Decent pay and conditions for working people didn't simply fall out of the sky.
Decent pay and conditions for working people didn’t simply drop out of the sky
Reading some of the reporting on today’s strike action by public sector workers, you could easily believe that it was trade unionists who caused the worst financial crash since the Great Depression.
It wasn’t of course, but that’s not stopped the right making use of a good crisis to demonise trade unionists and paint unions as outdated and led by ‘dinosaurs’.
Conservative MPs often make the charge that the Labour Party is ‘bankrolled’ by the unions:
“More than half of Labour MPs have had their campaigns bankrolled (that word again) by the trade union threatening to disrupt the lives of millions and bring our economy to its knees,” was how Baroness Warsi scornfully phrased it earlier in this parliament.
Yet when people describe the Labour Party as ‘bankrolled’ by the unions they are actually saying that working people pay for the party – which is surely how you’d want politics to work under any system.
No, what the right are really doing when they attempt to play off the public against trade unionists is trying to turn the public on itself. After all, the ‘millions’ whose ‘lives are disrupted’ by strikes also presumably have jobs themselves – jobs with pay and conditions which have at some point been boosted by the existence of unions.
And that’s the nub of it: however fashionable it may be to decry the trade unions as relics and ‘dinosaurs’ of a bygone era, in reality a renaissance in trade unionism is long overdue. Economic growth may have returned but average wages have been falling for years now compared to inflation.
A common myth about trade unionism is that decent pay and conditions are won by bosses being kind rather than workers being rebellious. But history as well as extensive research contradicts this assumption. A recent study from Manchester University shows that countries with a stronger culture of collective bargaining tend on average to have higher minimum wages.
The widening gap between rich and poor in the past 30 years also reflects the loss of democratic restraint on those at the top. According to a YouGov poll from April, 56 per cent of people would like to see a more equal sharing of income – even if it reduced the total amount of Britain’s GDP.
In other words, millions of people – even many of those inconvenienced by today’s strike – want to see reduced inequality – and trade unions are one of the best ways of achieving that. As the graph demonstrates, countries with strong trade union movements tend to be more equal:
As for the government’s argument that we need a 50 per cent ballot threshold in order for any strike action to be legal: what’s telling is that the people most keen on this have nothing to say on increasing the methods available to unions to ballot members. In other words, they have no interest in making it easier for members to vote in strike ballots, they simply want to make it more difficult to take any kind of industrial action.
No one on the left should gloss over some of the trade unionism extremism of the 1970s. But we’re a long way away from that era now, and the pendulum has swung much too far the other way. Trade unionism today is almost a dirty word, with politicians of all stripes practiced in a sort of collective amnesia whereby decent pay and conditions for working people simply fell out of the sky or came as a result of kind-hearted rich men.
It is a fantasy, and those who decry today’s strike action as ‘politically motivated’ know very well what the real political motivation is in all the talk about ballot thresholds: to take yet more leverage away from working people.
James Bloodworth is the editor of Left Foot Forward. Follow James Bloodworth on Twitter
125 Responses to “Strong unions won you your rights, not kind-hearted rich men”
crizz1066
Yes and how many of those children are in home where people actually work!!!! Very few! A large majority of those are from broken home where there parents are on drugs etc. There are very few truly poor and starving people in the UK. If people budgeted better, didn’t wast money on treats they can survive. My best friends and his wife, with 2 kids both un employed for 3years survived, if they could any one should be able to! The problem is instead of looking back a generation or so to see how much better we’ve got things, everyone’s looking over each others fences and saying, they’ve got more than me its not fair. Well life inst fair, its hard work and what you make it, no one owes you anything.
blarg1987
Then that will be covered by discussing it with the Union and saying this is our project (under the none disclosure point), also I think you will find under the company accounts this would come under reinvestment (as HMRC would be seeing these accounts) into the industry.
Reinvestment however does not include the company owner buying a top of the range car that costs more then the pay rise he says he can not give his employees. So any proposed big secret should be used to benefit staff and not only the owner of the industry, as it would be unfair for staff to used there pay rise to invest into a factory abroad and offload the staff as you can get better productivity abroad at a cheaper rate.
crizz1066
Yes that right the price of one MD’s care will be enough for a pay rise for the whole company. What’s he getting Bugatti Veyron? Also if he owns the company surely he should be allowed to give himself perks. When I set my company up I sold my car and was on minimum wage for 2 years. So I see no problem that once all the handwork is done in rewarding myself! I still work longer hours than my staff after 15 years, I don’t have to, but to keep pushing the company forward I need to. Life is unfair, if the owner of said company wants to out source, why can’t he??? I don’t come round and tell you what you can and can’t do with things you own. The thing is there are leaders and followers, vast amount of people are happy to follow. Anyone can set up in business, its easy. Most choose the easy option.
blarg1987
There is an issue with outsourcing your business (possibly your companies big secret?) when you know about it way in advance and do not tell your staff, allowing them plenty of time to find other employment or using the pay rise they are after to do it!
It would be like me promising you a large multi million pound project only to shaft you, they are both morally and ethically wrong.
Yes you were on minimum wage as an income, however no doubt you were relying on the assets of the company and possibly tax relief perks as well to subsidise your living costs. Yes you may work longer hours then your staff and your reward is the success of your company.
The point being if I was a major customer for your business and said to you well since I have worked hard to make my company successful therefore I am offering you 20% less on the products you serve me, you would rightly tell me to go away.
treborc1
You can still join a strike, secondary picketing is banned it would have been banned by New labour anyway if Thatcher had not done it.