class, unions increasingly compete for those members rather than co-operating to bring some organizational strength to groups of workers. This wastes resources and often also leads to unions undermining each other’s drives.

Consider, for example, Ontario’s homecare system. There are approximately 20,000 unorganized homecare workers in Ontario. After the Conservative government introduced compulsory tendering for homecare services in the 1990s, non-union multinational corporations with much lower labour costs largely displaced the not-for-profit unionized agencies. Unions that successfully organized homecare workers found that their new units were lost the next time the contract was tendered because of their higher costs and this generally discouraged unionization.

The compensation of private homecare workers – $12.50 an hour, no guaranteed hours of work, no pensions or benefits – is accelerating the movement of work away from the unionized hospital and long-term care sectors. It’s an example of an organizing dilemma that likely can only be solved through cooperative organizing by multiple unions with a sector-wide focus. The point would be to pool our resources, organize all of the unorganized agencies at once, bargain as a council of trade unions, bring the state rather than the individual corporations to the bargaining table, and use militant action to move these workers to compensation comparable with the public sector. But that kind of strategy is conditional on first going a much further way towards changing our unions.

Conclusion: Concrete Hope

In the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression and with unemployment rates over 20 per cent, workers ‘invented’ an industrial unionism that overcame divisions between skilled and unskilled workers. They introduced the tactic of sit-down strikes, initiated there own democratic structures via elected stewards and generated industry-wide pattern bargaining. Those breakthroughs were largely responsible for later bringing us many of our social services and benefits and, in the 1960s, the breakthroughs of organizing in the public sector by workers tired of government paternalism. That public sector breakthrough also created vitally significant new opportunities for women and revived the trade union movement more generally.

In that earlier period, capitalism legitimated itself by offering steady material gains, the promise of greater equality, a more meaningful democracy, and a quality of life that went beyond the pressures of economic survival. That era is over. Today, the message is that if you don’t like the way things are, tough – you have no alternative. The real lesson of course is that if the present economic system can’t offer us a better life, then it is that system, not our expectations that needs changing.

Previous generations of workers came up with creative responses to the challenges they faced. It’s now our turn – the turn of the great number of committed activists in the labour movement – to start truly taking on these issues within their unions,  build networks of support across unions and across communities, and convert widespread frustrations into concrete hope.

…………..

Michael Hurley is President of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, a division of CUPE.

Sam Gindin is a retired former assistant to the president of the CAW, Canada’s largest private sector union.

(A version of this article first appeared in the Socialist Project “Bullet”, June 14, 2011)

Len McCluskey

Hilary Wainwright  There seems to be a new self-confidence in the unions. What do you think lies behind it?
Len McCluskey  There is a sense of urgency. I’ve never been involved in a period like this before where they are effectively challenging everything that we’ve known, everything I’ve grown up with as a kid and way into adulthood. Whether it’s a new-found confidence I’m not sure. But certainly this is not the time to cower in a corner and hope that things pass you by.
I have a deliberate strategy to shout about our values and what we stand for. Our beliefs are the core values of working people and we’re their voice.
We have to raise the consciousness of people and their confidence, and the only way we raise the confidence of people is being confident yourselves and trying to explain about an alternative and a different way.
We’re going through uncharted waters. And the reason we don’t know what is going to happen is because of the vagaries of the global financial markets.
So in those circumstances, it’s vitally important for the trade unions to be focused, to be clear, to be unequivocal, to be strong. So maybe that’s what we’re seeing.
I became an officer of the then T&G [a forerunner union of Unite] in 1979 and they had 2.1 million members amid 13.5 million trade unionists. Today there are just 6.5 million in total, and yet on March 26 we organised the biggest demonstration in the history of the labour movement. That’s an indication of the anger out there.
And you look at the students last November – while the rest of us were still pondering strategies, they had 50–60,000 people on the streets. Fantastic!
Hilary Wainwright  Nina was there…
Len McCluskey  Well, congratulations. You did more on that single day than a hundred general secretaries sitting in meetings for a month.
Look at direct action groups like UK Uncut, a fantastic group of young people – we’re already linking up with them. So these are interesting times and for me it really is about us trying to keep pace with the time, not lagging behind the anger and confusion that’s being felt out there, and being seen as an alternative.
Nina Power  To follow up on what you are saying about how unions can learn from new forms of organisation and protest: how can the unions link up with people who aren’t in work?
Len McCluskey  This new period that we’re entering necessitates us being smarter, cleverer, streetwise. Just a couple of weeks ago at our rules conference we agreed a new ‘community membership’, which will be launched probably on 1 September.
The likelihood is that this will be 50p a week, and it is for ‘non‑working people’: not just unemployed, but non-working people. It’s to demonstrate that we want to reach out, we want to engage not just in our workplaces but with our communities in which we live.
Unite should be identified with everything that’s going on in the community: a protest of parents or tenants who feel a road is too dangerous, or the closure of the library – whatever, Unite should be there.
And the reason why I want that is that whenever we have an industrial struggle I want the community to be there for us, so the community wants to assist us. I want to look at the concept of community picketing and all of that. And that includes the students.
Nina Power  So how can community members and students play an active part in the union?
Len McCluskey  In community branches and in what we call ‘area activist committees’ – but it’s a question of ‘why would they want to?’ and ‘what could we offer them?’ We’re going to develop a whole series of things.
For example, at the moment unfortunately Citizens Advice Bureaux and welfare rights organisations will be getting decimated all over the place, and ordinary people will look to someone for help. Now we are developing an approach where we can give that type of help and assistance.
But we’ve got to be careful, and it is a fine line – we’re a trade union. And a trade union is about organising workers in work. So we have to be careful that we don’t distort the nature of the beast that we are.
Now, we can open up like this because we’re not only defending jobs, conditions and pay within the public sector, we’re trying to defend services that affect all of us – the private sector, all of us. Our ‘area activist committees’ are supposed to be what the name says on the tin. They’re supposed to draw people together within a geographical confine to develop common issues about what’s going on in their locality.
Community members will be able not only to participate, but also to be elected onto those committees. I believe that this will generate an image of Unite being interested in all levels of life for ordinary working people.
Michael Calderbank  Unite now are overwhelmingly one of the leading funders of the Labour party. What is the strategy for Unite influencing the party?
Len McCluskey  That’s the big question of the day for us. One of the core pillars of Unite is to use our power to have a progressive influence on society, and to punch our weight in the political arena – to have a powerful voice in the political arena.
There’s a huge question mark over whether we have that voice, after 13 years of a Labour government. We are now the worst protected workforce in the whole of Europe. It’s an absolute disgrace what happened in those 13 years.
Wherever I went in the general secretary election, I was consistently asked ‘Why are we giving these huge amounts of money to Labour and what do we get out of it?’ So I have no intention of giving a blank cheque to Labour.
I am committed to trying to reassert the values that we stand for in our party. I want to do that by creating an alliance with other trade unions and MPs specifically to develop a common narrative and programme to reclaim the party for our values. To make Labour – and I’d get into bother with some of my left comrades for saying this but there you go – a radical reformist party again, to give it a radical edge.
Just look at what’s happened up in Scotland. The SNP had the radical edge. The SNP appealed to ordinary working people. The Labour Party up in Scotland was pathetic, the campaign we ran was pathetic, with no radical edge, with disregard for the fantastic heritage that Scotland has shown in the past.
So it’s about trying. Is that going to be easy? Absolutely not.
The jury is still very much out but I think it’s possible, for one reason: because Ed Miliband won the leadership of the party. Had David won the leadership, I think people like myself would have been giving real serious thought to where we go, and I mean that in the historical context.
A wise old Labour MP said to me: ‘Lennie, I’m sick of telling these clowns here’ – he was pointing at New Labour MPs – ‘the Labour Party has no god-given right to exist’.
The Labour Party can only exist if it speaks on behalf of ordinary working people and organised labour. If it stops doing that then its very existence comes into question. Now, David didn’t win – Ed won. He said that he wanted to re-connect with ordinary people, he wanted to get a blank sheet of paper and start to talk to people. In that context, we have an opportunity, that’s all, to talk to him and try to influence him as he constructs his vision for what Labour can offer at the next general election, and he’s still in the process of doing that.
Obviously all kinds of people will criticise him – so I won’t. He’s 41 years of age, comes from a middle-class background, out of university straight into politics. He doesn’t fully understand who we are, the function of trade unions, and perhaps he doesn’t understand our values. He wants to learn.
In Ed’s acceptance speech at conference I shouted ‘Rubbish!’ at him, which was an inappropriate thing for me to do. The emotions just got the better of me – and I’ve spoken to him about it since then.
I told him ‘The rest of your speech was great.’ But it was when he spoke about irresponsible strikes. This is the problem that we have, and the opportunity, because he doesn’t understand, but he wants to, he wants to listen.
I told him he was ill-advised to put that in, because here’s the truth: there is no such thing as an irresponsible strike. I’ve never known any worker who wants to go out on strike. I said ‘I don’t expect you to support strikes but you need to understand that when workers go out on strike it’s because they have a deep sense of grievance and they fear there’s nothing else they can do.’
People understand that workers take strike action when they feel pushed into a corner. And they’re being pushed into a corner by this government, so all fire must be at the government.
Michael Calderbank  Will he learn, and what if he doesn’t?
Len McCluskey  We’ll see. If Labour don’t win the next election then Ed Miliband will be eaten up by the Blairite sharks that have been circling. And then who will become leader? Will Bonnie Prince Charlie return from overseas and David take up the mantle? Because one thing is for certain: as the leader of Unite, I won’t be looking to continue to support a Blairite Mark II Labour Party that’s going to run us into the sand again.
I’m an eternal optimist, and I think we can persuade Ed Miliband what our values are, and we can help him to construct his radical alternative.
Hilary Wainwright  Can you move outside the box, while still remaining affiliated to the party, by putting resources into developing a radical alternative, so you’re trying to change the public climate? Ed’s trapped, but its up to us to create the space into which he can move…
Len McCluskey  Spot on! For example, there is going to be the creation of a new left think-tank – and this is hot off the press – which we suspect will be funded by the unions, and it will be about developing alternative arguments and seeking to establish that our alternatives have intellectual value.
Rather than talking about repeal of the anti-trade union laws, which is the kind of slogan that we’ve been coming out with for thirty years, we need to freshen up our language. I’m interested in talking about fairness in the 21st century.
There’s going to be a new group of Labour MPs formed, which I think will be called ‘Labour Working’ – a group of MPs based on trade union values.
Hilary Wainwright  And the issue of disaffiliation would only arise in the nightmare scenario of the Blairites coming back?
Len McCluskey  I’m still concentrating on taking the party back. When I was travelling round in the general secretary election, I’d put forward my vision and I’d always be met with the same question: ‘That all sounds very well Len, that all sounds great and you obviously feel it has a chance of succeeding, but what happens if it doesn’t?’
And I gave the same answer. Our activists within the union will be the ones who determine whether it has failed, and if it does fail then we might just have to do what our forefathers and foremothers did at the beginning of the last century, which is to sit round the table and discuss where we go next.
I think that’s exactly what will happen – not just in Unite. I don’t want this to be seen as Unite as the ones with all the answers because we haven’t. That’s why I’m speaking to others about setting up an alliance. And if we are going to try to re-influence the Labour party from the grassroots then we have to put resources into that.
Some argue that New Labour cut the arteries and the heart of the Labour Party is no longer there. I’m saying that the resuscitation team has arrived and we’re going to pump something back into it. Is there a guarantee of success? Of course not. But I want to be able to say at the end of my tenure of office that I gave it my best.

Mark Serwotka

Hilary Wainwright  What’s your assessment of 30 June?
Mark Serwotka  It surpassed all of our expectations. Turnouts were the best that we have had, despite the government’s propaganda. Clearly the fact that it was more than one union caught people’s imagination.
I think it has strengthened our hand. It completely wrong-footed the government in terms of the public debate, particularly by putting private sector pensions on the agenda – we want to drive them up, as they’ve been a big scandal for the past 15 years.
At the TUC meeting the following day, all the unions who spoke felt the day of action and what it achieved had put us in a different place. We’re meeting next week to talk about the next wave of action.
Nina Power  In terms of this next wave of action, there has been the student movement, which Len McCluskey and yourself have been very vocal about. Len said that students had put the trade unions on the spot. Now there’s the discussion about a general strike or coordinated action. How do you see things developing?
Mark Serwotka  If any of our public sector counterparts are currently planning a general strike, I’d be overjoyed but I’d be very surprised. But what we are on the verge of is coordinated strike action that will give us the largest strikes that we have seen.
I am pretty optimistic that we will see in the early autumn a strike that was a lot bigger than the one we just had. I’d be very shocked if we got to autumn and we didn’t have a bigger strike than this one. The scale of it is up for discussion though, and a lot of that depends on what happens in the talks in the next few weeks.
The Unite stuff in Southampton is very interesting for the potential that throws up. [You can have] set-piece, periodic national strikes that run to hundreds of thousands or millions, creating political pressure, and rolling targeted action of a sustained level that starts creating real industrial grief. I think the trick is to combine them both.
Hilary Wainwright  So going on to this autumn offensive: what’s your strategy for maintaining the momentum from June 30 for building up towards the autumn?
Mark Serwotka  Our ballot gives us a legal mandate to not just have national strikes but also employer-based actions against cuts without the need for a further ballot. So for us over the summer, I think you will see a quite significant amount of strikes in different departments.
Clearly the big thing is the TUC congress at the start of September. We’ve got an eve-of-TUC event planned in the theatres in the West End, with comedians and political speeches. And we envisage going to the TUC with a resolution, hopefully agreed with other unions, that talks about another wave of coordinated strikes.
Nina Power  You don’t have the same relationship with the Labour party as Unite, but how do you see the Labour leadership and what they have been doing?
Mark Serwotka  I think Miliband was a disgrace. He was so badly advised. If there were negotiations going on, of any merit, I doubt there would have been a strike.
We believe that if he was prepared to put himself in the forefront of campaigning against cuts, it would increase his popularity enormously.
When we talk to Unite and others we understand the affiliated unions are in a different place, and I hope they all start exerting some influence.
We’re going to be doing something very interesting later this year. We are going to ballot our members on the potential for standing candidates ourselves in elections. We reached the conclusion at our conference that after three years of debate, now is the time to consider standing candidates in certain circumstances.
Obviously our aim is not to stand 600 in a general election but to target by-elections or elections where it is clear that all candidates are pro-austerity, privatisation and cuts.
Hilary Wainwright  On what sort of platform? Anti-cuts, pro-alternative?
Mark Serwotka  We would talk to see whether there is anyone in the field, which might take the form of us supporting a local anti-cuts candidate, for example, but we are considering whether we would stand a trade union candidate.
It wouldn’t be under any existing umbrellas, it would be something very different.
Hilary Wainwright  And quite local in a way?
Mark Serwotka  It would be localised, so say if it was in Brighton you wouldn’t be standing against Caroline Lucas, and if it was in Hayes you wouldn’t be standing against John McDonnell.
An example that I used to use was when Pat McFadden was putting the privatisation of the post office through parliament, and in Wolverhampton the likelihood was that all the candidates would have been pro post office privatisation.
But that was under Labour. Now it’s under the Tories, so you have to be a little more careful, a bit more selective in what you do.
Hilary Wainwright  Following the loss of the AV referendum, what do you feel about the fact that PR probably isn’t on the agenda now for some time? Does it make the whole issue of Scotland and Wales more important as the wedge that will lead to a constitutional shake-up?
Mark Serwotka  We supported AV, we put out a yes position. I have to say it was very hard to get enthusiastic about it.
I thought the campaign was appalling. It seemed to be all about Nick Clegg to me. It was a bit of a missed opportunity. We’re for PR, we want PR. When we campaign in Scotland and Wales, it’s very different to the first-past-the-post stuff here.
I think the Scottish situation is fascinating to see what the SNP will do with its majority. And the Welsh Labour government has been at odds with the members in Westminster, so I think there will be lots of ebbs and flows. We had a much more progressive, cooperative approach from the Welsh government when it was Labour/Plaid than we ever had off Gordon Brown.
Nina Power  Do you have a general sense of what on earth you think the government is doing? They’re going for this full-on attack on the welfare state and the public sector, making cuts Thatcher didn’t dare to…
Mark Serwotka  My own take is that there are two things going on. On the one level I think there is a surprising degree of incompetence from the government. They have been forced backwards on issues as variable as the forestry sell off, coastguard station closures and the ‘pause’ on the NHS.
As radical as Thatcher was, you look at what they’re doing now and arguably it’s more radical in terms of shrinking the state, the attack on welfare, the way they’re dealing with education. If you put the whole picture together, it’s extraordinary and they’re doing it all at the same time.
I think their real ideological objective is to have a mass transfer from state to private. That’s what I think the pensions thing is about ultimately.
While the Tories have clearly had to stomach some u-turns, all the right-wing ideologues are coming out to say whatever you do, don’t give anything to the unions. I think that’s because they understand that if you concede to the unions, it’s a whole different kettle of fish than conceding to people who don’t want to sell off forests. That’s why this pensions thing isn’t going to be easy – it’s going to be a huge scrap.
Michael Calderbank  One of the things that PCS has been impressively trying to do is create the mood and the idea that there is an alternative. Where’s your sense of where the public mood is on that big question?
Mark Serwotka  We recognised early on that if you can’t convince people that there’s an alternative, you won’t convince them to fight, because if you think it has got to happen, what’s the point in fighting really?
I think the mood is shifting. For example, I did Question Time. You say ‘no cuts at all’ and everybody there, from Dimbleby to Diane Abbott, is looking at you like you’ve gone off your head. But the audience loved it. I think it’s the unions who are leading the debate.
Michael Calderbank  What about groups like UK Uncut, which have left aside the traditional media and physically occupied spaces?
Mark Serwotka  We work very closely with UK Uncut. We campaigned on tax for three years but it was only when young people went to Topshop and shouted ‘pay your taxes’ that it made front page news.
So it’s a classic example of having to do the graft in terms of research to develop the opportunities, then having the means to turn that into something public. I think there’s lots of scope to do more of that.
Hilary Wainwright  Is there one key lesson in how to challenge the Tory argument?
Mark Serwotka  I think it’s about being very clear that you stand for something different and making what you stand for relevant to a whole range of people.
You can campaign for all sorts – you should be there to defend the forests and the libraries, and then hopefully they will come and join your march when you strike for pensions. It’s creating that real big picture of alliances, and I think we can do that because of the scale of what they’re planning.
To get opinion polls that even went 50-50 on the strike is incredible. The majority of people supported the unions against the government and I think that has got to tell us something.
It comes back to the student point that you made earlier on, because the students lit the touchpaper as far as I’m concerned. We’re carrying on campaigning with youth groups and student groups, UK Uncut and others to try and keep that big alliance together as much as we can. n

Trade unions have a major role to play in this. Over the past decade they  have often been identifies as ‘special interest groups’ – groups that have to be faced down by government in defence of the general good. Many of their leaders have felt vulnerable to this change and reluctant to openly challenge a government elected by the people.

However there is another view and one that is gaining ground: that given the scale of the social crisis that beckons the trade unions are now the only institutions capable of preserving a democratic civil society, constraining the unbridled powers and capacities of the rich.

Legitimation crisis

A number of factors have contributed to the development of a legitimation crisis within the British political system. The breakdown of the two party system is one important development. Today no single party can  will  an election backed by the majority of those who voted, let alone a majority of the electorate.

This is exacerbated by the ongoing formation of a new political class dominating Westminster politics. This class is drawn largely from business and professional families and educated in the  major universities; mainly Oxbridge. Normally recruitment to the class requires no experience of employment beyond the political machine itself, where work in research and public relations is obtained often through patronage.

More broad spatial demographic changes also have an effect. Danny Dorling has identified the ways in which ‘mixed neighbourhoods’ have become far less prevalent as the property market has worked in a way that people increasingly live close to people like themselves. As a consequence (and for example) almost all the members of the current cabinet represent constituencies with unemployment rates far below the national average. This spatial effect is likely to continue and make it increasingly difficult for there to be the development of a coherent national strategy to deal with the complex of crises (economic, political, environmental) that will face the UK.

One consequence of this will be an increasing centrifugal force seeing Scotland becoming independent in all but name and greater powers devolved to Wales  and Northern Ireland. Another will be the increasing concentration of poor people in poor neighbourhoods, stigmatised and prone to crisis and subject to sporadic violent regulation.

What underpins much of this has been the upward trend in income inequality which began with the intervention by the IMF in 1976 – when the bankers in New York decided that the UK had ‘run out of rope’ and has gone on apace since then. It is currently at a level not seen since before the first world war with the top 1 per cent receiving 20 per cent of the national income. This trend has produced over half a million millionaires while at the other end of the scale 13½ million people in the UK (around a fifth  of the population) live in poverty. This inequality is increasingly mirrored in health and mortality data with the very rich living longer while the poor have an early death.

Who can speak out against all of this? Who and which organisations can attempt to affect changes in these powerful tendencies?

Trade unions, class and equality

It is interesting to note that incomes were at their most  equal in the UK in 1976. This was also the year when people declared themselves to be happiest. It was also the year when trade union membership peaked. These things are not unrelated. As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett conclude in their book The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, institutional changes associated with right wing politics have been at the root of rising inequalities and of these changes trade union membership is the most important single factor.

Even at the height of the attack on trade union power when MORI polls found a majority of people agreeing that ‘trade unions had too much power’ and were ‘run by militants’, 73 per cent also agreed that ‘trade unions are essential to protect workers’ interests’.  MORI last polled on this issue in 1995 when only 24 per cent of its sample thought trade unions too powerful and 79 per cent thought them vital to the protection of workers’ interests. Interestingly, and after a gap of sixteen years MORI included the questions again this year. Today 35 per cent thought trade union too powerful but 76 per cent continued to believe them essential for workers’ protection. In all of these polls, the responses of trade union members were consistently more positive towards trade unionism; offering some support to the idea of trade unions as an ‘experience good’ – something that is valued more, once experienced directly.

And, of course thereby hangs a tale, for trade union membership has been falling since it reached the heights of 13 millions in the seventies.  While membership has been flat-lining since 2000, this is at the low level of  25 per cent of the labour force, some 7 million employees.  There are strong differences between the public (56 per cent) and private (15 per cent) sectors and between men and women, with women now and increasingly more prone to union membership than men.

This is an issue that has perplexed trade union leaders for some time, often to the exclusion of all else. Here they have received encouragement from the USA where – as recent events amongst New York’s hotel cleaning staff has shown – campaigning unions have been able to establish membership strength and support vulnerable workers in the least propitious of environments.

However there has been a game change, brought about by the policies of the current government with regard to the public sector. The cutbacks planned by conservative and liberal ministers will, in the view of the IMF, see the UK have the lowest level of public expenditure of all the OECD countries by 2014. In three years time, with these plans, the UK will have a smaller public sector than the US. Privatisation and job cuts together would see British trade union memberships dropping below 20 per cent of the labour force; perhaps well below and severely damaging the capacity of these organisations to affect major change. For them a struggle for a better society is also a struggle for their very existence, and in this they are fortunate is having in leadership positions people of real substance and experience.

Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite, was brought up in Liverpool and (to borrow from Bill Shankly) didn’t do PPE at Oxford but learned about it on the Liverpool waterfront. Similarly with Mark Serwotka of PCS  who became active in the trade union though his work experience in benefit offices in Aberdare and Sheffield. Both of these men (articulate and intelligent) came out of the working class and are framed and marked by that experience. It distinguishes them from Cameron and Clegg but also from Miliband and Balls, and from the rest of the new political class. They represent increasingly a different locus of power and understanding within society.

We should remember that in the 1951 Census, manual workers made up 64.2 per cent of the labour force of 14.7 million people. While much is often made of the decline in these numbers these accounts almost always ignore the power of memory and of generational inheritance and transfer. In the UK , and often to the dismay of the media, people have regularly expressed an identity with being working class. As the Sunday Times noted fifteen years ago:

The majority of people regard themselves as working class even when they are (according to the people who decide these things) middle class……..Confused? Either they are or we are. (The Sunday Times, 22 September 1996)

So within the threat there lies an opportunity for trade unions in Britain to survive and also to reform society for the better.  But to succeed in this they need to revolutionise themselves.

The challenges

We live in threatening times, but also a time of opportunity which trade unions need to grasp. The new government has fragile support across the country. There are few signs that the Labour Party is keen to lead a broad based opposition to the cuts and to policies of privatisation. Yet there are signs that opposition is developing – often in unexpected places. Only the trade unions – with the national organisations and experience of struggle and dispute – have the capacity to coordinate and develop this into a coherent resistance movement. But to achieve this the trade union leadership will need to act with a sense of urgency. They will need to develop new ideas, new ways of organising and work with new, more open alliances. In this, and though the direct experiences of their members they will need to develop a full defence of ‘the public’ as opposed to the assumed supremacy of ‘the market’.

In this there are many challenges; some of ideology others of organisation and practice. At the moment it is clear that a majority of the people in the UK have become convinced that cuts are necessary if we are to come out of the crisis and, in the phrase of the Tories ‘penalise our children’. The Labour Party hasn’t helped to dispel this account and most of the people think that a Labour government would have embarked on similar policies, albeit slightly slower.

However, and in spite of some anticipatory adjustments, the cuts have not yet begun. There is reason to expect that they will be seen by many as shocking. Already 57 per cent of people polled have expressed dissatisfaction with the way the coalition is governing the country. In this context the trade unions needs to be in a position to speak, not only for their members, but for the population as a whole and especially the poorest and the most vulnerable. Len McCluskey was adroit in speaking of ‘the people against the cuts’, placing the trade unions with the majority and for the country. This however needs to be backed with a strong and credible account of alternatives and of the threat to democracy posed by the enormous power of the banks.

The second challenge is one of organisation. If the trade unions are to help lead us out of this mess they will need to develop modes of organisation that have almost been forgotten. They will need to empower their local branches and organisations and encourage involvement with a wide range of social movements and protest groups. Again, in his open approach to the students and his defence of them as they faced police harassment, McCluskey hit the right note. This link also needs to be taken forward though local committees, and through a devolution of powers, that will be difficult to achieve but nonetheless essential.

To this there is another problem and one that the trade unions have struggled with over the last thirty years and it relates to the problem of striking over the delivery of public services often to the vulnerable. Aside form the publicity this gives to the Daily Mail, trade unions need to be seen to stand for a better kind of society and a better way of doing things. While striking against the employer deep consideration needs to be given to ways of ameliorating distress and harnessing this into a campaign for a better society.

The story of the public education coalition in New South Wales offers many lessons about how to build powerful and effective campaigns. The coalition had its roots in the imagination of a group of rank-and-file union leaders who believed that in order to confront the teachers’ political isolation, the union needed to form strategic links across the education community. These activists started setting up local public education lobby groups consisting of parents, teachers and school principals in the socially disadvantaged areas of outer western and south-western Sydney. Meanwhile, inside the union, these rank-and-file leaders argued that teachers needed to work constructively with principals, focusing on their common ground and agreeing to disagree where there were conflicts of interest. They also argued that the union needed to collect significant resources to fund a long-term public education campaign, establishing a multi-million ‘war chest’ funded through a $17 levy paid by all union members.

These internal reforms put the union in a strong strategic position when faced with a major policy proposal from the New South Wales state government. The state had been experimenting with changes to schools, and by 2001 had developed a policy called ‘Building the Future’ that included closing 13 inner-city schools. Initially, the union simply proclaimed its opposition to these proposals, calling on the government to launch an inquiry. But in a discussion at a union rank-and-file executive meeting, one teacher asked, ‘Why don’t we just do an inquiry ourselves?’ The idea of an independent public education inquiry was born.

The union knew that it could not run an independent inquiry on its own, so it approached the Federation of Parents and Citizens as a partner in the process. Together they funded the inquiry and drafted the terms of reference. Senior elected officials from each organisation took responsibility for the day-to-day management of the inquiry. Together they approached a professor of education, Tony Vinson, to be the inquiry’s head. He was well-regarded by government, having run previous government-initiated inquiries. He set up his own team to commission submissions, visit schools and run hearings around the state.

Over the next 12 months, between 2001 and mid-2002, the Vinson inquiry (as it became known) received 790 submissions, held almost one hundred hearings and visited several hundred schools. As it traversed the state it provided an organising opportunity for parents and teachers, who mobilised people to attend hearings. The process was very open. Hearings asked participants to identify ‘what they would change to improve the education system’, providing a space to talk about people’s personal experiences. It built new ideas for public education reform based on the experiences of the schoolyard.

The inquiry process was also consciously planned to coincide with election timelines. The inquiry began to spoon-feed its findings to the media in the nine months leading up to the 2003 state elections. In total, 96 recommendations were tabled in four separate public policy releases. To turn these broad reform proposals into a winnable political programme, the union formed a new coalition called the Public Education Alliance. This involved the union, parent groups and school principal groups. They agreed on six united demands, prioritising a policy to reduce class sizes for young children.

Together the alliance lobbied for these changes. Sometimes its members worked in parallel. School principals lobbied the Department of Education, Tony Vinson lobbied ministers, teachers used their war chest to run advertisements, and teachers and parents held meetings with local members of parliament. They also worked in concert, jointly meeting with the premier and leader of the opposition. The alliance organised a public assembly five weeks before the election to which all the political parties were invited and then questioned about their support for the six united demands.

These actions worked. Two weeks before the election, the governing Labour Party, which had been so hostile to the union in its 1999 salaries campaign, announced that it would fund the $250 million policy to reduce class sizes that had been proposed by the Vinson inquiry. The public education coalition had identified and delivered a new agenda for public education, while actively engaging union and community members in the process.
When coalitions succeed

Embedded in this story are universal lessons about coalition success. Coalitions occur when two or more organisations come together to work on something they have in common in order to have a social impact in specific place. They are defined by their organisational relationships, their common concerns and the scale at which they seek to win social change. While these three elements may be common to all coalitions, how they work in practice varies. The way in which organisations relate to each other, the kinds of issues that coalitions work on, and how a coalition seeks to achieve social influence affect the chances of success or failure.

The public education coalition followed an important rule for building strong organisational relationships – ‘less is more’. By only involving a small number of organisations, each of which had a strong shared interest in public education, it sustained the active involvement of these organisations.
In some ways, however, its organisational relationships were constrained. Coalition decision-making was dominated by the union, which provided most of the financial resources.

There was no independent coalition staff that could help manage tensions, and the coalition focused on action around education rather than building strong trusting relationships between the organisations. These weaknesses left the organisational relationships fragile, and after the class sizes campaign was won, the coalition fell away.

The coalition drew its strength from working on issues that were in the mutual interests of the different partner organisations. It sustained itself because it was based not only on a shared belief in improving public education, but shared interests in the specific demand to reduce class sizes. Teachers would benefit from smaller class sizes because reduced workload. Parents supported smaller class sizes because it improved the quality of their children’s education.

The coalition was successful because it engaged not only the interests of the organisational leaders but the lives of its members. There was a high degree of parent and teacher participation in the public education inquiry hearings.
Moreover, by working on an issue that was in the mutual interests of multiple constituencies, the coalition’s core demands tapped into a general public interest.

The union had been vulnerable in its previous campaigns over teachers’ pay because it was seen as only acting for its ‘vested’ interest in higher salaries. The strategy opened up the issue of how the union expressed itself in the public arena; it started talking about the importance of public education, not just teachers’ pay.

The coalition’s impact was enhanced because it could take action locally as well as across the state as a whole. To change the policy on class sizes, it needed to influence the state government. These political representatives were simultaneously representatives of the state as well as specific electoral districts. They were also subject to electoral timelines, most open to influence in the lead up to an election.

So the coalition focused on building pressure among local voters as well as generating public debate more broadly. The inquiry hearings generated scores of opportunities for teachers and parents to organize locally, as well as supportive media.

Over an 18-month period, hundreds of local actions created a supportive political climate for public education across the state. The teachers’ union established local groups of parents, teachers and principals who could take action to lobby individual politicians, consciously timetabled in the run-up to the elections.

‘Wins’ are not enough

We should not judge a coalition, however, merely on whether it wins (or fails to win) a public policy victory. In addition to ‘winning outcomes’, coalitions are successful if they can help shift the overall political climate.
In Chicago, a coalition called the Grassroots Collaborative briefly won a living wage ordinance that would have significantly increased the wages of retail workers such as Walmart employees. The mayor vetoed it, but in the years following this apparent ‘failure’ there was a significant shift in income policies. Mayor Daley supported an increase in the state’s minimum wage, which became the second highest in the country. And in 2010, when Walmart wanted to build a second store in Chicago, for the first time ever in the US, the company negotiated a wages agreement with local unions that paid retail workers above the minimum wage. While the coalition lost its living wage ordinance, its campaign changed the political climate around living wages.
Coalitions are also successful if they can enhance the strength of the organisations that are working together. In this way a coalition may lose a battle while still building its long-term power. This can be measured in two ways: whether a coalition helps sustain relationships between organisations over time, and whether a coalition helps to develop the leadership skills and capacity of the members and staff of the partner organisations.

One of the strengths of the public education coalition, for example, was that it developed the leadership capacity of union and community members, while one of its weaknesses was that it struggled to sustain relationships between the parents’ organisation and the teachers’ union.This was partly because at the end of the class sizes campaign the union moved its focus to the issue of teacher salaries, but it was also because the union did not build a strong relationship with the newly elected leadership team in the parents’ organisation.

In contrast, the coalition was effective when it came to rank-and-file leadership development. Its public education lobbies and the inquiry’s local hearings provided opportunities for teachers and parents to work together and develop public policy.

Coalitions between unions and community organisations can be a powerful means for achieving social change and reinvigorating civil society. But not all coalitions are made equal. There are strategies that are likely to lead to more successful coalition practice.

Many of these fly in the face of popular wisdom. For example, while many coalitions end up being an exercise in assembling the largest possible number of organisations, smaller, more strategic, ‘less is more’ partnerships can often create a stronger basis for collaborative action.

While many coalitions come together to resist particular policy changes, collaboration will be more powerful if a coalition commits to building a specific, winnable shared agenda. And while many coalitions undertake mass action such as rallies, multi-scaled coalitions that can sustain their activity are more likely to build long-term political influence.
Amanda Tattersall is author of Power in Coalition: strategies for strong unions and social change and director of the Sydney Alliance, Australia