Spare a moment for the real victim of the mass sacking of P&O workers: Natalie Elphicke, the Conservative MP for Dover. When she turned up to address a local protest in support of the now redundant staff, the attendees were, for some reason, unimpressed with her failure to vote against fire-and-rehire rules that had left those workers vulnerable to gangster capitalists such as the owners of P&O Ferries. After they chanted, “Shame on you” she warned fellow MPs of the dangers of “militant unionism”, and said she had been “bullied” and “abused”.
But increasing numbers of Britons have come to realise that the real menace is not militant unionism, but militant capitalism. And that rather than being too extreme, the modern labour movement has been too subdued. Trade union membership is around half of its 1979 peak: just a quarter of the British workforce are members of unions, and in the private sector, it’s a derisory 13%. As Tony Blair boasted in 1997, British law was “the most restrictive on trade unions in the western world”, and Tory anti-union laws have only tightened that vice since. Communities based around secure jobs in mining, factories and docks have given way to a precarious and transient workforce that is harder to organise.
And there’s an even bigger existential menace to trade unions: decades of officially sanctioned hostility to trade unionism has left the very concept alien to many younger people. As one study of young core workers by the Trades Union Congress in the UK found: “The vast majority hadn’t heard the words ‘trade union’ and couldn’t provide a definition.”
But a new generation of trade unionists believe these are challenges to overcome, not excuses for passivity. “The anti-union laws in the UK are draconian and terrible,” Eve Livingston, the author of Make Bosses Pay: Why We Need Unions, told me. “But that said, there are still powerful tools and strategies available to unions if they’re brave enough to make use of them.”
Livingston’s critique goes like this: some unions shifted from an organising model to a servicing model – that is, focusing on signing members up to union magazines, offering discounts and insurance policies, rather than going to the workplace to discuss activism and politics. One striking example of an organising model is that of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWBG), whose Ecuador-born general secretary Henry Chango Lopez can often be seen on picket lines bellowing through a megaphone as the union’s red-white-and-green flags flutter behind him.
When he became a porter at the University of London in 2010, “I just didn’t know about any rights we had,” he tells me. Like other outsourced workers – from cleaners to security – he lacked basic rights but felt abandoned by traditional unions. “We weren’t being supported, they wouldn’t put any resources into supporting us,” he tells me. But the IWGB’s tactics of wildcat strikes, direct action and building coalitions with other grassroots organisations, trade unions and students paid off. In 2020, the University of London was forced to recognise the workers – from porters to receptionists to cleaners – as staff, with all the rights that entailed.
IWGB is a small union, but it punches hard: it has won employment rights for workers ranging from couriers to foster care workers. “I think if we’re able to do all of this without resources – we function on a shoestring – why can’t unions with loads of money in their bank accounts,” asks Lopez. “They can organise workers, invest in training, get organisers to go into workplaces.” Those younger, precarious workers who are supposedly out of reach of unions are being organised by IWGB: for actions such as the ongoing longest ever courier strike, as McDonald’s, Greggs and Costa delivery drivers take action over pay and conditions.
There are some other unions that do this, and have found themselves vilified for their success: such as the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), which represents the P&O workers and, more famously, train and tube drivers, whose decent salaries should be seen as the product of dogged organising. But the most decisive shift towards the organising model is the recent election of Sharon Graham as general secretary of Unite, the biggest private sector union, who pithily sums up her pitch to me: “We need to get back to the workplace and get off the hamster wheel of party politics.”
Believing Unite has invested too much energy and resources into remoulding the Labour party rather than “hard miles dedicated to organising and mobilising workers”, Graham believes younger workers need to be won over by focusing energy on unionising the service sector. Given Unite’s size, this resolute approach poses the biggest potential threat yet to the Thatcherite anti-union settlement.
There are several factors feeding into a possible union resurgence. Stagnating living standards were often masked by access to cheap easy credit, but that has injected destabilising levels of household debt into the economy. In-work benefits, too, have been repeatedly slashed in real terms. Horror stories – from Sports Direct’s reliance on zero-hours contracts to the lack of rights for Uber drivers to the latest P&O travesty – have helped cement a justified public attitude that British workers have an unfair lot.
Yes, unions are shackled by restrictive laws, they’re demonised by politicians and media outlets, and they face formidable obstacles in organising an increasingly fragmented workforce. But unions are the only viable challengers to the P&Os of this world – and that fact is surely becoming ever more obvious.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
