As conflict with Starmer’s new austerity develops, how best will trade union unity be achieved? In a contribution to the debate PAULA MITCHELL looks specifically at the experience of organising and representing school support staff and the broader issues it raises.
“Strikes are back” declared the Evening Standard, at the announcement of action on London Underground by RMT and Aslef unions over pay. This followed just weeks after members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) rejected the Labour government’s 5.5% pay award. The public sector pay awards in health, the civil service and to teachers, in the region of 5% and above, were made by chancellor Rachel Reeves in the hope of staving off trade union action.
That is the legacy of the 2022-23 strike wave, and it is a lesson lodged in the experience of hundreds of thousands of workers as they now face new Labour austerity from a government determined to rule in the interests of big business.
An important feature of the strike wave, especially in the public sector, was the involvement of big numbers of young workers on strike for the first time. This stirring of a new generation included thousands joining unions in order to participate in action, and hundreds stepping forward as reps. That was particularly the case with teachers in the National Education Union (NEU) in schools.
Another feature of the strike wave was a growing mood for unity in action. In 2022, when the strikes on the railways and in Royal Mail were developing, the Socialist Party and the National Shop Stewards Network called for workers to ‘strike together’; as successful ballots gathered pace in the public sector, we called for a 24-hour general strike, especially in the face of the new ‘minimum service levels’ threat. These demands were popular.
But workers in local government – including school support staff – were largely unable to take action in the strike wave. The biggest public sector union, Unison, missed the Tory 50% turnout threshold in its national ballots in local government. Socialist Party members in Unison put forward a fighting strategy that would involve strikes in council areas that got over the threshold and re-ballots in areas that were close, but this was not taken up by the national leadership. Some localised action was able to take place – Unite, for example, sanctioned action in particular councils where they had strength, and won some victories, such as by Newham and Tower Hamlets refuse workers.
A certain churning of trade union membership took place during the strike wave as workers sought to participate in the struggle. Teachers in the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), for example, joined the NEU; nurses in Unison joined the RCN. Thousands of support staff joined the NEU, looking to fight alongside the teachers, who took a series of strike days through the first half of 2023. Unfortunately, the NEU’s ballot of support staff narrowly missed the threshold.
These factors – the legacy of the strike wave, the respective roles of Unison and the NEU in the strike wave, thousands joining unions in search of a fightback, the desire for unity, and the austerity coming down the line from Starmer’s Labour – are all part of the background to the dispute between support staff unions.
It is not lost on workers that those that took action have won more from Labour. Local government workers, including support staff, were made a paltry pay offer under the Tory government, which has not been improved by Labour. The offer of £1,290 will mean less than 5% for many thousands of council workers. As the majority of support staff are term-time only, the deal equates to an average of 3.5% for them.
While the GMB union accepted the pay offer, members of Unison and Unite rejected it and balloted for strike action. Outrageously, Keir Starmer has left all the anti-union restrictions in place while ‘consulting’ on his Employment Rights Bill. Unfortunately, once again the threshold was missed in most areas.
Support staff members in NEU voted overwhelmingly (92% in England and 96% in Wales) to reject. In the summer, the NEU wrote to Unison and Unite to ask to work collaboratively by balloting its support staff members alongside theirs.
General background
It will come as a shock to many Unison, Unite and NEU members that, instead of promoting the unity of all local authority workers, the leaderships of Unison and Unite responded to this approach by lodging a second complaint with the Trades Union Congress (TUC) against the NEU. The complaint was made in conjunction with the GMB, which had already accepted the pay offer and did not want action.
Spearheaded by Socialist Party members, members of the national executives of Unison and the NEU put out a public statement against this. They said: “What is clear is that we need maximum unity and coordination between the unions to ensure that action is as strong as possible. Unison, Unite and GMB claim that the NEU has breached the decision of the TUC last year, effectively claiming that because the NEU is not a recognised union on the National Joint Council (NJC), they do not have the right to ballot and fight for their members. The logic of that position is that Unison and Unite would rather have NEU support staff members working on days that Unison and Unite are on strike, undermining the action. Therefore, we call on Unison and Unite to drop their complaint to the TUC and support the NEU wish to join the action in pursuit of the joint pay claim. We appeal to all unions that a joint meeting of the Unison, Unite and NEU national executive councils and sectoral executives be urgently set up to resolve the issue”.
The NJC is the body through which national negotiations over local government pay are conducted, including for support staff (unlike teachers, for whom pay is recommended by an allegedly ‘independent’ pay review body). Currently the NJC unions, ie those that are recognised by the employer and government for negotiation purposes, are Unison, Unite and the GMB. Unison is easily the biggest union representing support staff, claiming 250,000 support staff members. Unite has around 6,000 support staff members. GMB’s membership information is less easy to find. There are 300,000 support staff not in a union at all. But around 60,000 support staff are members of the NEU.
The reason the NEU does not have recognition is the agreement made with the TUC when the NEU was formed in 2017. It was a merger of two unions: the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the smaller Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), which had both teacher and support staff members. The agreement was that the newly formed NEU should not ‘actively or knowingly’ recruit support staff.
An initial complaint was made by Unison, Unite and the GMB against the NEU in 2022, on the basis that their ballot of support staff broke the agreement, because it could lead to an increase in support staff joining NEU when they had no recognition or bargaining rights. The TUC disputes panel found against the NEU and levied a fine.
In the summer the NEU wrote to the other unions and submitted a resolution to this year’s TUC Congress calling for collaboration. The resolution called for “all education unions to work collaboratively to organise unorganised support staff, to make all support staff voices heard across the bargaining table, and launch a joint campaign of collective action to bring their conditions of service in line with teachers”. This was ruled out of order at the Congress, and elicited a further complaint from the other support staff unions to the TUC.
The dispute between the support staff unions is now made sharper by the proposal in the Labour government’s Employment Rights Bill to reinstate a School Support Staff Negotiating Body (SSSNB). This would take support staff out of the NJC into their own negotiating body.
Socialist Party members in Unison have warned that this takes a big section of workers out of the collective agreements of local government workers, thus reducing the industrial weight of each group.
Unison pointedly says on its website that NEU will not be involved in the SSSNB: “There are only three recognised trade unions for school support staff: Unison, GMB and Unite. There will be only the three unions that sit on the new negotiating body. Please note that the NEU are not part of this process and are not able to negotiate pay for school support staff”. That is the reported current position of the Labour government too.
It is reported that the NJC unions’ new complaint is not only that the NEU continues to recruit and campaign among support staff, but is also about the reference in the TUC resolution to the “bargaining table”. It is NEU policy, agreed at 2023 conference, to campaign for recognition for support staff. The unions are reported to complain that the NEU is ‘piggy-backing’ on the work of the other unions to achieve the establishment of the SSSNB.
Unity not division
The public statement from executive members opposing these complaints is clear: it is in the interests of workers to seek maximum unity, not division. We don’t support opportunistic ‘poaching’ of members from one union to another. But neither are we bound by inter-union rivalry or ‘turf wars’ between right-wing leaderships. Which union workers are members of cannot simply be decided by agreements between union leaders. No matter what rules or agreements are in place, workers will go where they believe their interests are best served.
No union is a panacea. In every union the pressures of employers, government, the press, and capitalist interests generally are applied to leaders. Through various mechanisms the capitalist class attempts to separate out leaders from the counter-pressures of their members, aiming for leaderships to effectively police their own members. That is always a living struggle and is the key reason why the Socialist Party strives to build genuine democratic broad lefts in the unions, to organise all those who want a fighting union, to campaign for the policies that are necessary throughout the union, including standing for positions at every level, to apply the counter-pressure of the members most effectively.
We therefore cannot take the position that ‘everyone should join such-and-such a union’. All workers need a fighting union. In every union where we have members, we fight to transform it. Even in unions which have led a fight and could be seen as more militant, like the NEU, we don’t cover over the mistakes of the leadership; it is still necessary for us to put forward what we think is needed industrially and politically, to stand candidates in union elections, to attempt to collaborate with others to campaign for a fighting, socialist leadership.
And in unions with the most right-wing of leaderships, our members don’t turn their backs on the thousands of workers who are in them in search of greener grass, but fight to change the union. For example, the forerunner of the civil service union PCS, the CPSA, had a vicious right-wing leadership. Socialist Party members battled for decades, building up a strong left, which led to the removal of the right wing and winning a left-led PCS for a period. The experience of PCS also demonstrates that nothing stands still – that battle is on again as the under the blows of Tory attacks in the 2010s the formerly left leadership moved rightward (as the union vice-president Dave Semple explains in his article on page 18).
But we also defend the right of workers to join another union if they feel it necessary. In 2007, the right-wing leadership of Unison began a witch-hunt against Socialist Party members – three branch secretaries and one branch chair – on fabricated, but very serious, accusations of racism. The members of their branches fought tenaciously for seven years to ‘Defend the Four’; the union wasted huge amounts of members’ money taking the case all the way to the Court of Appeal, and effectively shut down branches by taking them into administration, during which ‘the four’ were completely exonerated. Eventually, workers moved over to Unite. In one case it meant that workers joined and became leading organisers of the fighting Unite Housing Workers branch; in others it meant that council workers in Greenwich and Bromley were able to rebuild a fighting union branch. Rather than allowing members to leave in disgust and face a jobs slaughter, Socialist Party members acted to try to hold the workforces together, maintaining their ability to fight.
In 2014, the Unison branch secretary, a Socialist Party member, and stewards at Whipps Cross Hospital in east London, along with members of the privatised workforce, resigned from Unison and joined Unite. This move followed years in which the regional organisers of Unison had collaborated with management against the secretary on trumped-up disciplinary charges and had consciously acted to undermine campaigns of the Unison branch. There were enormous cuts coming down the line and joining Unite put them in a better position to be able to organise, including being able to take strike action, which would better enable them to build a united struggle across the workforce. The Unite branch went on to lead successful strikes on pay across the whole five-hospital NHS trust, and achieved the victory of ending privatisation and being brought back into the NHS.
Union recognition
It could be argued that the situation with support staff in the NEU is different from these examples, because the NEU doesn’t have recognition. While it is true that NEU doesn’t have recognition in terms of national pay bargaining, support staff in the NEU can and do campaign and win victories at local level – such as in Newham, where the NEU branch is led by a Socialist Party member. Action by support staff in the NEU, even if not at the negotiating table, adds to the strength of action by other support staff, education workers and other local government workers, and thus can still influence the outcome of negotiations. If they do not take action, there is the risk they can be used as strike-breakers by school management.
Of course, lots of workers don’t have recognition and still fight – including fighting for recognition. Amazon workers in Coventry have been an inspiration over the last two years, an example of a new generation of young and migrant workers getting organised, fighting over pay and for recognition. Famously, in 2009, workers at Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight (where Unite had some members) embarked on a battle for jobs and joined the RMT transport union, which at that stage was led by Bob Crow – they wanted to be in a fighting union, whether it was recognised by the employer or not!
But those are examples where there are not already unions present that do have recognition. In the end this is not an abstract question. Workers join a union that they believe is the best for them. Currently refuse workers in Unite in Sheffield, employed by Veolia, are striking for union recognition. GMB is the recognised union.
During the strike of DWP security guards employed by G4S, strikers have told us that GMB has complained that the PCS union is ‘poaching’ members. GMB organises around 1,500 security guards and is the recognised union. But as part of organising around 190,000 workers in the civil service and outsourced government services, PCS also has security guard members. Although it doesn’t have recognition, PCS has led its members in strike action over pay to coordinate with the GMB strike.
Employers use the granting of recognition as a weapon to try to prevent action. At the housing charity Hestia, workers joined the Unite Housing Workers branch to aid their fight for better pay, and the employer signed a recognition agreement with Unison – on the basis of having one member!
The concerns about the NEU’s lack of recognition would of course be resolved if it was recognised. Does that effectively mean that the NEU would be ‘rewarded’ for breaking agreements and rules – for ‘poaching’?
The NEU claims around 60,000 support staff members. A section of those are a legacy of the merger. There is no doubt that for a layer of education staff the ATL was seen as a ‘non-strike’ organisation, and could have won members in the past through undermining the collective action of other workers in education and local government.
And it is true that Socialist Party members in the NUT at the time of the merger raised serious concerns, most particularly about the risk that the more fighting and democratic approach of the NUT, hard-won by members against its own previous right-wing leadership, could be watered down in the new union. We wrote at the time: “Socialist Party members in the NUT start from the position that we are in favour of anything that strengthens the organised voice of teachers and school workers in order to confront the challenges we face in terms of pay, workload, cuts and academisation. However, this cannot be at any cost”.
But things change. Members can force even the most right-wing leaders to act. Look at the RCN. Even more than the ATL, that was a non-strike professional association, not part of the TUC – the organisation that nurses would join if they didn’t want to strike. But following Covid and the cost-of-living crisis it has been one of the most fighting health unions in the strike wave – alongside the doctors in the British Medical Association (BMA), also a professional body not part of TUC.
The ATL itself was forced into action before the merger. Having never taken strike action before, in June 2011 it joined with PCS, NUT and the University and College Union (UCU) at the front of strike action in the pensions struggle, following the historic 750,000-strong TUC demonstration in March that year, and a precursor to the two million-strong public sector general strike in November. Those pre-merger support staff members have now been brought into the arena of a much bigger union that has been pushed by members to fight. And thousands of support staff have joined more recently, because the NEU was seen as fighting.
Common workers’ interests
The agreement made when the NEU was first established was based on the TUC’s Principles and Procedures, which form a binding code for all TUC affiliates, and which themselves are based on the ‘Bridlington agreement’ signed at the TUC Congress of 1939. While Principle One of the TUC’s code states that unions are actively encouraged to work together, Principle Two states that affiliates “will not knowingly and actively seek to take into membership existing or recent members of another union by making recruitment approaches, either directly or indirectly, without agreement of that organisation”.
The Socialist Party agrees that the trade union movement should decide its own affairs. The fundamental reason that we oppose all the anti-trade union legislation, not just the most recent, is because it is not up to capitalist governments that rule in the interests of the bosses to regulate and hamstring the actions of workers’ organisations, whose basic interests are in opposition to those of the bosses.
In the view of the Socialist Party, where there are disagreements, they should be resolved in the best traditions of the workers’ movement: through discussion, not through complaints and sanctions. However, that doesn’t mean there are not struggles between different interests within the trade unions. In 1939, there were 214 unions affiliated to the TUC, in contrast to the 48 today. In the early 1930s, following the defeat of the 1926 general strike, anti-trade union legislation, and the onset of the Great Depression, trade union membership declined. The lowest point was in 1933 at 3.25 million.
But the 1930s was a tumultuous time of rent strikes, hunger marches, anti-fascism and growing strikes. By 1939, trade union membership had increased to over four million, around 25% of the workforce. It would suit the right-wing leadership of the TUC to assert a degree of control over workers joining and moving between trade unions, seeking more combative organisation. The 1939 congress took place literally as world war broke out, when the right-wing leaderships of the trade unions committed to ‘national unity’, with the aim of holding back workers from action.
The fact that amendments have been made to the basic code time and again by the TUC itself recognises that agreements made in 1939 cannot be set in aspic – even if that might have been the original intention! Leaderships, under the pressure of events and their members, depending on the level of class struggle at different times, will interpret and enforce rules in different ways. No agreement between leaders prevents members joining a union that is fighting back.
We don’t stand over any agreements made between right-wing union leaderships who want to hold back their members. At the time of the agreement over the formation of the NEU, both Unison and GMB were led by right-wing general secretaries and NECs. The current complaints are presented as being about the NEU breaking the rules and the 2017 agreement, but the two complaints have come firstly during a strike wave and now under the new Labour government. Two of the signatories – the general secretaries of Unison and the GMB – are Starmer supporters who want to prevent action.
But the executive committees are now different. While the Starmer-supporting leadership of the GMB still intends to prevent action, the situation at the top of Unison and Unite has changed. In 2021, members of Unison finally ousted the right wing from the NEC for the first time in the union’s history. The left-led NEC, with the majority grouped in ‘Time For Real Change’, exists alongside a right-wing Starmer-supporting general secretary, Christina McAnea, and a right-wing union machine. A significant proportion of the EC in Unite was elected on the basis of supporting general secretary Sharon Graham’s industrial militancy. This support staff issue poses a challenge to those on the left in the executives of those unions: whose side are they on? The Starmer supporters, or the members who want to fight together?
There are 300,000 support staff who are not in any union. The best way to move forward is for socialists and activists to stand up to their respective right wings, to fight for all the unions to become strong, democratic and combative unions, for them all to have negotiation rights, and to campaign for maximum collaboration in action. And what is true for the school support staff is true for the working class more widely – true unity is achieved through fighting for common interests.