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of course, but that’s not stopped the right making use of a good crisis to demonise trade unionists and paint unions as outdated and led by ‘dinosaurs’.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
Having a company pull deals like that happens every day in the business world. My company had no assets when I started out, no tax relief or perks to subsidise my living. You have a very old and distorted view of the business world. Yes I could pay my self in dividends to save on some tax, but the company needs to be making a profit for that to happen. Something which doesn’t happen to most company for 5 years! I’m not sure what you are trying to say there, but yes it happens. Also if I couldn’t afford to run company with out that customer I would have to suck it up and take the hit and do! There’s no one I can go crying to to demand more money. Which is my whole point!!!!! The business world can move very slowly or very fast, it is not always possible to keep going back to staff and going through every in an out.
blarg1987
If you had no assets how were you able to set up the company in the first place? All companies have assets be it equipment, facilities etc. Your company no doubt does get tax relief as HMRC guidelines do allow companies to claim against tax if they do suffer losses.
The point I am making is that you took a salary of minimum wage however on paper when you include the assets your company owns, you are worth more.
If a company does screw you over you can go to mediation, arbitration and possibly court if you have been wrongly screwed over so yes you do have recourse all depending on what was agreed etc.
It is possible to get back to staff with good communications, for example a weekly meeting, however outsourcing jobs abroad is not an overnight thing so you would have easily plenty of time to inform staff.
crizz1066
You have no idea!!! I set up the company by taking a loan and selling things. Yes on paper I was worth something, but I can’t cook that or show it to my landlord. So I go to tribunal, force the company to pay the 20%. They don’t use me any-more, I’ve lost my biggest customer. I have to start making people redundant as there’s no work for them, the cash flow drops and I find it hard to pay staff. Tully brilliant business strategy. Do you know how long a weekly meeting takes??? Even with just my depart heads of 5 people its over 3 hrs, making sure everyone has their say. Again all lovely ideas but don’t work in the real world. Sometime you have 3 ideas going on, then for what every reason you have to jump!!! It doesn’t leave time to go back and check with staff. There is a big world out there which effects the UK and that world is moving faster and faster. Your ideas would slow us down and we’d lose out.
treborc1
When a Union leader moves into a labour party job or a shop steward become an MP or councillor that is because the Unions are the labour party or they were.
You should not look at it like a Union leader getting a something extra.
treborc1
Well in the UK our Unions have to have a long hard look at labour and whether it worth staying within the party, at the moment the Unions are seen as a cash cow and not much else. if next year labour win I think state funding will happen and Unions will be dropped. Maybe with the £20 odd Million they give labour they can go and start another Union, but unless labour the party starts to think about how it’s going to get this country growing without cutting I think the Tories will walk the next election.