SIXTY-THREE thousand Unite members are currently out on strike, and the union’s leader Sharon Graham was praised for having won over £50 million in pay awards for workers in under a year as general secretary.

This month the union secured a vastly improved pay offer from British Airways — which had been seeking to deny baggage handlers restoration of the 10 per cent pay cut imposed on them during the pandemic — following an overwhelming vote to strike, though action had not begun.

It’s not a story confined to Unite, with workers in multiple unions showing a new readiness to take action and win big on pay. How’s it being done?

“What we’re seeing now is the rebirth of the trade union movement,” Graham told the Morning Star after the Gala speeches.

“That doesn’t mean a rehash of what we did in the 1970s — we have to be more organised than ever before.”

In her address to the Big Meeting Graham had stressed the need for “brain as well as brawn” and appealed to the movement to “stop playing the bosses’ game.”

Levelling the playing field meant a strategy incorporating “the share price as well as the picket line.”

“Most of the strikes where we have won money have been ‘strikes plus’ — we’ve done detailed forensic accounts,” she explained to me afterwards. “We’ve been able to find out where the investments of employers are. So combining those two things, the brawn and the brain — but also following the money has helped expose things and influence things quicker than ever before.”

If Graham references the 1970s as another period when unions were fighting for pay rises to match devastating inflation, the current era also has parallels with the 1980s, with a class war being waged on working-class communities through a sustained attempt to drive down living standards and permanently degrade services.

That’s the Conservative plan for rail, but is also visible in the attacks on Royal Mail managerial jobs (which has provoked planned strike action by Unite) and the threat to close multiple bus routes in London. What’s driving this vicious agenda?

“Two things I think. There’s the bosses’ instinct not to waste a crisis — we saw that in 2008 when after the banking crisis and we ended up with ‘austerity’ and workers paying the price. So what is happening now is the determination to make workers pay the price of Covid, so we see that push politically and from employers to suppress pay.

“So what’s driving it is corporate greed. How do we deal with that?

“That’s why when dealing with employers I’m not just looking at that campaign and this campaign, but across Unite, our 38,000 agreements, how can we connect these industrial disputes? How can we connect outside Unite, with what the RMT are doing, Unison, the CWU?”

The economic debate is too often held on employers’ terms with what Graham calls the “false premise” that wage rises drive inflation.

“Profiteering and widening profit margins are driving inflation. What we need to do as a movement is first to do the research ourselves, credible research that the companies can’t pick holes in, and then use it to win disputes.”

The Unite Investigates research showing that profits are driving inflation across the economy was in some ways a “macro” version of the forensic accounts done on a company by company basis when the union is gearing up for disputes.

“We have economists and forensic accountants working for the union now and they are going to do these reports from a workers’ perspective.

“Unions have got to stop being victims and get ourselves in gear, whether that’s strikes, moving the share price, or information.

“All of these things are powerful.”