I, LIKE the rest of our party, am immensely proud of the historic link between the trade union movement and the Labour Party. 

And I will never apologise for seeing the unions as an equal partner in this movement. 

That’s why Jeremy Corbyn has made the ministry of employment rights such a central plank in what Labour will do in government.

But when we talk about what we will “do” for the unions, it has to be borne in mind that we’ll do this together, hand in hand. 

It’s not about a gift from a Labour government, it’s about a joint project to transform society.

But we will be radical. If I was to sum up our approach, as a team (which includes John Hendy QC and Professor Keith Ewing of the Institute of Employment Rights who have been writing on this and campaigning for this for most of their lives), what I would say is that we will be knocking down walls for the unions.

We all know that over the last four decades, those walls have been built to stop workers organising together and to curtail the freedom of unions to talk to workers, to recruit, to negotiate on behalf of workers and to strike when needed.

So, we’ll provide a legal framework which protects workers, so they can have respect and dignity at work, including the right to join and engage in trade union activity without victimisation and interference.

We’ve seen, particularly in the private sector, how union membership is suppressed by intimidatory tactics, by a lack of or misleading information about unions and the blocking of union spaces and facilities. 

It will take time, but our explicit aim is to change that power imbalance, so unions become a normal and accepted part of the workplace.

It’s important to make the point that what I’ve often described as the “beating heart” of the new ministry — sectoral collective bargaining — will not just be about established sectors. 

We know that for it to work, for a Labour government to change workplaces up and down Britain and for us to establish minimum terms and conditions and the right to have your pay determined by negotiation rather than imposition, we need to include the private sector — where there are the most precarious workers and where those rights and that change of culture is most needed. 

To do otherwise would be a failure, let’s not make any bones about it.

But our agenda is about more than legislative change, important though that is. 

There has been a sea change in attitudes to the trade unions within the party — we now have shadow cabinet members proud to support unions on strike, on picket lines and online.

Whatever you think about Ed Miliband and his leadership, that moment when he kept repeating “these strikes are wrong” to a BBC interviewer was a sign of our deep unease at the top our party about the relationship with the trade unions. 

That had been a long-term trend, not something that can just be pinned on Ed, or even Tony Blair. 

For a long period of our history, we lost that umbilical cord between the trade unions and the Labour Party.

We lost an opportunity not just to educate our members and voters about the meaning of trade unions but to normalise it. 

When, during the Thatcher years, the press was demonising the trade union movement and calling the miners the “enemy within,” there was very little counter-narrative, even from the party born out of the relationship between the unions and socialists in Parliament.

So we lost the chance to educate society about the power of collectives. Trade unionism, at a broad level, is about a different way of organising ourselves — a cold, harsh, consumerist society can learn a lot from the principles of co-operation and community that it embodies. 

So that’s what we need to do — not just provide legal frameworks and rights, important as those are. We need to change the way people view their relationship to work and society.

Our approach will never be top-down. We will continue to listen to and work with the trade unions and improve rights and conditions together, even — no, especially — when we’re in government. 

This is not a gift to the trade union movement, rather it’s about international obligations and creating a fairer, more equal society. 

As such, the Labour Party needs the trade union movement as much as the union movement needs us — and that drawing together of these two constituent parts of the labour movement will not only have the power to revolutionise workplaces but to completely transform our society. And that’s why nothing is more important than this project.

Unions are equal partners in that project — they were there at the formation of the Labour Party and once again we will develop that historical link to build our mutual strength. 

Only with that kind of unity can we build a project that has the strength to make real, systematic change.

I’m excited at that prospect, because it’s what those who went before us, those who built this party, dreamed of — and we are in touching distance of it.

Laura Pidcock is shadow minister for labour and MP for North West Durham.