In the coming months there will be increasing tension between the economic needs of trade union members and the austerity strategy of the new Labour government. It will be the pressure of those ordinary union members that will force their leaders – some of them reluctantly – into opposing the austerity regime being cooked up by Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
The annual Congress of the TUC this week shows only the beginning of a process of change that will affect the unions, with opposition to the government already beginning to surface, despite the best efforts of the right wing leaders of the big unions.
The anger towards the government is already focused on the extremely unpopular decision to cut the winter fuel allowance to millions of pensioners. It is being opposed as much as anything because of what the policy implies – that ordinary working class households will be expected to pay for the failures of the economic system.
“lots of unions represent low paid workers…”
“I can see a situation” the general secretary of the PCS union said, “where, if they continue along the line that they’re heading with, not just winter fuel payments but with social security and benefits more generally, there will be a real backlash and that could take the form of industrial action… because lots of unions represent low paid workers”
Sharon Graham, Unite general secretary, also suggestd that last month’s riots were a warning. “ If you kill hope”, she told the Guardian, “if you abandon working-class communities, you create an open wound of discontent that the scapegoaters will stick their fingers in. This is how support for rightwing nationalism grows.”
Away from the TUC conference in Brighton, there is a rebellion of Labour MPs over the issue. As many as fifty will either oppose the measure directly, by supporting an early-day motion in the Commons tomorrow, or by abstaining on it. But the motion opposing the cut is likely to be defeated by the huge majority of Labour MPs, most of whom are ready to toe the line. In the longer run it will be the trade unions, not handfuls of Labour MPs, who will provide the main drive against the Labour government’s austerity strategy.
Where it affects the direct interests of the trade unions – on the important issue of trade union rights – right wing union leaders are expecting some quid pro quo for their support for Starmer up to now. The union leaders are not going to let Labour forget their commitment to a ‘New Deal’ on workers’ rights.
Motions at the TUC Congress will call for the repeal the 2016 Trade Union Act 2016, removing the ballot threshold required for industrial action, including the additional 40 per cent threshold applied to certain public sector workers, and the six-month limit for industrial action mandates. Congress will also call for the repeal of the Minimum Service Levels Act, the outlawing of zero-hours contracts and a strengthened role for unions in collective bargaining, including giving all workers full employment rights “from day one of employment”
TUC demands on a New Deal for Workers
UNITE specifically calls for a complete ban on ‘fire and rehire’, and the removal of “loopholes” – such as those implicit in Labour’s suggested New Deal. Even USDAW, generally a union on the right of the movement, calls for the “full removal of all anti-trade union legislation”. We look forward to USDAW representatives on Labour’s NEC fighting the same fight.
We can expect an overwhelming, if not unanimous, passage of a composite motion, therefore, on a New Deal for Workers, as an indication of what the union tops expect from ‘their’ new government. However, these same union leaders will have some explaining to do to their members, if, as is likely, the rights they were promised and which they are demanding this week, are significantly diluted when a parliamentary bill is finally published.
When it comes to economic policy, most TUC conference motions are relatively muted in their demands and it would appear that many trade union leaders have planned for the minimum of boat-rocking. It is only Unite which puts forward specific policy goals, including “a wealth tax on the richest one per cent, to raise £25bn per year for our public services and NHS”.
But even UNITE, a supposedly left union, fails to grasp the nettle on the regeneration of national infrastructure by limiting itself to a call for “responsible borrowing” to close the gap on public investment. Like the Labour leadership, the horizons of this union look to be limited to whatever is possible under capitalism.
Even where some unions have in the past called for renationalising their own sectors, they are now tamely letting Labour ministers off the hook, by posing re-nationalisation as an aspiration rather than a firm policy. The CWU, for example, refers to the renationalisation of the postal service as a “long-term goal,” and the rail union ASLEF calls only for the “expansion” of publicly own rail services, “eventually” resulting in afully nationalised service.
Unions have back-tracked on nationalisation
This is a sharp move backwards from previous support by unions for the public ownership of utilities like rail, post, water and electricity, which were publicly-owned in the past, but which have been plundered by privatisation.
We should not forget that had it not been for the support of the right wing leaders of the Labour-affiliated unions, Keir Starmer would not have been able to ditch every single one of the ten pledges he made when he stood for leader in 2020, and subsequently abandon all the radicalism of the 2017 and 2019 Labour manifestos.
The tops of UNISON, USDAW and the GMB especially, who wield a significant influence on Labour’s NEC as well as at TUC, allowed the Starmer/Evans faction to ride rough-shod over Labour Party rules and selection procedures, so the huge Parliamentary Labour Party is now packed with right-wingers and careerists. These trade union leaders bear some responsibility for the drive by Labour’s right wing towards a new round of austerity.
So it is probably despite the wishes of some right wing union leaders, that the issue of the winter fuel payments has arisen and has become the key focus of opposition to Labour austerity at the TUC. A resolution on Universal Credit from USDAW, calls, among other things, for the scrapping of the five-week waiting list and the two-child limit on benefits, while PCS calls for opposition the cut to winter fuel allowance, and demands “appropriate taxation of corporations and the super-rich, to fund the social security improvements identified in this motion”
Any warnings from the TUC on welfare payments are going to fall on deaf ears in Westminster. In one gloomy speech after another, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have made it clear that living standards are bound to fall. “Things are going to get worse”, Keir Starmer has said, and he is planning for the government to be “unpopular.”
One should have expected under these circumstances, where each Labour minister’s speech is more dire than the last, that the TUC leadership would be sounding an alarm, loud and clear. Every union leader, not just one or two, should be warning the government that they will fight to defend the interests of workers. Instead, with a few notable exceptions, we have muted warnings and resolutions listing luke-warm hopes and aspirations.
Threats of austerity grow louder
Nevertheless, in the coming six months all the trade union tops will feel the heat from their members, transmitted through national executive bodies, meetings of activists, and even full-time officers. As the threats of austerity grow louder, so will the anger of trade union members.
It is well known that the Tories had already written swingeing cuts into the spending plans of many government departments, and when the first Labour budget is revealed on October 30, it is likely to confirm those cuts. Labour under Reeves and Starmer is planning a new round of austerity every bit as hard-hitting as David Cameron and George Osborne in 2010. That is the meaning of their warnings about “difficult choices” and expecting to be “unpopular.”
Labour MPs, sitting on a massive majority, are guaranteed a good salary and generous benefits and expenses for the best part of the next five years. Some of them in ‘safe’ seats think they have a meal ticket for life. But ordinary workers and trade union members live only month by month. Their jobs, their hopes and their standard of living can be undermined in a week.
Low pay in the public sector, the crisis in local authority finances and services, the crushing debilitation of the NHS, the growing inaffordability of housing for young people – not a single one of these issues is going to be properly addressed by this Labour government. It is a government that bases its entire policy on the ‘market’ and the need for investment through profit.
Needs of working class households
Whatever resolutions might say at TUC congress, this government will not “tax the rich”. It is in hock to big business and it will make no serious inroads into the industrial scale tax-dodging that goes on. It is as inevitable as night following day, therefore, that there will be a growing mismatch between the needs of working class households and the policies of the government.
It is also inevitable that within the labour movement opposition will begin to develop. The groans and complaints we see at TUC conference with week are only the start of a widespread and profound opposition that will develop to the ‘Labour’ austerity we will be forced to endure.
If not in Brighton this week, then in the early part of next year, when there are a number of trade union conferences scheduled, the trade unions will begin to be pushed even harder by their membership into opposing the government. It will happen despite the wishes of some the union leaderships.
The voices of opposition in Brighton will become a crescendo later. At some stage, despite the supposed ‘stranglehold’ that the right wing imagine they have in the Labour Party, the noise will be transmitted through conferences and elections into the Labour Party as well. Then real politics will begin again in the Labour Party.
