What sort of post-recession society we want to see is a key question for TUC leader Brendan Barber
The trade union movement is in a hard place. Far from being the classless recession that was once predicted, this downturn has hit workers in many of the same industries and regions as those of the 1980s and ’90s. Construction, manufacturing and finance are just some of the unionised sectors hit hard.
This leaves unions running fast, but not even standing still. Job losses affect membership and income. Many union officers have found dealing with redundancies has come to dominate their lives. And when they are not doing this, they have to contend with the employers taking advantage of job insecurity to hold down pay, cut pensions or treat people badly in other ways. The private sector has suffered the most, but the public sector – particularly local government – may well be next.
This situation is not going to change in the near future. Britain may well meet the conditions that economists set for a technical recovery by the end of year, but most experts say that unemployment is set to increase throughout 2010. It will take some years – and the right government policies – before we have a chance of getting back to relatively full employment. Perhaps that is something we undervalued, as we had come to take it for granted.
The political situation is fraught, too. I don’t predict elections. But when even ministers say that Labour has only a 50/50 chance of winning the next election, unions need to think through what a change of government or a hung parliament will mean, even while those affiliated to Labour do all they can to stop that happening.
The biggest threat is a switch of economic policy from dealing with the recession to big cuts in public spending. Our argument must be that this will make the recession worse. When business and consumers stop spending, then – as John Maynard Keynes taught us – the public sector must make up the difference. Cutting spending when we are still in the grip of the recession will increase unemployment – and thus spending – and so reduce the tax take.
But while these may be hard times and some tough decisions approach, there is also much going for the union movement. For 30 years, we have faced an economic consensus that was shared in various forms across political parties and through much of the developed world. It gave primacy to markets, was relaxed about inequality and saw deregulation – including legal obstacles to effective trade unionism – as the all-in-one solution to every issue.
That consensus is now in crisis. This economic crash was not part of the normal ups and downs of the business cycle, but caused in bank boardrooms while regulators looked the other way. Now, as Adair Turner, chair of the Financial Services Authority put it, we can see that much of what was once celebrated is socially useless.
At the same time, we face runaway climate chaos. Few can now deny that we need urgent action to move to a low-carbon economy and manage that on a global basis. That cannot be done with markets, deregulation and shrinking the state.
So the key question is what kind of post-recession society and economy we want to see and to map out how we get there. Unions have a huge amount to contribute to that. We never fell for neo-liberalism, and the policies needed for the new economic era are exactly those that unions traditionally back and understand.
While the next few years are undoubtedly going to be tough both for ourselves and our members, looking to the longer term, union values and ideas have a crucial role to play in building the politics and the economics of the next phase in our history – as we can already begin to see in the United States under Barack Obama.
I do not expect that to be a smooth, easy or painless process. However, after 30 years, unions have a new opportunity to be part of the solution, not seen as part of the problem. The challenge is to put together a new progressive movement for a low-carbon, globalised and connected world – and that won’t happen without a strong union voice. l
Brendan Barber is general secretary of the TUC
