|
<<back to articles
My message to you today is straightforward. There is a huge opportunity today for modern trade unionism. Seize it. There is enormous potential in what trade unions can offer. Fulfil it. There is, often unpublicised and by the outside world, unnoticed, great ground-breaking work going on today in parts of the trade union movement. Bring this together in a critical mass of innovation and use it to cross the threshold of the 21st century. As the people here show, there are trade unionists poised to take this leadership role: people who know that its not Governments or political parties that can give legitimacy or strength to trade unions. It is those actually involved in trade unionism that will do it. Today’s a work place so different from the factories and shop floors of the early 20th century; but in an era of globalisation there are new multiple insecurities in which the helping hand of a trade union can make a difference between someone sinking and surviving. The unions who see this are boldly embracing their future as part of the modern service sector of the economy.
And there is a new wave of engagement going on, at community level, between business, charitable and voluntary sectors; and civil society. There is no reason why trade unions should not be part of this new engagement and every reason why they should. Again, the best already are.
Finally there is an understanding that political influence today can not, and actually should not depend on institutional political links, though these can, of course, play their part, but depends ultimately and crucially on the broader support of people. Political activity is the corollary of the core business of trade unions; and political weight is something gained through demonstrated success in the core business, not as a substitute for it.
In all of this, there is something very similar to the journey of change undertaken by the Labour Party. Our values – compassion, solidarity, a belief in opportunity for all – were always powerful. Ironically, given our 18 years of Opposition, they were and are the values for the modern age. This is a world in which economic success is found in human capital, and therefore in the use of the talents of all members of society. That essentially egalitarian impulse fits perfectly with the progressive vision of a society based on merit and equal status as a citizen, rather than a Tory one of hierarchy, class and privilege.
The problem in truth for Labour, was, therefore, never one of values. It was one of policy and more profoundly of confusing policy positions or prescriptions suitable for a particular moment in time, with values that are by their nature, timeless. So we fell behind, not in belief, but in the application of belief to the modern world. The purpose of New Labour was to re-align values and their contemporary relevance in policy; to stop confusing ends and means. By doing so, we won three elections and whatever the day to day problems that beset any Government, still have the dominant political agenda – provided, of course, we continue updating the way our values are applied and do not lapse into the old errors.
My point about trade unions is exactly the same. The most basic value – solidarity – is identical. Its basic relevance today is undeniable. The issue is its application. And here like every business, Government, organisation and indeed nation, the challenge of changing times confronts you.
But let us be clear. For most people, globalisation in terms of the workplace with all its attendant insecurities, is a worry. It means constant adaptation, alteration and struggle to keep upright in shifting sands. Naturally it brings its benefits. But all in all, in terms of the world of work, it is a creator of insecurity. For trade unions, it should be an almost unalloyed blessing. The 9 to 5, jobs for life, steady state labour market has gone. What this means is that there are millions of employees out there in need of support, advice, and the strength of an organisation large enough and powerful enough to help navigate the terrain globalisation is configuring. Of course, it means jobs will come and go; sectors even can be made redundant. But this, after all, is the meat and drink of trade unions. If everything were constant, and comfortable, they wouldn’t be needed. In any other setting, law or financial markets for example, turbulence and upheaval means work for those who advise the actors in it.
Take a man, who never quite got the qualifications at school he needed; who now realises that to keep his job, he needs to upskill; but he’s not sure how or where to do it. Or the woman, with two young children, who wants to work part-time until they are of secondary school age, but then return to full-time work. Or the people, millions of them in low-paid work, who want to improve their conditions or look out for new career opportunities. Or even the reasonably well paid executive, in private or public sector, who knows down-sizing and rationalisation are just part of working life and who wants the expert advice and collective strength of a workplace organisation behind them.
All of these people, and they are typical, are in the market for help. It may seem old-fashioned to call it solidarity but that’s what it is.
Yet I recall a short time ago, on a visit to a Sure Start centre and talking to the Mums and Dads. Most were in relatively low paid and insecure work. I said: “what about joining a trade union?” The response was not hostile; it was just that they were totally ignorant of the possibility. They had simply no idea of what a union could do or how they could contact them. Talk to young people in the new industries, even well educated ones and they would give you the same response. They would ask: why? And yet they know, with a host of problems to cope with at work, that their working lives are going to be fraught with challenge.
Times of change test us. And this is emphatically a time of great change. The structure of developed economies is unrecognisable even from my childhood. Employment has declined rapidly in the heartlands of the movement, in manufacturing, mining , utilities and the public sector. Fading industries are heavily unionised. Emerging industries are not.
The fortunes of the trade union movement have tracked this change, rather than bucked it. Membership plummeted from almost half the workforce in 1980, after steady growth from 1950, to under a third in 2000.
Most employment growth is likely to come in the private sector where unions account for just 15% of employees. Despite the recent surge in public sector jobs the overwhelming majority of the 3m jobs created between 1992 and 2005 were in the private sector.
Union membership is getting older. Young people are not joining. In 2001 a mere 19% of workers aged between 18 and 29 belonged to a union, compared to 44% in the early 1980s. Many young people regard unions as backward-looking, middle aged and male-dominated. Even those who do not remember the 1970s are looking away.
There is a paradox here. The decline in membership is not just about the loss of the old manufacturing base. It is also a story about the perverse consequences of success.
The historian Henry Maine once said that the whole history of the modern world can be seen in the gradual move from status to contract.
Relations between unions and employers used to be conducted on the basis of status, in a voluntary way. One of the tactics was to press for statutory protection. And here is the paradox: the more this recognition was granted, the more the law reflected these demands, the less the apparent need for a union to fight the battle on the worker’s behalf.
The worker now has recourse to a series of rights which he or she bears as an individual, rather than as a member of a collective body like a trades union.
The regulation of working time; equal rights for part time and temporary workers with their full time counterparts; minimum rights for migrant, women and disabled workers. These are all legally enforceable rights that have come out of the social market work of the EU. So one part of union’s traditional role has changed.
But here is the good news. Within trade unionism today can be found immensely innovative ways of helping people. Agenda for Change within the NHS is a classic example. USDAW and their new LEAP Programme is a clear demonstration that a union, with its stall set out properly, can put on members and expand influence. The GMB now have several agreements with employers on skills and diversity as well as traditional terms and conditions. AMICUS are now, starting with the British print industry, putting productivity at the heart of collective agreements. The TGWU, along with many other unions, offers a wide range of financial, legal and personal advice to its members at a hugely competitive cost. The unions, some of whom are here today, who represent executives across industry and public services, are growing not declining and that is people joining not because of habit but because of self interest.
But there is one very obvious feature of all these successes. Increasingly unions have to protect the person not the particular job. In other words, as in every other walk of life, the service, even though often derived from a collective agreement, is personal in nature and focuses on the individual’s personal development. This is wholly natural and can be taken much further, with trade unions becoming more clearly a thriving part of the service sector of the economy. Here, too, the relationship with the employer becomes one of social partnership. There is a common interest in creating a successful business and in managing the change necessary to get it. Of course, occasionally, there will be confrontation. But, interestingly where that happens – as with Gate Gourmet – it is the mobilization of public support not simply traditional industrial action that makes the difference.
The point is: the world has changed; the role of trade unions must change with it; but the necessity and relevance of the trade union purpose has not.
This is even stronger when we examine another dimension of change: the way civic society works. Barriers between public, independent and voluntary sector are coming down. Any major modern business is heavily involved in local community action. They see this as important for many reasons: to build support for their business as socially responsible; to create awareness of their product; and also because progressive business knows that if they add value to the social capital of a community, that helps the environment in which their business operates and grows. In other words it is a mixture of things that adds up to enlightened self interest. People find it hard to understand why business should want to become involved with schools. But actually it is perfectly understandable and is precisely for the reasons above. It makes sense for them to put something back into the community and country. It is not the same as a direct profit or loss deal; but it is, in the broadest sense, good for them if standards in schools improve.
In my view, completely the same considerations apply to trade unions if not more so. The first employer’s Skills Academies will come into being soon – specialist centres of vocational learning. But why not have such centres run also by trade unions? Already unions like Community, born out of the old ISTC, are engaging actively in former steel communities, winning new friends and members. But the principle could be massively extended: in adult skills; in support for childcare; in legal advice centres; in helping tackle the problems of social exclusion or community relations. Trade unions along with everything else, are a huge part of the voluntary sector, still indeed the largest voluntary organisations in the country. There is a new role here, just waiting to be grasped.
It is out of this interaction with the community and the strength and relevance of unions in representing people, that the true political power of trade unions arises. Let us be blunt about this. Some unions affiliate to the Labour Party. Some don’t. There is a debate about the institutional link that continues. But let us put to one side for the moment, the precise way the link works – the arithmetic of party conference etc.
The political reality is that whatever the nature of the link, the influence of the trade unions is only effective in proportion to the weight they have in broader society and the reasonableness of the case they make. I was perhaps the first Labour leader to be so explicit about this. But it is now reality. No Labour leader is going to do something they think is fundamentally wrong, just because this or that sector of the union movement demands it. That statement is irrespective of votes or arithmetic at party conference. And to be fair, whatever is sometimes said publicly, that is accepted by union leaders. They know it.
The reality is that the only political power that can be exercised by unions today is of the small “p” variety. It derives from their standing and support amongst people. In turn, this derives not from industrial militancy or historical party relationships, but from how well unions perform their proper functions. Do well and politicians respond. They have to. I sometimes say – only half joking – trade unions will know they’re succeeding, when Tory politicians are asking to see them and consult them because they know it matters to their reputation with voters.
The fact that the TUC under Brendan’s leadership has been closely involved with debates on the environment and with the campaign for equal pay, shows the role unions can play and also a growing understanding that unions need to be at the forefront of such single issue campaigns, in order to establish their own credentials in wider society. The participation of the TUC in the debate about the future of pensions has been exemplary and of great importance to the country.
The unions kept faith with Nelson Mandela all the way through apartheid. They are offering great support for struggling unions in countries where the tradition is just emerging or is being recovered, as in Iraq. They are standing against racism and the BNP. The meeting of the General Council in the Mosque was community building of the most important kind. So is the work that has been done in the construction industry to provide English language tuition for Polish workers. I was especially pleased to see such a strong union representation in the Make Poverty History campaign. Perhaps the only time in recent memory that the unions have marched on exactly the same side as the Government.
So, my point today is essentially an optimistic one. There is a great opportunity for trade unions today and you, like all of us, struggling with changing times, have a choice. It is a harder one than that faced by the Labour Party in the 1980s and for a somewhat perverse reason.
In the case of the Labour Party, it really was: modernise or face extinction as a governing force in British politics. In respect of trade unions, your choice is more attenuated and therefore paradoxically more difficult, because its less stark. Trade unions, whatever happens, will continue to play their part. They will be strong in the public sector and with mergers, will have at least some firm locus in the private sector or parts of it. Your choice is between a reasonably steady state, with probably some more private sector decline and depending on the Government, some public sector risk; or a major re-casting in order to size what is a big opportunity. In other words, your danger is really an opportunity lost.
If trade unions re-shape themselves to advance the interests of people in a modern and insecure workplace, with a far broader range of services and support than is traditional; if they embrace social partnership fully; if they assert a true and necessary role in community action; and build political power from this base; if they do this, trade unions could become a revitalized part of British society, with tremendous and beneficial consequences for people at work and for the community.
It will require profound organisational change. But what this Conference shows is that the leaders of such change are out there.
We, I, want to help. There is, frankly, a lot of nonsense talked about this Labour leadership’s hostility to trade unions.
In 1996 the GMB published its checklist for the Labour government it hoped to see. It included tough action to create jobs, a national minimum wage, equal rights for part time workers, entry into the social chapter and union recognition where a majority want it. They have just published their verdict: nine out of ten achieved in full and considerable improvement in the tenth.
We have reduced the barriers to job creation. There are over 2m more people in work then there were in 1997. Tax credits ensure that nobody is worse off in work than out of it. The national minimum wage dealt with the tail of exploitative employers who hadn’t yet turned into the 20th Century, let alone the 21st. We have sought, with our stress on education and skills and on investment in new technologies and science, to make sure that everyone comes to the labour market equipped with the tools they need.
Living standards have risen. Earnings have risen 4.3% per annum since 1997 in the private sector and 4.1% in the public sector, both well in excess of inflation.
I am very proud, in particular, of what we have done for women. Over 1 million women have found work since 1997. The Women At Work commission has reminded us that a lot more needs to be done and we will study its proposals with interest.
The 1999 Act provided trade unions with legal recognition and individual with the right to join. Individuals now have a right to be accompanied for grievance and disciplinary procedures – a big recruiting tool.
Over 60,000 workers have been helped back into learning by 12,000 union learning representatives. Maternity leave has been extended to 26 weeks. Maternity pay has been increased. Part time workers have been given the same rights at work as full time workers. Workers now have the right to four weeks’ paid holiday. The two-tier agreement has been reached and extended across government.
In our third term the Work and Families Bill will extend paid maternity and adoption leave and the right to request flexible working. The Corporate Manslaughter Bill is on track. The Warwick agreement will be taken forward and implemented in full.
When I hear people say that the government has been antagonistic to trade unions I wonder sometimes where they have been these last nine years.
We want to work with you. The Modernisation Fund is there to help and within the next few weeks, we will be dispersing its money. We want to help your process of change because, in turn, it helps us. The representation here today shows it can be done. It is a beginning. Let us build on it.
PS: If you are a branch officer; please pass this article around to your members so that we can have as many trade unionists signed up to the www.unionstogether.org.uk website as possible.
<<back to articles
|
There is a great opportunity for unions today
