We must challenge politicians to back working people and collective agreements when they come asking for our vote in next year’s general election.
That was the key message from Keith Ewing, a professor of public law at King’s College, London, when he addressed UNISON’s local government conference this afternoon.
“Politicians will suddenly be swarming around you,” he told delegates, after reminding them that the election is less than a year away.
And the question for UNISON members has to be: “What are we gonna get for this money, this support, these votes?”
Professor Ewing listed issues that working people in the UK face – low pay, the “virus of zero-hours contracts” and “the problem of agency workers”, together with many other attacks, including employment tribunal fees.
Moving on to the “unprecedented attacked on trade unions in the workplace”, he told delegates that specific problems included the continuation of blacklisting and the continuing attacks on facility time, which is a “serious attack on trade unions”.
But the heart of Professor Ewing’s message concerned the attack on our collective agreements, with employers just ripping up agreements and foisting new ones on workers, as though the collective agreements “were just tissues that could be thrown away”.
In 1978, he explained, the UK labour force saw 82% of British workers covered by a collective agreement. Today, that figure has “collapsed” to 23%.
This, he said, “reduces our voice – and diminishes our impact”.
He noted that, in Austria, 98% of workers are covered by a collective agreement. In the original 15 member states of the European Union, not one country has below 70% of the workforce covered by a collective agreement.
He said that politicians may suggest ‘repairing’ the recognition legislation from 1999, but he said that that “is part of the problem”.
Other countries with such a system includes the US, Canada, Japan – countries that have very low levels of collective bargaining coverage. It’s 10% in US and about 30% in both Canada and Japan.
It is essential to challenge candidates to restore proper collective bargaining structures.
“We need a government department that represents the interests of working people in the government,” he said, adding that the UK is the only country where the interests of working people are not represented in government.
And he said that any such department should have the principle responsibility to rebuild and restore sector-wide bargaining arrangements.
“Our ambition has to get the number of people covered by collective agreements to be above 50%,” he said.
“We will close the gender pay gap, deal with TUPE/Alemo-Herron problem, the agency worker problem, the zero-hours contracts problems – it’s a simple solution to these things.”
And he suggested that, when candidates come calling, members say to them: “If you want my support, I want your support to rebuild the collective bargaining structure that is so important to the well-being of this country.”
