 |
As we enter the early days of conference season attention
turned towards Bournemouth as the Trades Union Congress meets to discuss its
agenda for the next year. However, members of all unions meet against a rapidly
tarnishing backdrop.
In the last few months notable members of the TUC have
struggled to stay out of the headlines following the Falkirk by-election
debacle, Labours funding switch and the threats of industrial action over pay
and conditions.
The major question, from alternative perspectives depending
on your political orientation, is how relevant are the trades union in the
modern age.
After all we now have health and safety, equal pay, labour
and discrimination laws, minimum wage and employment rights. What more can the
unions actually achieve in the era of private companies in the public sector?
Labour, whose leader was elected largely thanks to trade
union backing, now want to slash its own funding by rejecting trade union donations,
while the Conservatives, who have never liked the unions, argue they are
out-of-date, out-of-touch and, with regard to strike action, out-of-order.
This is not helped by what is arguably all trades union
biggest headache, their poor public image.
When any of the major union leaders go on television they
appear like shouty, football hooligan types, who complain about pay and
conditions when almost every non-union worker suffers with the same issues.
After all, we no longer live in the age of cotton barons,
child labour and worker exploitation and mainstream politics has moved to the
centre ground where a balance must be struck between big business and employee
rights.
Even the far-right of the Tory party is not going to suggest
abolishing the minimum wage.
No matter how suicidal Ed Miliband’s stance on union funding
might be for the Labour Party, many on the
left would agree it is an undue
influence, verging on the unacceptable, on the modern geopolitical and
socioeconomic landscape.
However, disregarding the unions is in itself short-sighted.
After all workers will always require protection and there are examples today
of where unions would be better off focusing their attention.
Zero-hours contacts are a prime example of this. This kind
of contractual agreement could clearly be used, if it has not already, by
companies to exploit workers.
Similarly, at a time of private and public sector cost
cutting, it is not a huge leap for this to result in unfair dismissals,
worsening work conditions and health and safety violations.
Then there is the decline in living standards across the country
as wages fail to keep pace with inflation.
Foreign workers, who may not know what rights they are
entitled to in the UK, are also heavily at risk and need a union-based set up
to ensure they are not taken advantage of.
These are, for the moment, all just hypothetical, but, in
the same way the European Court of Human Rights is there to ensure another
fascist dictator cannot start randomly imprisoning dissidents, the trade union
movement is needed to guarantee UK workers never have to face industrial
revolution style working conditions.
This shows the trades union are far from irrelevant, but suffer
from three main issues, a lack of focus, a lack of discipline and a bad public
image.
Over the years many unions have split, fractured and even
sub-divided to the point where the delegate list at the TUC is an unholy spectacle
of acronyms with several unions representing the same interest groups.
Industry specific unions are vital for industry specific
issues, for example ensuring teachers have the relevant training, but need to
be brought back under a single umbrella union so each sector can pinpoint
specific and wider raging areas to deal with.
A major reason for this, and a cause of the trade union
movements seeming irrelevance, is because a large number of people, many not
associated with, or even lacking access to, a union struggle with the same
problems.
With this in mind it is time for the unions to rethink how
they operate and stop being the fire and brimstone style agitators they were
during the 70s.
As the UK has developed as a country many of the issues
unions were formed to fight have been solved, however the movement as a whole
still campaigns in the same way as when they were opposing child labour in cotton
mills.
What this leads to are regular strike threats which are
never taken forward because industrial action is the first weapon taken out of
the bag.
Having the right to strike is important, but low voter turnout
at the union ballot boxes results in it being more of a legal battle of
legitimacy of the action rather than the issues they are fighting for.
If unions restructured themselves along the lines of think
tanks, lobbyists or focus groups, with industry specific unions offering
greater focus and the TUC offering oversight on all UK workers, they would
bestow a level of legitimacy not seen for many decades and be able to achieve
some good for the workers of Britain, not just its card carrying members.
To reach this point however the unions need to address the
biggest issue. Its PR problem.
Put any of the major union leaders in a debate with a
politician and the union leader ends up looking like a foolish, badly behaved
child, not because their arguments have no validity, but because they appear
like a football terrace hooligan.
Instead of criticising the New Labour years maybe they
should take a leaf out of Tony Blair and Alistair
Campbell’s book and polish up
its communication skills so they can become the strong, legitimate force for
good they could be in British politics.
In the political world there are some people who are never
let in front of a television camera, because they do not come over well on
screen, the most damaging problem for the unions at the moment is they have no
one who looks good and sounds intelligent on camera.
What this comes down to in the end is not a case of whether
or not the trades union are relevant in the modern world, but a case of how can
they make themselves relevant to today’s workers as a whole, not just its
traditional membership.
