of salami-style legislation, year on year, throughout the 1980s. Act upon parliamentary Act restricted our ability to take lawful industrial action and picket workplaces, with secondary ‘sympathy’ action being outlawed. Employers were handed new and powerful legal means to stop strikes if unions put a foot wrong, including in how they balloted their members and the ballot thresholds they must reach. What counted as a trade dispute was now so narrowly defined so as to restrict what we could actually take action about.
Why did Thatcher and her successors do this? Because employers and the political establishment knew then, and understand even more acutely now, that trade unions are the first line of defence for working people. It amuses me whenever the right-wing media try to portray trade unions as being irrelevant – with membership today less than half what it was at the end of the 1970s – because I always think, if we’re so irrelevant then why do they keep attacking us? Why don’t they just leave us alone and let us wither on the vine? They don’t, because they know that we are the only ones who challenge their power, the only ones able to stand up to them.
What does this brief history of British trade unionism demonstrate? Firstly, that the story is inextricably linked to working-class history, and that working-class people have consistently been given a voice by becoming trade unionists.
When I worked on the docks in Liverpool, I remember how an arch-Conservative friend of a family member challenged me about why I’d become a trade unionist and shop steward. It’s a bit of a Monty Python cliché, but he said: ‘What have the unions ever done for you?’ I told him my union had given me a voice, and dignity at work. And I’ve never come up with a better answer since. My experience on the docks taught me so much about the essence of solidarity, being able to stand up with dignity, look an employer in the eye, and not be intimidated.
And that’s exactly what our British Airways mixed fleet have done recently, reminding us that the struggles of the past continue to be the challenges of the present. During a lobby of Parliament, MPs were visibly shaken when BA mixed fleet cabin-crew members, on strike to secure an increase in the poverty pay the airline forced them to live on, told them about their working conditions and the creative methods BA was using to avoid paying them the minimum wage, including by lumping in food allowances. Among those sharing their stories of living on pot noodles and tins of tuna, sleeping overnight in their cars, being unable to afford fuel to get to work, and losing incentive pay for being sick, there was a deep resolve not to be cowed by our national carrier. A deep resolve even though the airline was punishing them for their action by denying them their bonuses – those hard-earned extras that are vital to workers whose take home annual salary amounts to just over £12,000.
These mixed fleet members, the majority of them young, took some eighty-five days of industrial action, in what became one of the longest running disputes in recent trade union history. They weren’t being greedy. They just wanted to be able to provide the best and safest service they could to BA customers, and to be paid a wage they could live on for doing so. Trade unionism gave them a voice to demand that they be treated with dignity.
I recall some of the conversations I had with those on strike – whose jobs are considered so glamorous by the public – when I joined them on the Heathrow picket line:
‘I’ve had to have a second job the entire six years I’ve worked on mixed fleet. My BA pay covers my rent and no more.’
‘There are some routes where we have no choice but to stay in the crew hotel and eat there, at huge expense.’
‘It makes me rage when I see the profits BA is making, but none of it is passed on to its workers. All they need do is offer us a bit more money, give us our bonuses back and treat us with a bit of respect.’
The mixed fleet members were inspired to take their stand by BA cabin-crew colleagues before them, members of our British Airlines Stewards and Stewardesses Association (BASSA), who had been in dispute with the airline for nearly two years over staff cuts – a dispute I was heavily involved in settling in 2011.7 This was a very high-profile and heroic struggle, and I was privileged to represent this group of decent people who stood firm and defeated BA’s CEO Willy Walsh, the darling of the right-wing media. Similarly, it was the determination and solidarity of our mixed fleet members, and the voice trade unionism gave them, that secured a decent pay rise in the end. They stuck together through thick and thin, and demonstrated how it pays to be a trade unionist.
The vast majority of trade unionists’ time is spent dealing positively with employers over pay and conditions and resolving grievances, and I am proud of the type of engagement we have with them. I talk to company chief executives every week, often working together to resolve complex issues that as an employer they cannot solve on their own. That is what unions and their shop stewards do – they negotiate and work to put out fires. We do not seek confrontation, and we do not relish fights; but neither do we walk away from bullying bosses and companies that are not treating their employees fairly. We are afraid of no one.
So when we do take industrial action, it is a last resort. And it is how workers find their voice when their employer is refusing to hear it.
Another example: Greenwich Leisure Ltd (GLL) runs libraries and swimming pools for local authorities in London, many of which have London Living Wage (LLW) accreditation, meaning they should mandate GLL to pay the LLW. But some have allowed the firm to pay eighteen- to twenty-year-olds over £2 an hour less. So we built a campaign, talking to those young workers about what mattered to them, bringing them into union membership, and putting political and industrial pressure on the local authorities, supposedly so proud of their LLW accreditation, through protests, lobbies of council meetings and media activity.
Finding a voice through their trade unionism, these young workers were able to force councillors to explain why they were letting a private contractor off the hook when it came to ensuring fair and equal pay. The decision of the Waltham Forest and Tower Hamlets councils to pay under-twenty-ones the LLW were big wins that saw a significant number of young Londoners joining Unite.
The list of similar campaigns is long. The TGI Fridays dispute, the Pizza Express fair tips campaign,8 the McDonald’s strike, and the fair pay deals we’ve struck for hospitality workers at the Edinburgh fringe,9 have all been made possible because young people working in hospitality are standing up and taking action. They know why they should be trade unionists.
Asif Mohammed chairs Unite’s West Midlands regional and young members’ committees. He recorded a video in which he explains why he became a trade unionist:
I joined Unite as a student, when I worked in retail. I saw there was a lot of exploitation, including non-payment of the adult national living wage rate. I thought the best way to challenge this was by becoming part of a collective, coming together with people who were in a similar position as me and fighting for better pay and conditions, and ultimately achieving a better, fairer future for all of us.
Asif had a piece of advice for young people starting out in work today. Joining a union will give them a voice both at work and within the union. His point is that members are central to the democratic life of any trade union, and there are many ways to be involved. Asif’s rise to chair of a Unite regional committee, in his early twenties, also demonstrates the new vibrancy that our young members are bringing to our union. We are seeing young trade unionists, with women at the fore, generating an enthusiasm that is so necessary in any organisation, carrying forward the values of older members and expressing those values in different ways. And this is fantastic for the future of our movement.
A trade union is like a bundle of sticks. A worker who is not in a union is like a single stick. She can easily be broken or bent to the will of her employer. An employer can do without one worker. He cannot do without all his workers.
Mary Macarthur (1880–1921)
Too often we hear the lament: ‘I can’t join a union