1993 saw the Tories announce their latest masterplan to destroy and disable unions once and for all – the re-sign legislation which required every existing union member in the UK to re-join their union.
This was clearly a direct attack on working class organisation from the representatives of the employer class in the context of a wave of industrial disputes. It was also laden with upper class sneering, derision and assumptions about union members by the Tories based on decades of believing their own anti union propaganda.
But in my Branch and across the union movement we rose to the class war the Tories had started, organised to meet every member where they worked and where they lived: - and as a movement grew our membership in response to this attack as millions of working people confirmed they were up for defending their unions by re-joining. Just as importantly we properly mapped our industrial power and strength for the first time in each workplace and developed thousands of new leaders.
The organising lessons were there for even the most conservative union leaders of the time to see, and a new politics of bargaining, organising and campaigning around power and leverage began to emerge from the ashes of the dominant “partnership and parliamentary politics” approach of the time. Union building, it turned out, was still a matter of class conflict - not flogging insurance for a fee. The Tories seemed to remember this before we did, we had to re-learn it and then use that to re-earn our credibility with our members
And the first tentative, hesitant and erratic steps were taken of the turn back towards the bottom up union organising around power of the late Nineteenth Century seen in the last twenty years. From this organising practice we began to formulate a "new" organising theory with clear line of sight to parallel development in Europe, the US and Australia:
As a direct result, the five organising principles set out here emerged and consciously aim to keep class at the heart of union building. First formed by Battersea and Wandsworth TUC Organising Centre in the mid 1990s following the re-sign campaign, before adoption by the TUC Organising Academy in 1998, the GMB in 2006 and adapted for Labour Party Community Organising in 2016, many now know these principles best as underpinning GMB@Work organising policy:
1. The workplace is the building block of the union. Whether the workplace in 2022 is defined as the app, the warehouse, the office – its where workers see and feel their exploitation that unions build power
2. Each workplace should be organised and ready to deliver a super majority in a ballot of members - so workers and managers alike feel the unions power on a daily basis and between disputes.
3. The employer’s interests are different and opposed to working people’s. Employers want as much work for as little money as possible from working people, we seek control over our working lives. Human Resources Departments act to obscure this basic conflict. Everything we have at work was fought for by unions – including the weekend.
4. It is the process of industrial relations, bargaining, campaigning and organising that builds unions much more than the results. Successful union building is ultimately democratic, inclusive, bottom up and inside out and focussed on the whole workplace/workforce having a claim on the table permanently
5. People are strongest when they organise themselves – External Organisers must avoid the trap, now amplified by social media, to become the centre of attention in a campaign to avoid crowding out emerging leaders from the organising workers themselves and undermining their union building. Leading from the back and adopting of social movement collective cultures such as “Ubuntu” can assist union builders get out of the way to help working people organise themselves and feel their own power.
Union and community builders tend to take a material and collective approach to class politics as set out in the five principles above. This approach embraces the dynamic nature of class conflict and its power in developing inclusive relationships both within and between groups of people on a shared identity. Class acts as a powerful tool for creating unity as a foundation of union building.
For a union organiser you’re working class if you have to work to eat and pay rent, stand in class conflict with those who would deny you this human right and act to build unity through developing a collective class consciousness where you work
Of course some on the academic left, politicians, and media seek to reduce class to a static individual identity to be worn like a lapel badge alongside all others. For such philosophers, class identity is about where you were born, what your parents or even grand parents did for a living, your accent and education and so on.
Such an approach to class can in reality act to obscure the class conflict union builders are seeking to expose and in the end represent the same old problem we faced with the philanthropy of the Victorian era - self appointed but well meaning middle class tourists doing things “for” working people.
Instead union building should actively seek to promote a collective and conscious working class identity that defines itself against the employer and builds the union through conflict. If we act to suppress this consciousness in our organising we act on behalf of the employers and fall back into the failed partnership and politics policy prior to 1993 .