Written by Lee Booker, a Green Party member and Health and Safety Rep for the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw). The Green Party Trade Union Group publishes an array of different views and perspectives on both Green Party and labour movement topics, which represent the view of the writer and not necessarily GPTU. If you want to write for our blog, please contact us today.

Image: Make Amazon Pay!’ Demonstration in Berlin 03.jpg” by Leonhard Lenz is marked with CC0 1.0

In the early hours of ‘Black Friday’ – 26^th November 2021 – Amazon distribution depots were hit by an unexpected delay. Extinction Rebellion (XR) set up blockades at various sites for 48 hours to try to interrupt Amazon’s well known run-up-to-Christmas Black Friday sales. Coincidentally, at four sites members of GMB Union supported by the TUC protested against Amazon’s exploitation of its workers and criticised its anti-union culture; the GMB protests took place as part of a global day of action under the banner of ‘Make Amazon Pay’, an initiative coordinated by the Progressive International. It is part of a much longer campaign spanning years by the unions to organise Amazon workers. However, as reported in the Guardian, the union and XR campaigns were separate. Visible GMB campaigning could be seen on only four sites, whereas XR hit thirteen. This piece will argue that the nature of such actions and the lack of collaboration with broader movements, such as the trade union movement, enable the media to spin a popular narrative against such protests.

Examples of this media phenomenon abound. Take right-winger Brendan O’Neill’s piece in the Spectator attacking Extinction Rebellion’s Amazon action, titled: “The snobbery of Extinction Rebellion’s Amazon blockade”. Without so much as a shred of irony writing for an avowedly capitalist magazine, O’Neill characterises the XR action as distinctly bourgeois; with this action, he claims, they were punishing the working class for its consumerism in the lead up to Christmas. He finishes the piece with the following summary:

“These eco-muppets occasionally don the garb of anti-capitalism and flirt with radical lingo. But strip that all away and you’ll find well-educated, often well-off people who are hell-bent on stopping the rest of us, the little people, from driving so much, flying so much and buying so much.

“Extinction Rebellion is fundamentally a movement for austerity. No wonder it is unpopular. We like our holidays, we like our comforts and we like our Black Friday bargains, so bugger off.”

Let us be perfectly clear: Brendan O’Neill; is a right-wing charlatan, and no ally at all in the fight against capitalism or ecological destruction. But strip away the fiery faux “everyday man” language and behind O’Neill’s clownish and bad faith provocations there hides a kernel of truth. One of the biggest problems that often haunts environmental movements time and again is its class composition. Take a look at Wales’ excellent Centre for Alternative Technology, whose own research has led them to formulate a strategy to broaden the environmental movement after recognising that “the environmental movement in the UK is dominated by a single demographic: the white middle class”.

When I heard XR had targeted the Rugeley Amazon site (which is relatively local to me) I felt excitement and a degree of support towards their direct action. Why? I know the site’s track record in terms of employee treatment, as well as its anti-union tactics because of my own lived experience. I have friends and colleagues who have worked there, and I have seen various large site demonstrations by unions at the site entrance.  However, I also expected anger from the many people locally and across the region who would likely be using the Black Friday sales to help get Christmas presents at cheaper-than-usual prices in these tough times. This feeling was weaponised by the media, as the Spectator piece shows.

Taking the Rugeley site as a focus point to analyse tactics will shine a light on the ways in which the ecological justice movement, in this case Extinction Rebellion, need to alter the ways in which they work if they are to gather broad appeal for real change.

Rugeley is part of Cannock Chase District. In 2017 this area was ranked (excluding Stoke on Trent) the most deprived local authority in Staffordshire, its rank pre-pandemic in 2019 was the 126^th out of the 317 most deprived local authorities in England. Amazon’s Rugeley site is now recognised as the largest business in the area and is located over the road from the now demolished power station, which once was the area’s largest employer. Stable long-term jobs, replaced by precarious employment. 

GMB union have been trying to unionise the Rugeley site for years, including well publicised demonstrations which have attracted support from some MPs. A major recurring issue on the Rugeley site has been its terrible health and safety record, leading to frequent call outs to ambulances for staff.  Whilst the district today may unfortunately elect Conservative MP Amanda Milling as its representative, Cannock Chase District has not shied away from class and ecological justice struggles in its history. From the striking Lea Hall miners in ‘84 and ‘85 to the recent opposition to the increased privatisation of Cannock Chase Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Not far from Amazon, the area still retains the Lea Hall Miners Welfare Centre and Social Club which has hosted post-demonstration socials for trade unionists picketing the amazon site in a show of solidarity a few times over the years. Many times I have driven past St John’s Church in nearby Heath Hayes and spotted banners and announcements that a church group is supporting extinction rebellion events and other earth strikes. Cannock Chase District, whilst once a majority Labour council area, now shares control between Labour and Conservative Parties; it also has one elected Green Party councillor (following the defection of three to an Independent group). A combination of multiple social, economic, culture and political potentialities exist and could be utilised, but so far have not been.

There exists here, as in most communities, the possibility of campaigns that could gather mass support. One problem, however, with Extinction Rebellion’s actions is that they act in isolation and ‘out of the blue’. The ability to put oneself in a position whereby deliberate arrest is sought, a common XR tactic, also comes from a position of privilege (albeit also one requiring courage, which is laudable). Many working class people could not necessarily risk arrest, the loss of wages and the impact this would have on future employment. While many working class movements and their campaign actions have resulted in mass arrests, these have been most successful when supported by a vibrant local support network and local trade union backing; with robust support and buoyed by the collective self-confidence it engenders, working class strikers and agitators have been able to defy the criminal justice system to advance their demands. But XR does not appear to have built the local infrastructure that could make judicious use of such unlawful tactics sustainable and successful. As a result, their tactics can appear alien to many but the most radical and ideologically committed.

Working with those employed on the Amazon site would mean reaching out to and coordinating both with the trade unions trying to organise there, and with ‘organic’ leaders among the workforce. It would mean working within those communities and involving them in the organising process. Until this approach is taken, XR will struggle to challenge hegemonic media narratives characterising them as out of touch; they will fail to represent the views and issues which concern working class communities. The exploitation that occurs in Amazon, as with most large industries, is so often hidden from view. With the general public often oblivious or misinformed as to the misery that has gone into getting the product to their front door, it is no wonder many do not speak up. This is one of the key difficulties when it comes to confronting capitalist relations of production, where the social relations between human beings and the producers of commodities are obscured by the production process itself.

Extinction Rebellion is right to challenge business and government for leading the world into ecological catastrophe. It was right to challenge Amazon. However, to gather public support they need to work with the people of the areas they target. We cannot just be a photo and press opportunity for 48 hours of action, where our community has never had support from XR before and will likely not have it again. They will not win support this way.

The post View: Critical engagement with XR’s Black Friday Amazon blockades appeared first on Green Party Trade Union Group.

Written by Lee Booker, a Green Party member and Health and Safety Rep for the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw). The Green Party Trade Union Group publishes an array of different views and perspectives on both Green Party and labour movement topics, which represent the view of the writer and not necessarily GPTU. If you want to write for our blog, please contact us today.

The most recent Labour Party conference saw 80% of its Constituency Labour Party delegates vote in support of adopting Proportional Representation (PR) as a future campaign pledge.  Yet affiliated trade union delegates used their powerful votes to vote in opposition to the majority of CLP delegates and ultimately see off the popular motion.

From a Green Party member’s perspective, and from that of a trade union member, it could not be clearer what we must argue for and where we must organise.

All political parties except the Conservative Party and the Labour Party are committed to campaigning for PR and to replace the undemocratic First-Past-the-Post system (FPTP) that Britain currently operates for parliamentary elections. The Labour Party, historically, was formed by the trade unions as a representative political party for their interests. However, since the Labour Party’s formation in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee, this historic link has often frayed and on occasions broken down. Today the Labour Party is down by an astonishing 430,000 members since Keir Starmer took over. Not only that, but its links with trade unions are being tested after decades of broken promises, most notably the failure to repeal the restrictive trade union laws during the Blair and Brown era.

Take one of the largest affiliated general unions and Labour’s biggest donor, Unite the union. The Labour Party has faced harsh criticism from its former General Secretary, Len McCluskey, who stated recently that it would be “almost impossible” for Labour to win an outright majority at the next general election. Speaking during her successful leadership campaign to the Green Party Trade Union Group, its newly elected General Secretary Sharon Graham pledged to reorient Unite away from Labour Party internal affairs. While Graham has since taken pains to clarify that a substantial break with Labour is not on the cards, her campaign and conduct since have been characterised by a outward disdain for Westminster politics. Graham seized the opportunity to demonstrate her preference for industrial matters by conspicuously declining to attend the Labour Party’s 2021 Conference – choosing to spend her week on picket lines instead.

In other unions, the breakdown of relations with the Labour Party leadership has been more complete. The party’s recent conference saw the disaffiliation of Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) from Labour after months of outspoken disagreement with Keir Starmer’s behaviour. The BFAWU’s General Decretary Sarah Woolley announced the end of a 119-year affiliation between the union and the party writing that “the decision taken by delegates who predominantly live in what’s regarded as Labour red wall seats shows how far the Labour party has travelled away from the aims and hopes of working class organisations like ours“.

Just as members within the Unite voted for a General Secretary who campaigned to put distance between their union and Labour Party obsessions, and BFAWU delegates voted to disaffiliate from The Labour Party, members can also campaign inside their union to adopt a position of supporting Proportional Representation at union conferences.

It is clear now, that without solid campaigning across the country in our trade union branches and workplaces, the adoption of proportional representation will continue to be blocked and a major barrier for The Green Party to break through in Parliament will be upheld. Many unions are still affiliated to the Labour Party, but many also are not. It is of absolute necessity that Green Party members who are members of their trade unions work to push the rank and file of the trade union movement to vote to support of proportional representation.

We cannot ignore the importance of workplace democracy: after all, it is one of the key areas where we meet and work with people who are not Green Party members. It is an area where we must make the case for proportional representation, ecological justice policies and green transitional programs if we are to create a necessary left-wing alliance in this country that could remove the Conservative Party from power.

For Green Party trade unionists, it is important to seek out and join organised left-wing coalition groups inside their trade unions. These groups often consist of members of various left parties, and members of none; from the Labour Party through to to smaller parties, with members of the Green Party being represented in all of them. They include Usdaw Broad Left, in my union, to Unite’s United Left, and many more besides in all different unions.

Through such groups, many candidates are selected democratically to stand for positions in the unions to represent our shared interests; many proposals to union conferences are drafted and submitted by such groups, to be debated in branches across the country.  If Green Party engage heartily in this key area, we will advance the cause of greater democracy and make PR harder to block in the future.

The post View: The fight for PR needs to go through the unions appeared first on Green Party Trade Union Group.

Written by Lee Booker, a Green Party member and Health and Safety Rep for the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw). The Green Party Trade Union Group publishes an array of different views and perspectives, on both Green Party and labour movement topics. If you want to write for our blog, please contact us today.

With the elections for the Green Party leadership and Executive just around the corner, trade unionists should be looking for candidates who are committed to linking up the environmental movement with trade unions and expanding the Green Party’s support base. 

Trade Unions and the environmental movement have historically not always seen eye-to-eye. These divisions have been based around the drive by the trade unions to protect or guarantee jobs sometimes at the cost of environmental goals  – see, for example, GMB’s prioritisation of nuclear power over Green Party policy ambitions. However, trade unionists were also responsible historically for initiatives such as The Lucas Plan which called for a change over 40 years ago towards cleaner and renewable energy. Communities’ and workers’ concerns about the security of jobs in their area is understandable and reasonable; the Green Party should ensure the environmental movement is seen to work with these causes, promoting ecologically sound alternatives, as opposed to the removal of people’s livelihoods. This is where the trade union movement comes in. 

It would be a mistake for the Green Party and its membership to overlook the trade union movement. The most recent government statistics on trade union membership in the UK have shown that membership of unions in the UK has been increasing since its lowest ebb in recent history in 2016; 2020 showed a total membership of 6.56 million. A substantial segment of this membership lies in the public sector, listed at 4 million members. In contrast, private sector membership has been on the decline, currently sitting at 2.6 million members. This is the lowest private sector membership level since the financial year 2010/11.  With the rise of ‘zero hours’ contracts and insecure work in the private sector over the past decade under Coalition and then Conservative governments, it is no wonder that private sector membership is has suffered.

However, the trade union movement has battled these conditions before, and with the rise of independent workers’ unions across the country (including the IWGB and United Voices of the World), it is clear that workers are still willing to organise and confront these new conditions. Many of the campaigns of these smaller unions have focused on more than just wages, these include the right to sick pay, holiday entitlement, better contracts and better working environments. The Green Party’s wellbeing economy policy would work well with these campaigns in addition to the Green Party championing policies that re-empower trade unions in the UK (such as by repealing the 2016 Trade Union Act). 

In addition, the rise of the private rented sector amid a housing crisis has seen a resurgence of tenants’ unions, overseen by dedicated organisers. To take one example, ACORN tenants’ union continues to experience growth across England and Wales, alongside Living Rent in Scotland. ACORN’s campaigns often focus on environmentally-inflected issues, such as living conditions in accommodation. After all, health issues created by environmental factors should be part of any environmentalist cause: the right to live in a healthy environment should be sacrosanct. And this focus among radicals is not new: in his influential study The Condition of the working class in England Friedrich Engels studied working class living conditions in the late 19^th century. A significant focus is the environmental causes of poor health, from pollution through to housing design, which enabled the rapid spread of communicable disease.  The same arguments ring true today, and all of these issues are interlinked to people’s employment rights, housing rights and the state of our economy. ACORN have a track record of opposing climate destruction on their social media and have also recently campaigned to take back ownership of bus and rail services into the public sector; this focuses on cheaper transport for working people, but equally highlights the role of costly and inaccessible public transport in driving people to use cars. It is clear how this contributes to spiralling levels of CO2 and other deadly air pollutants. 

The apparent conflict of interests between unions that prioritise job creation through stimulating economic growth, and an environmental politics that calls for degrowth policies, may not always be easy to overcome. But unless we work closely with trade unions, we will be ceding ground to other political actors. Trade unions often dwell in the heart of traditional productive industries, such as steel works, construction and the power generation; yet at the same time they can also thrive within other sectors – take for example our emergency services like the NHS and the Fire Brigade. Working with unions means we can push for transitional policies that protect communities and jobs, offering schemes like re-training and job retention, whilst engaging and politicising the very workforce with the knowledge and expertise needed to bring about that transition to a zero-carbon economy. Recently the Conservative government cut funds to unions’ lifelong learning scheme; these are the types of policies a Green Party leader should be opposing vocally. Supporting the trade union movement, calling for the use of lifelong learning schemes to include environmental education, using such schemes to aid the transition from fossil to renewable energy generation for workers: all these could be Green priorities.

In her 2020 book Working-Class Environmentalism, Karen Bell rightly criticises the failures of the environmental movement to engage with and include the working class, citing the overbearing influence of the middle class. She not only discusses the impacts our environment has on poorer communities but also discusses the importance of trade unions for increasing the scope and appeal of environmental politics. It should be recommended reading for any Green Party members who wish to engage with and learn more about these issues. The ‘grow-or-die’ agenda is constantly reproduced and reinforced by our capitalist social system, often primarily for the benefit of a tiny percentage of the population. Organised workers in trade unions have the power to withdraw their labour and go on strike; this is the most powerful tool the workforce has against its exploitation. As Jason Moore argues in his 2015 book Capitalism in the Web of Life, economic and environmental exploitation are fundamentally linked in our economy, as many industries take “free gifts of nature” (such as coal and oil) to accumulate surplus value. A labourer is exploited both economically and for their own nature (as a part of nature, human labour being used to profit others is also exploitation). The workforce in a special position to potentially have a stronger say over the operations of businesses by threatening to strike (Moore, 2015). 

Our Green Party needs a leadership that wants to work closely with trade unions and calls for greater integration of our party into the trade union movement. Without trade union involvement, it will be hard for the Green Party to appeal to a wider section of the population and develop, with their support, a just and fair transition for a sustainable economy.  I urge our members to pay attention to which candidates are pro-union and call for stronger association with the trade union movement.

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A survey by Usdaw found that 57% of workers on Universal Credit are struggling to pay their gas and electric bills. 80% said they would be worried or very worried if the Government removed the £20 weekly uplift. Usdaw again urges the Government to do the right thing by listening to low-paid workers who are struggling to make ends meet.
 
Paddy Lillis – Usdaw General Secretary says: “It is unacceptable that nearly 6 in 10 workers on Universal Credit are struggling to heat their homes. Usdaw again calls on the Government to retain the £20 weekly uplift and tackle long standing issues with the Universal Credit system. Now is not the time to be removing this lifeline for low-paid workers and their families.
 
“Usdaw has also consistently called for the rollout of Universal Credit to be halted, to allow a full review and overhaul of how the Government supports the incomes of working people who are already struggling to make ends meet. We need a proper social security system that supports families, particularly during this appalling pandemic.”
 
Usdaw has long called for a fundamental reform of Universal Credit, including:

• £20 additional weekly uplift made permanent.
• Five week wait scrapped, by making advance payments non-repayable.
• Two-child limit immediately removed so that welfare payments take all dependent children in a household into account when granting a claim.
• Reducing the taper rate and increasing the work allowance to incentivise work.
• Benefit Cap stopped.
• Universal Credit payments, or at least the child elements of Universal Credit, paid to the main carer by default. This was a commitment made by the government in January 2019, but has still not yet been introduced. This has become even more urgent with the rise in domestic violence since the start of the pandemic. 

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