By John Pickard
The organisation that represents the trade unions affiliated to the Labour Party, TULO, met with Keir Starmer and leading Shadow ministers on Tuesday, and appeared to come away happy. But they are making a serious mistake if they are taking Keir “ten pledges” Starmer at his word.
Before the meeting, several trade union leaders had expressed their outrage at the apparent watering down of Labour’s New Deal for Workers, putting caveats and qualification to commitments that had meant banning zero-hours contracts, outlawing ‘fire and rehire’ and giving workers full rights from day one of employment. Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, Labour’s biggest affiliate, correctly said it was a retreat on a retreat, and that the proposals bore “no resemblance” to the policy agreed at Labour’s National Policy Forum last summer. A trade union source told the Guardian that “the general secretaries had presented a united front” and told the Labour leader he should agree to return to the language agreed at the Policy Forum. After the meeting, Sharon Graham was reported as having said that “unions had been listened to and the workers’ voice heard” and that Keir Starmer apparently agreed to the demands.
It was the Fire Brigades Union and Unite which had publicly criticised the now twice-watered down proposals before the meeting, but another left union leader, Dave Ward, General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union, also confirmed on LBC that the deal “will be implemented as we agreed previously”. There will, apparently, be another meeting in three weeks time to confirm this.
What trade union activists need to ask, however, and need to pursue through their trade union structures, is how watertight is this new commitment? Keir Starmer has a track record of reneging on commitments he made previously, most famously on his ‘ten pledges’ without which he would never have been elected leader in the first place. As soon as he was elected, he filed all ten of them in the bin. Since then, he has back-tracked on green policy and on other announced policies.
USDAW leader calls for backing Starmer before the meeting with TULO
How much of a “united front” the unions really presented can be gauged by the comments of Paddy Lillis, right-wing General Secretary of the shopworkers’ union USDAW. Even before the “crunch meeting” with the unions, he was already calling on his colleagues to cut Starmer some slack.
Lillis, a key Starmer ally whose union has more than 300,000 members, told the Financial Times it would be “silly to derail a Labour victory” by complaining about the revised plan. “If we don’t get a Labour victory in the election”, he said, “then there won’t be any New Deal at all.”
With a further comment that will probably guarantee his elevation to the House of Lords when he retires, he added, “There’s no reason to believe Keir Starmer will roll back on it.” On the contrary, lots of USDAW’s 300,000 members do have good “reasons” to dis-believe Starmer. Despite the apparent agreement between Starmer and TULO, the nearer we get to an election, it will be the likes of Lillis who, in front as well as behind the scenes, will be calling for ‘restraint’ and for the trade unions not to ‘rock the boat’.
What is most surprising about this whole story, is the apparent willingness of trade union leaders, perhaps including those on the left, taking Keir Starmer at his word. We are not privy to what was said on Tuesday morning, when the leading figures of TULO met before they met the Labour leadership, but the last thing they should do now is ‘stand down’. They need to keep the pressure on publicly and make it clear that they demand significant, meaningful and permanent changes in the rights of workers, including the repeal of Tories’ anti-union legislation.
The left union leaders need to campaign inside the Party
It is more than likely – to put it mildly – that once Labour is elected, the qualifications and dilutions to workers’ rights to which the union general secretaries objected, will be restored by the Labour leadership, under the pressure of big business.
Given the views of Paddy Lillis, it is possible that the right-wing trade union leaders in TULO have ‘conned’ the rest into the appearance of a deal, even though, with Starmer’s record, it isn’t worth the paper it is written on. On the other hand, there is no reason why the left trade union leaders should not begin preparing now for a new abandonment of policy in the future.
That should mean not only public statements, but a developed, concerted and relentless campaign inside the Labour Party to challenge the rightward drift of the last four years. The left trade unions have considerable resources and still significant influence inside the Labour Party, notably at regional and national conferences. If the left union leaders want a proper guarantee that a New Deal for Workers is implemented, they need to start campaigning for it now, and that means inside the Party.
As an aside, it is a great pity that the Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) withdrew from affiliation to the Labour Party. They were in parliament this week launching their own manifesto for the election, called the Bakers’ Dozen, pictured above. In it, they outline thirteen key elements of policy that they say their members want implemented by the next government.
The thirteen are an excellent set of proposals, none of which would be opposed by Left Horizons, and they are clearly aimed at the Labour Party. What a tragedy, therefore, that this important union is plying its wares out in the cold. It could have made a significant contribution to the left in TULO and to a real struggle in the Party against the right wing and that is a fight that is only just beginning to warm up.
