The Green Party Trade Union Group has noted the decision by the Labour Party leadership to sack Sam Tarry MP, their former shadow Transport Minister, following his appearance on an RMT picket line.

This is a disgraceful move by Keir Starmer’s Labour, that shows he is more willing to crack down on trade union solidarity in his own ranks than he is to crack down on the Tories.

The irony of dismissing someone from post for taking part in trade union activity appears to be lost on Keir Starmer. This is behaviour we expect from the worst of bosses, not someone who claims to lead the labour movement.

This episode provides yet more evidence that the Labour Party leadership is incapable of standing up for working people. The cost-of-living emergency is tearing up our collective living standards, and people will suffer and die as a result. Workers and the trade union movement need strong, consistent political leadership that understands the importance of collective action.

Labour’s diet of platitudes and posturing will not address the crisis. Only empowering workers to take on employers and the Government to demand better pay and conditions through their unions will do that.

If Labour will not provide the independent political leadership workers need, the Green Party will.

The Greens have been consistently supportive of RMT and CWU strike action to demand better pay and conditions. We support all workers taking strike action to defend our collective living standards in this crisis.

We urge trade unionists and socialists to join the Green Party and be in a party that understands solidarity and the importance of workplace collective action.

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Tens of thousands of rail workers are preparing to walk out over jobs, pay and conditions. RMT members are demanding a fair pay rise to match inflation, guarantees against compulsory redundancies, and the protection of key roles on the railways.

This is set to be the biggest rail strike since 1989 – and a milestone in the fight for real Government action on the cost of living crisis. A victory in this dispute could inspire a wave of action – from teachers to nurses and beyond – to force the Tories to hand workers real pay rises and tackle inequality.

But the Conservatives have other plans, and are already looking to seize the chance to further restrict lawful strike action and even force rail workers to scab on their colleagues.

In short, this is a major fight for the labour movement and we need to make sure we win.

The Green Party Trade Union Group committee has produced an explainer on why Greens should support the RMT’s action, including some materials you can use to get supporting the striking workers locally.

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By Matthew Hull. Matthew is Chair of the Green Party Trade Union Group. This article was originally published on Bright Green, an independent outlet for radical, democratic green movements.

Another Tory parliament, another anti-union law? Last Sunday’s issue of the Telegraph carried briefings from Government ministers threatening to impose ever tighter restrictions on trade unions in some of the UK’s biggest and most strategically significant industries.

Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi hinted at undermining the position of educators’ unions, by allowing non-union associations to represent teachers in disciplinary and grievance procedures. Grant Shapps, Transport Secretary, dusted off a 2019 Conservative manifesto pledge to introduce so-called ‘minimum service requirements’ across public transport: requiring a certain number of workers to continue staffing services during strike action, and therefore requiring workers to scab on each other or make their action unlawful.

These proposals have been floated before and come straight from the pages of the Tory anti-union playbook. Not only that, but they are of a piece with the tsunami of repressive legislation that Boris Johnson’s government has sent crashing against the UK public.

The Policing Act and coming Public Order Bill, the Elections Bill, the Nationality & Borders Bill and more. Each is designed in its own way to make effective lawful democratic resistance to the ruling Conservative Party more difficult and, in cases, impracticable for many people. Shrinking the space available to organisers and community activists in particular, these pieces of legislation constitute a centralisation of increased power in the hands of the Government at the expense of all of us.

Restricting the activity of trade unions and rank-and-file members fits this pattern. The Tory design is to keep unions down by limiting the scope of their actions within the law: making lawful strike action as ineffective as possible, while threatening noncompliant unions with suppression and sequestration if they fail to police their own members. It is the sick genius of the modern British anti-strike law that it recruits union bureaucracies to act as disciplinarians on the state’s behalf.

Beyond this general picture, the plans trailed in the Sunday Telegraph are specifically targeted at what the Government considers to be problematic areas of relative boldness.

Speaking to the paper, Shapps told railway workers’ unions to “wake up and smell the coffee.” While he did not say it, his comments were surely directed at the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT); they are in the late stages of a national ballot of workers involving 40,000 railways staff. An outpost of relatively high density and strike-readiness, in the strategically important transport sector, the RMT are a perfect example of the commendable militancy that the government wishes to supress. 

Zahawi’s encroachment on the position of education unions comes after two years where the National Education Union (NEU) in particular has grown more vocal and gained more members. The NEU’s creative invocation of health and safety protections in Section 44 of the Employment Rights Act to force a U-turn in Government policy during Covid lockdowns has neither been forgotten, nor forgiven by the minister. The broader weakening of democratic accountability in education, driven by academisation and free schools, would be consummated by depriving unions of a key institution role in defending members’ interests.

These are changes the Government has been dying to make. Incubated for years in the imaginations of the Right, they could have made an appearance at seemingly any time. So why now?

As mentioned, the RMT are approaching the end of a landmark ballot of railway workers that could see tens of thousands walk out. This is reason enough for a scare-story in the Government’s favourite receptacle for propaganda and puff pieces. In an exceedingly busy parliament, with the Government racing to push through the rest of its repressive agenda, it is not clear that the Conservative Party will prioritise giving these plans a high-profile hearing.

Given the broader economic context, however, it is equally if not more plausible that the Government is laying the groundwork for this assault on trade union rights to take place, albeit further down the line.

As the crisis in standards of living grows and grows, dissent and anger are only likely to grow. The Conservative government has shown that it has neither the ideas nor the commitment to provide a resolution to this crisis that would support working people and challenge corporate power. Selling “more work” as the way out of it, at a time when work is paying less and less by the week, is going to fool no-one. The Government’s best bet for maintaining their grip on power whatever the weather, is to increase their ability to repress organised dissent and prevent a coherent popular opposition from forming.

This is what makes keeping unions down, in a cost-of-living crisis, a political priority for the current Government.

In 2022, even in their comparatively diminished state, trade unions are positioned to do something that other institutions in British politics cannot. Unions have the ability to take ambitions, ideas, impulses, and feelings among the mass of working people and translate them into demands for progressive change. The student movement – another potential locus for the creation, popularisation and resourcing of such demands – is in a weakened state and without a genuinely engaged mass membership. The print and digital media are largely owned (and their agendas determined) by a right-wing billionaire clique, ably assisted by a narrow, isolated and upper-class journalists’ set. Put simply, if mass dissent is going to take political form at all, it is difficult to see how it will not come from or at least through the labour movement. 

There is ample historic precedent for trade unions playing this social role, as a vanguard of social change. Waves of popular industrial action throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries have resulted in sea-changes in Britain’s social contract. To put it another way: the worst outcome for the Conservatives isn’t just a successful RMT action on the railways, but an RMT action that gains broad sympathy and popularity across the UK. Not only are Tories aware of this, but it is the stuff of their most feverish nightmares. It fuels an obsession with imposing ever more restrictive anti-union laws, even though Britain already has the most oppressive in Western Europe.

This is how the Tories’ response to the cost-of-living crisis is shaping up to be a security state response, without a welfare-based response (and much less a democratic worker-led response). The game is insulating themselves and their base from the climbing costs of crisis, while suppressing the effects of working people’s resistance.

This is an incredibly dangerous road. The Conservatives’ agenda is already building the state’s capacity to repress resistance by the working class, and especially LGBT communities and people of colour. 

The strains on people’s ability to live are only likely to grow. Supply shocks in food and commodities, for example, amplified by an unstable financialised trading system; climate-induced instability and price fluctuations; the increasingly inability of the poorest to secure publicly accessible health services in good time if at all: each successive impact will prompt the state to react as it is accustomed to do, by containing the impacts and protecting the interests of owners and not workers.

In this context, attacks on trade unions’ ability to organise and strike freely should be interpreted as part of the broader attack on the people’s ability to struggle for and win justice for themselves and the planet. Even if the government is trailing these proposals primarily to test the waters, we need to be firm in our resistance.

The RMT has already committed in policy to flout any so-called ‘minimum service requirements’ should they be implemented, and to fight against their implementation tooth-and-nail; we must support them in this all the way. Unite’s General Secretary, Sharon Graham, has declared that “if the government forces our legitimate activities”, they “shouldn’t expect [Unite] to play by the rules.” Commitments like this should be commended, and Graham should be encouraged to make firm preparations to fight this fight. Support should be offered to unions that refuse meekly to accept these changes.

One of the great psychological victories of Thatcherism is that even among progressives, some have been primed to see union rights and workplace struggles as separate from wider democratic rights and struggles. History’s lesson that trade union rights and freedoms are the canary in the coalmine for civil liberties is a lesson that constantly needs revising. Too many people hope, without justification, that they can support and protect democratic rights in society without prioritising the sometimes-messy business of upholding the right to strike.

The supposed division between freedoms to organise and exercise democratic power in the workplace and outside of it, has always been artificial. Maintaining this artifice in a period when elites are threatening a total regression in rights and freedoms, however, could be nothing less than suicidal. The more and more our working lives resemble dictatorships, the more difficult and painful all democratic resistance will become.

The learned habit of tempering or moderating support for union actions must be set aside. Supporting such rights in principle, while avowedly criticising unions and industrial actions that apply them in practice, will be shown to be insufficient. Greens, progressives, socialists, social democrats, liberals too: it’s time to stand up and defend workers’ rights to organise. You might be next.

The post View: We All Need to Oppose Tory Anti-Union Laws appeared first on Green Party Trade Union Group.

The Green Party Trade Union Group expresses our disgust at the dismissal on Thursday of approximately 800 seafarers by P&O Ferries. We stand in solidarity with the workers and their union, RMT.

The decision by P&O bosses, taken secretly and communicated to the workers remotely and with no notice, is a shameful example of an unscrupulous practice that has become all too common in modern Britain.

That the company was able even to contemplate this action testifies to the rank insufficiency of the UK’s workers’ rights protections. Such actions should not be possible.

P&O’s actions clearly fly in the face of employment law, disregarding the consultation period among other requirements.

The episode has also revealed the extent to which the UK’s economy facilitates and encourages tyrannical management practices. P&O’s parent company, DP World, has paid huge dividends to shareholders in the past two years. It availed itself of the UK’s furlough scheme to sustain itself through the pandemic. Its owners have spent over £140m on a golf competition alone, while depriving the P&O staff pension scheme of a similar amount.
Now, the company is pleading poverty and claiming this decision is ‘necessary’ for P&O to survive. This claim is utterly without basis and below contempt.

No worker should have to suffer such dreadful treatment. In place of the sacked employees P&O now seeks to exploit a new group of workers, who on the grounds of their status as migrant agency staff will be denied fair pay and conditions. We resist any attempt to make this issue about so-called “British jobs” or “foreign workers”: workers of all nations will only win real security and dignity by uniting and refusing to be divided by borders. Fraternisation and organisation with potential agency workers is essential, to ensure they do not cross pickets and replace union workers.

We applaud the decision of the workers, supported by the RMT, to sit-in on their vessels and refuse to accept the company’s decision. We call on the wider labour movement to meet the RMT’s requests for mobilisation in support of the workers at P&O, and call on fellow Green Party members to offer their support in turn.

Finally, we call on the UK government to take urgent action to protect each job and prevent any detriment to the workers involved. The UK should be prepared to nationalise P&O Ferries, without compensation, and reform the company to hand workers greater power over their working conditions.

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We must empower the unions to fight the climate crisis, writes Matthew Hull on the COP26 Coalition’s Day of Action. Matthew Hull is Chair of the Green Party Trade Union Group.

At the Green Party’s Autumn Conference in Birmingham, the Trade Union Group was joined by John – a workplace representative at GKN Driveline.

The GKN plant produces drivelines and other parts for the automotive industry, supplying various well-known industry names. Just a few miles from the Conference venue, in Erdington, it has been a feature of the local economy for decades, and the company has operated since the 19th century. But in the space of a few short years, it has been acquired and asset-stripped for sale by a venture capital firm.

The Erdington workers’ efforts to save the plant, their jobs, and the skills-base that has sustained a Birmingham community were extensive. Tactics included lobbying ministers, working through their local MP Jack Dromey, and public campaigning.

Perhaps most notably, for the purposes of this article at least, the GKN plant convener and reps produced a transition plan for GKN Driveline. In partnership with a consultancy and drawing on the expertise of their own engineers, they worked up a proposal for the GKN plant to retool itself for electric vehicle supply chains.

This was no revolutionary screed, but a business case. It included a comparative analysis arguing the GKN plant was competitive, both in the market and in comparison with other GKN plants (there are more than a dozen sites across Europe). Written to demonstrate the long-term viability of a plant plugged into the UK’s electric vehicle industry, it appealed directly both to GKN’s owners as business managers and to the Conservative government rhetoric of ‘levelling up’ and electrification.

GKN’s owners, however, are not interested in being business managers. The venture capitalist owners, Melrose, specialise in acquiring and ‘slim-lining’ manufacturing enterprises before selling them on at a profit. Having met the Unite plant conveners, Jack Dromey, and even government ministers Melrose acknowledged the plan and the claims the workers were making. Melrose then dismissed it out of hand.

The anti-union script running in the background

After months of campaigning, Unite’s representatives at the Erdington plant have negotiated an enhanced redundancy package for the workers set to lose their jobs. Unite’s members voted to accept the package, and the union is working with Jack Dromey and others to ensure the workers affected are best looked after. The transition plan fell on deaf ears.

It would not do to oversimplify the reasons behind what has been done to GKN workers in Erdington. John himself was clear that the eventual outcome was the result of a confluence of different factors: a generalised slowdown in auto manufacture reducing union leverage, and ministers’ unwillingness to match their ‘buy British’ rhetoric with interventions to defend the plant, featured heavily in his telling of the story.

It would be too easy to present the demise of GKN Erdington as a fait accompli, the inevitable result of the 2018 hostile takeover of GKN by the motivated re-sellers at Melrose plc. Unite was never going to win by speaking to the bosses’ hearts; but there can be no denying that the asset-stripping modus operandi practised by Melrose also restricted the union’s ability to speak to the owners’ pockets. A venture capital firm that is disinterested in the actual production of auto parts for a just transition will not be moved by proposals that complicate their project, which was and is to trim down GKN for resale.

There is however a missing piece in the puzzle. Speaking as a shop steward, John was very clear that among all GKN’s sites, the Erdington plant was a sitting duck because of Britain’s legal environment. The UK’s constellation of anti-union and anti-strike laws itself made the Erdington plant especially vulnerable. From the perspective of Melrose, the ease with which UK workers can be fired and the difficulty they have in resisting dismissal through legal means made Erdington a prime target in their project. Decisively pro-boss regulations make the messy and soulless business of axing jobs that much cheaper.

Melrose’s decisions, and the extent to which they were determined to pursue the demise of the Erdington plant, were shaped by Britain’s incredibly lopsided industrial relations architecture. This, at any rate, is the perspective of Unite representatives involved in negotiations to save it.

Not only did anti-union laws shape Melrose’s decision to enact a hostile takeover of GKN in 2018, and their subsequent behaviour, but they also critically limited Unite’s ability to resist. Ballots for industrial action, both consultative and legal, were hampered by restrictions on unions’ ability to operate freely. GKN’s management challenged the legality of strike action, exploiting the various opportunities given to them in UK law to stymie worker action. All in all, this compounded Unite’s inability to identify and use their leverage in a timely and effective fashion.

Many events in labour history are overdetermined. We do not make history in conditions of our own choosing, and the various conditions in which GKN’s workers found themselves made effective resistance critically difficult. It may be that the anti-union and anti-strike laws do not have to be adduced to explain what has happened. From another vantage point, however, the anti-union laws cannot neatly be separated from the various other factors explaining the how, the what, and the why of recent events.

The exact relative importance of the anti-union laws can be left to historians. But we can be sure that they are a script running in the background facilitating the damage that venture capitalists like Melrose do to communities.

This feature of the UK’s economy is not new, and will be familiar to almost everyone involved in the labour movement. Greens and environmentalists should make themselves increasingly familiar with these laws too. 

If the story of GKN teaches us anything – and having listened to John I am confident it can teach us a lot – it is that the anti-union laws considerably reduce our leverage to present and implement concrete plans for a just transition. An opportunity to retain skills and redirect them to more sustainable industry has been lost, in part because the workers and their union were constrained.

If we are to implement plans for a just transition to a zero-carbon economy, we must instead empower working people to develop their skills and enable them to work to transform society through dignified, well-rewarded work in the home, the office, the factory and elsewhere. It is hard to imagine doing this successfully without resisting and repealing the anti-union laws.

Changing models

There has been substantial opposition to the anti-union laws on the part of trade unions. This has taken various forms – in parliament, on the streets, in the workplace. But it is useful to dwell on the less obvious, and frequently less positive, reactions and adaptations to ever more restrictive anti-union laws on the level of union strategy and tactics.

As historians Sundari Anitha and Ruth Pearson note in their book Striking Women, the growing list of restrictions on legal trade union action have caused a fundamental shift in the function of trade unions in the 21st century.

A series of five Trade Union Acts and Employment Acts between 1979 and 1990 imposed severe limitations on the ability of workers to stage walkouts. In 1984 secondary picketing was outlawed, banning one of the labour movement’s most powerful tools; new requirements for ballots, including postal balloting and minimum turnouts, ensured that industrial action would be slower and more difficult to organise. There are too many to cite in one piece. Each successive restriction had the effect of creating new spaces for employers to exploit, making challenges to the legality of workers’ actions and jamming the gears of collective action before they could really gather momentum.

In response to these growing legal obstacles, and in the aftermath of landmark defeats, Anitha and Pearson argue the trade union movement underwent a transformation in its organisational posture and behaviour. They chart the decline of industrial militancy, referring to the decline from over 29 million strike days in 1979 to just 273,000 days in 2018. They also chart signs that trade unions were beginning to assume the role of membership organisations, supporting workers increasingly as individuals and following new avenues to do so. For example, as strike days fall, submissions to the Employment Tribunal often with union assistance rise sharply from 40,000 in 1979 to 191,000 in 2013 (when the Coalition government’s punishing fee regime causes them to fall precipitously).

Anitha and Pearson identify an overall trajectory from unions as organs of collective action, towards organisations that provide specialised assistance and benefits to each member as an individual worker (sometimes described as a ‘servicing’ model of trade unionism). Political representation is achieved increasingly through the Labour Party and by lobbying at Westminster. There is space in this model for representation of the collective membership to the employer, but the union’s role is increasingly advisory and dependent on finding sympathetic listeners. While there are notable and proud exceptions to this trend, it is hard to deny that it exists.

It is clear how in the aftermath of historic defeat, and increasingly cut off from avenues for creative collective action, trade unions would in practice accommodate themselves to the new legal reality. In the scramble to survive amid what Tony Blair proudly called “the most restrictive [union laws] in the Western world”, with membership rolls shrinking, it is a shift accomplished easily.

But as experiences all across the movement show, this more bureaucratic form of trade unionism is unable to meet the demands of the climate and ecological emergency.

Changing mindsets

A labour movement in retreat will be prone to assume more defensive postures. Severe legal restrictions on the tactics available will only reinforce that tendency.

This vantage point is particularly helpful when considering why trade unions have previously adopted, and continue to adopt, climate wrecking policy positions. A dispositionally conservative union leadership that has internalised the logic of the anti-union laws will be less receptive to overtures promising greener grass in some distant promised land. It will be proportionately more likely to prioritise the narrow defence of its members’ interests, even as the ecological crisis threatens to envelop us all.

This is not just a question of officials and leaders. For many rank-and-file union members, and especially those whose jobs are exposed in a transition, the landmark defeats of yesteryear are only too recent. The fact that many such defeats involved the utter destruction and generational impoverishment of communities bound together by extractive and carbon-intensive industries, like coal mining, means the threat is very real and very much in living memory. The fact that many such communities were promised new and more sustainable jobs, opportunities, and support that never materialised adds to the malaise. If there is among such places and people a scepticism of grand designs from career politicians, that scepticism is well-earned.

None of this is to excuse those policies that pose a threat to our planet. Nor does it glorify or justify those who propose and defend them. But it does suggest the way to beat the trap is to break the mindset and organisational practice that the anti-union laws have served to embed in the movement.

Empowering workers through their unions to take ownership of and drive forward plans for a just transition is one way to set about this. By making resistance to the anti-union laws and their eventual replacement with positive union rights central to our organising and campaigning, we can plant the seeds of workers’ skills and creativity in better soil.

Empower the unions to defeat the climate crisis

This work is already ongoing. A rising general environmental consciousness, however shallow and flawed, has put a transition on every political party’s agenda. The notion that justice for working people must be served is hegemonic such that even the Conservative Party must imitate its rhetoric, even as they fail to match it with any substance.

As the experience at GKN Driveline suggests, workers and their unions are already exploring this political landscape and fashioning futures for themselves and others. At Rolls Royce, workers successfully defended one site and delayed any job losses at two others; together with their union and local MPs, they are developing transition plans and have already secured vital training to re-skill their members to produce greener technologies. Other unions, including the Bakers, Food & Allied Union (BFAWU), have made their workers’ exposure to the climate crisis a key plank of their policy alongside vigorous campaigns to defend jobs and conditions.

The experience at GKN also suggests, however, that something must change if we want workers’ plans to be implemented.

The labour movement is undertaking an orderly retreat. Unions are haemorrhaging their private sector membership: in 2020 private sector membership fell by 110,000, while rising public sector membership rescued overall union membership to bring it to 23.5%.

But if we are concerned with reviving the spirit and practice of collective action, then we must look beyond membership figures to evidence of willingness and capability to strike. And here the picture is even darker. In 2018, just 273,000 working days were lost to strike action, down from the postwar high at 29.5 million in 1979 (and in a workforce that has almost doubled in size).

Most of these strike days were undertaken in fortresses of the public sector. 68% of 2018 strike days were in the education sector, and most of those in a single dispute by the UCU. The highest annual figure since the millennium, 1.4 million days in 2011, was due principally to two huge public sector disputes. The overall prognosis for much of the private sector, which will be critical in any industrial transition to zero carbon, is poor indeed.

Recent developments suggest that union members are chafing against the limited ‘servicing’ model and the climbdown it represents. The election of Sharon Graham as Unite General Secretary in 2021, upsetting pundits’ predictions, signalled a shift towards an industrial approach and a willingness to revive the strike as a central tactic. Graham’s manifesto policy of approving strike ballots in far greater numbers is just one sign of this.

Not only that, but there is a growing awareness that confronting the arbitrary and undemocratic restrictions of the anti-union and anti-strike laws, as well as the mindset they have embedded, is essential to the movement’s health. At Unite’s 2021 policy conference the union reiterated opposition to the anti-union laws, and indicated their willingness to campaign on the issue. The RMT’s recent AGM produced a resolution to oppose the laws, including any attempt to impose further restrictions on transport workers through so-called ‘minimum service levels’.

There are other, perhaps less obvious signs too. Sharon Graham’s insistence on revisiting union structure to bring reps together across each industry (creating ‘combines’), a seemingly strictly bureaucratic move, could implicitly challenge the logic of the anti-union laws that rigidly keep workers apart and prevent action in solidarity with others.

Fighting back and repealing the anti-union laws, to replace them with a positive charter of trade union rights, will depend on our collective ability to make the current legal framework unstable and unenforceable. Considering where we are, the scale of this work should not be underestimated. But as consciousness of the problem grows among trade unionists we can be more confident that we have a basis to push forward. Rising anger among workers in particular sectors – including health and social care – offers hope that a collective spirit is not yet dead.

Understanding this, Greens have an opportunity not just to acknowledge but to embrace the developing environmental and climate consciousness of workers, like those at GKN, Rolls Royce, and elsewhere. We can work to turn this ripple into a wave of transition plans sweeping sectors like manufacturing and beyond into all sectors of the economy.

But doing this requires a commitment to actively resisting, in speech and action, those laws that critically limit democratic space to take control of our working lives.

The recent launch statement of Empower the Unions, a joint project of Earth Strike UK and Free Our Unions, expressed this desire and recognised the necessity of solidarity action to win climate justice. This is the spirit of democratic industrial militancy Greens and the movement for climate justice must assume, recognising that our plans will wither away without the power to implement them. The Green Party Trade Union Group has been joined by Caroline Lucas MP and representatives of the Young Greens in supporting the campaign.

If we want to see more GKN plans not just emerge but emerge triumphant, we must examine the laws that prevent such workers from transforming their working lives. And then we must fight to change them.

The post View: Empower the unions to fight the climate crisis appeared first on Green Party Trade Union Group.

Green Party members came together at their Autumn Conference in support of the private members’ bill to stop ‘fire and rehire’.

The bill would make the practice, in which workers are dismissed and rehired on worse terms, illegal in the UK. It is proposed by Labour MP Barry Gardiner and supported by a cross party group including Green MP Caroline Lucas.

Greens congregated as the bill was being heard in the House of Commons, in a show of support and solidarity with workers fighting the abhorrent practice.

But despite widespread condemnation of the practice the government whipped its MPs to oppose the private members bill by denying a vote on the practice.

Speaking after the demo, Trade Union Group Communications Officer Martin Francis said:

“I’m proud that the Green Party stands against the practice of fire-and-rehire, and express my full support for Barry Gardiner’s bill in parliament today.

“This struggle will continue beyond today, and it is vital that the labour movement and its allies remain steadfast in the fight to eliminate the abhorrent practice of fire-and-rehire once and for all.”

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By Daniel Randall, RMT Rep and co-organiser of Free Our Unions. This is a transcript of a speech given by Randall at a meeting of the Green Party Trade Union Group on 20th August 2021. This transcript was first published on the Free Our Unions website.

My name’s Daniel Randall, I’m a railway worker and a rep for the RMT union. I’m speaking here as a co-organiser of Free Our Unions. Thanks very much for the invite, I’m looking forward to this discussion.

I’ll start by giving a quick introduction to what Free Our Unions is and what we do, for those that may not have heard of us. We’re a grassroots labour movement campaign against anti-union and anti-strike legislation, that exists to raise awareness of how such legislation makes our lives as workers worse. We organise information campaigns, public events, and direct action, and our supporters are active inside their own unions fighting for those unions to adopt a radical approach to these issues. We’re supported by four trade unions at national level – FBU, RMT, PCS, and IWGB – and dozens of local union branches and committees, as well as some Labour Party organisations.

Free Our Unions organises on a very open basis, via open organising meetings. We produce regular briefings and materials for supporters to use in their workplaces and communities. We don’t want that to be a passive relationship, whereby passive supporters dutifully hand out materials produced by some distant centre, but an active one, whereby supporters themselves are producing materials explaining the relevance of anti-union laws to the spheres of activity they’re involved in. If you want to stay in touch with our campaign on an individual level, there’s a contact form you can fill in on our website.

The Green Party TU Group has already taken a strong stance, in policy terms, against anti-union and anti-strike legislation, so I’m fairly confident I don’t have to spend any time convincing you that it’s necessary to oppose them.

Nevertheless, as trade unionists who organise on a day-to-day basis within the constraints these laws impose on us, including their deadening effecting on consciousness, it can be useful to take a step back and think about the issue in context, in order that we can strengthen the foundations of our opposition. So what I’d like to do with this talk – and I don’t intend to speak for more than 15 minutes – is give a bit of background in terms of how we in Free Our Unions approach the issues, and then talk about why I think there are particular possibilities for collaboration between our campaign and yourselves as Green trade unionists, that I hope we can explore.

As I’m sure many of you know, Britain has what Tony Blair once, proudly, called “the most restrictive union laws in the western world.” How unions organise, when and how we can take industrial action, and over what issues, are all severely restricted by this legislative regime. Any worker aged around 45 or under has spent more or less their entire working life under it. The laws which most constrain us today began to be introduced under Thatcher, and were progressively added throughout the subsequent decades of Tory rule and, disgracefully, were left entirely intact by 13 years of Labour government.

The constraints of these laws seem so solid that it often feels somewhat fantastical to imagine things could ever be any different. The idea, for example, that workers could get together in the staff room or canteen, take a vote there and then to strike, and walk out the door – and for that to be perfectly legal and legitimate – seems unimaginable to many…

…to such an extent that well-meaning figures in our own movement recoil from the ostensible radicalism of demanding the restoration of such rights, and feel it necessary to cringingly preface their comments about anti-union laws with assurances that “no-one wants to go back to the bad old days of the 1970s.”

There was indeed much about the 1970s that was bad – both in general, and in terms of the trade union movement as it was then (or so I’m told: I wasn’t there personally). But we should make no apology for aspiring to least the levels of legislative freedom and social power that organised labour had then – and in fact much greater levels.

That contraction of horizons also leads to a tendency to think of anti-union laws really only in terms of the most recent – the 2016 Trade Union Act, which included the imposition of turnout thresholds in industrial action ballots. But that law is only one facet of the legislative restrictions on our rights to organise and take action, and in many ways not the worst. So a big focus of our work in Free Our Unions has been to try and resist, and push back against, that ideological retreat to only talking about the most recent anti-union laws, and maintain a perspective of confronting the older laws – the laws which prohibit workplace balloting, which prohibit striking in solidarity with other workers, and which prohibit striking over political issues.

It’s an important moment for the labour movement to step up our campaign against these laws now because this legislative regime is set to get worse. I’m sure you’ve all heard of the Police Bill; that bill will restrict yet further our rights to protest and dissent. Free Our Unions has published an extensive briefing examining the effect the bill will have on unions and workplace organising, which you can read on our website, freeourunions.org.

Beyond this, the Tories also have a manifesto commitment to implement so-called “minimum service requirements” during transport strikes, something that will obviously directly affect me and my workmates, and you and yours if you work in the transport industry. It’s not yet clear exactly how they envisage the system working here, but in other countries with similar laws, they often involve transport unions designating a section of their membership as exempt from striking so those workers can provide the legally-stipulated “minimum service”, meaning unions essentially have to facilitate scabbing. The political aim here is very clear: to minimise the impact of strikes, and essentially reduce them to the status of a protest rather than a leveraging of workers’ power.

We don’t know what the timescale for the implementation of the new law is yet. Government priorities have obviously been recalibrated by the pandemic, but this is something the government is still committed to and could decide to bring forward at any time. If these new laws are passed, they won’t stop with transport workers. The government already has a list of “essential services” which are subject to additional restrictions under the 2016 Trade Union Act, which includes education, healthcare, and the fire service. If they impose “minimum service requirements” on transport workers, I have no doubt those sectors will be next.

I want to talk now about some specific points of convergence between the fight against anti-union laws and your potential political priorities as Green trade unionists. In the interests of full disclosure, I myself am a Labour Party member and a supporter of the revolutionary socialist group Workers’ Liberty. But, although some of our activity historically has been oriented to policy issues within Labour, Free Our Unions isn’t a solely Labour-focused campaign.

The first point of convergence I want to suggest is around the question of democracy. I know the Green Party is strongly committed to democratic reform; I would argue that restrictions on the right to strike are one of the most significant brakes on meaningful democratic action in Britain today, and that repealing anti-union and anti-strike laws would represent as meaningful an expansion of democracy as reforming the electoral system.

Without a full right to strike, we’re essentially subject to the dictatorship of the boss. Democracy ends as soon as we set foot in the workplace. In a context in which our hard-right, nationalist government is proposing legislation to restrict the right to protest, to further restrict workers’ rights to organise and strike, gerrymandering constituency boundaries, and more, I think you have to say that this adds up to a serious assault on democracy. The first mass workers’ movement in this country, Chartism, was a movement for democracy, a movement against the dictatorship of the rich. The contemporary labour movement needs to reclaim some of that spirit today, and I think you, as members of a party strongly committed to an expansion of democracy, could help to leaven that by making campaigning against anti-union laws a strategic priority.

The second point of convergence is around the obviously central question of climate change. As I’m sure many of you know, the origin of the term “green” as a political label lies in a trade union struggle – the “Green Bans” movement of Australian construction workers in the 1970s, who leveraged their class power, their power over production, to shut down environmentally and socially destructive construction projects. If you’re not familiar with this episode I strongly urge you to learn about it; in my view it is one of the world-historic high-points of rank-and-file-led trade unionism that was both politically and industrially radical. So, if only in a nominative sense, the Green tradition is linked to a class-based, workplace-based, union-based struggle.

We desperately need a new “Green Bans” movement today. We need workers to have the freedom to strike not only over narrow economic issues – so-called “official trade disputes” – but over political issues, so that they could leverage their class power to demand radical climate action from the government. We need the freedom to strike in solidarity with others, including with youth climate strikers. And workers in high-emissions industries need to the freedom to strike to demand transition and conversion, recapturing the spirit of the Lucas Aerospace workers who, in the 1970s, developed a plan to repurpose their employer’s productive capacity away from making military hardware in order to make medical equipment and renewable energy technology. I imagine that the statement “climate change is caused by capitalism” is uncontroversial in this room; if that’s the case, and if we see the working class as a key anti-capitalist actor – the key anti-capitalist actor, I would argue – then we are impelled to confront the legal shackles the capitalist state has placed on us, in order to protect itself.

Free Our Unions is currently supporting Earth Strike, a network of anti-capitalist activists that emerged from the climate strike movement, in a new initiative called “Empower the Unions”. This initiative aims to connect trade unionists and climate activists, drawing on traditions of working-class direct action for the environment, such as the Green Bans movement, the Lucas Plan, and more recent struggles like the occupation of the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight in 2009, in order to highlighting how anti-union laws inhibit such action today. That’s one specific area of activity in which I’d invite Green Party trade unionists to work alongside us.

The formal political situation in this country is very bleak, and I’m sure none of us expect, on any kind of short or medium-term timescale, the election of a government likely to repeal these laws. I think it will be a social imperative to break and defy these laws much sooner than we have any prospect of seeing them repealed. In fact, I believe that’s already the case. But I also believe that continually highlighting these laws, raising consciousness around them, and explaining their essential nature as statutory weapons of class warfare in the hands of the bosses and their state, which menace the future of the planet as well as constraining our democratic rights, and demanding their abolition – even when that demand isn’t immediately likely to be won… these are all essential parts of the means by which our movement can develop the confidence to defy the laws.

That, ultimately, is what Free Our Unions exists to do, and if you agree with the perspective I’ve sketched out today, I hope we can discuss how we might work together to advance it.

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On Friday 20th August, the Green Party Trade Union Group welcomed Daniel Randall to speak to us from the Free Our Unions campaign.

Daniel is an RMT rep on the London Underground, and a co-organiser of the Free Our Unions campaign.

Free Our Unions is a campaign to repeal the UK’s anti-union laws and replace them with a positive bill of rights, securing the right to organise and strike without impediment. It is formally supported by the RMT, PCS, FBU, and IWGB unions, as well as dozens of union branches and sections across the UK.

Daniel spoke to us about the significance of the UK’s highly restrictive anti-union laws – perhaps the most severe in the Western world – and why repealing them is critical in order to win pillars of Green politics such as ecological justice and democracy.

Click here to watch Daniel Randall’s talk here.

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