Who Are The Unorganisable?

Here are some hard cold facts. Membership of TUC-affiliated trade unions has been declining since Margaret Thatcher’s Tories were elected in 1979.

Trade Union Membership

Out of around 28 million workers in Britain, less than a third belong to a trade union.

Since that time, the gap between rich and poor has widened, neo-liberalism has tore into public services and privatised and casualised much work in Britain where we now work the longest hours in Europe and our union rights are continually being squeezed.

The Filthy Rich: Money To Burn

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/specials/rich_list/article7107299.ece

And many within our movement tell us that its not possible to organise casual, temporary, part-time, agency and migrant workers.

Problem is that these same casual, temporary, part-time, agency and migrant workers keep proving them wrong.

Some recent examples:

1. The London Living Wage (LLW) – the hourly rate of £7.60 recommended by the London Mayor’s office as the minimum wage required for London’s workers to get by and be on par with workers on the National Minimum Wage (currently £5.80 per hour for workers 22 or over) outside the capital – and union recognition has been won by a number of migrant cleaning workers in 2007.
2. The LLW and the first pay rise in 6 years was won by union members, the vast majoirty on casual “zero-hour” contracts,  in a call-centre in London in 2008.
3. Engineers at an interhouse company providing internet connectivity won shift allowances of £2,000 and union recognition in 2003.
4. IT workers at Fujitsu won union recognition in the past five years and embarked on their first-ever national strikes in late part of 2009 and early part of 2010 against redundancies.
5. Workers at the homelessness charity, Shelter, took strike action for the first time in the organisation’s 41-year history against pay cuts and redundancies in 2008.

Potential for union growth and the desperate need for it was identified by the TUC in 1996.

That year, the TUC set up a taskforce, the New Unionism Task Group (NUTG) with a remit to find ways to arrest the decline of trade unionism.

The NUTG’s objectives were as follows:

• Support the development of an ‘organising culture’ inside trade unions
• Provide ways of developing unions’ existing membership bases and also explore potential in new and emerging sectors of the economy
• Sharpen the appeal of unions to traditionally under-represented groups of workers: women, young workers, workers from black and ethnic-minority backgrounds and those at the fringes of the labour market for whom trade unionism appeared to have little or no relevance.

I want to look at the latter part of the second objective to “explore potential in new and emerging sectors of the economy” now,  and the third objective in my next post.

“Explore potential in new and emerging sectors of the economy”

and to go where no union has gone before as James T. Kirk may have had it.

Examples above have shown some successes. These are mainly the work of union activists, socialists inside the workplaces and in too few cases, persistent and forward-looking local officials. Born of the NUTG, was the TUC’s Organising Academy, and many that have made it through the assessment centres and been placed by a variety of trade unions have also made a difference in this area.

The major difference they have made has been to be a buffer between poorly-resourced, but enthusiastic rank-and-file activists in these “emerging sectors” and staid, and in many cases, irrelevant local union bureaucracies.

But its not enough.

The major blocks to union organisation are the following:

• Union organising models are usually fine – mapping the workplace and issued-based campaigning are at the heart of most plans. But when it comes to taking the action needed to win union recognition, union leaders shy away. There are countless examples, one very close to my heart that I am bound to keep to myself for the time being, of national unions that have marched the troops to the top of the hill only to disarm them on the way up and have them mowed down at the top. I will recount the story of one workplace that I have most detail about this when I can – so watch this space.
• The law and the the trade union bureaucracy’s acquiesence to it. John Hendy QC, who represented Unite at the case of the scandal of the judgement that ruled that a 92% strike vote on an 80% turnout was not sufficient as 800 of the 14,000 workers had been balloted but laid off (this would have made the vote 91% in favour) angrily told a Right To Work Seminar in April 2010 that the TUC had failed to mount any challenge to the anti-union laws that have been standing on the statute books for the past 30 years. Its not just the anti-union laws that have been used as weapons against workers, immigration legislation has been used to victimise, detain and deport union activists that are migrants, for example at SOAS and Eurostar.         http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9WoqaqLXuk&feature=related     
• The Labour Party. The election of “our” Government as our union leaders tell us, is paramount. This goal, despite a Labour Government helping to increase the gap between the rich and the poor and dumping on the union members that fund their election campaigns to the tune of millions, with their policies of war , privatisation and cuts, comes above the immediate interests and struggles of workers. In the next eight days, it will be difficult to get hold of an official whose union is affiliated to Labour, particularly Unison, no matter how urgent the problem. Union energy and resources will be eked out trying to rescue Brown from an election defeat.

Tomorrow, I will deal with the question of the involvement of under-represented groups of workers: women, young workers, workers from black and ethnic-minority backgrounds.