AS WORKERS around the world mark May Day this week, we must remind ourselves that the advances that we make as a movement are never given to us in some act of kindness by those at the top but won through concerted and unified struggle.

This weekend is not just a celebration of past victories; it’s a call to action for a trade union movement that must rebuild its power or risk facing a future of irrelevance and obscurity.

At a time when inequality is increasing and living standards are collapsing in Britain, not enough workers are in trade unions and a tiny percentage of those are covered by collective bargaining.

We have gone from 13 million union members to just six million. Collective bargaining used to cover 80 per cent of workers — now it’s closer to 25 per cent. That collapse hasn’t just weakened pay and conditions — it has torn the fabric of working-class life.

The Employment Rights Bill currently on the table has many positive aspects, but does not deal with all the related social problems that have been caused by the vice-like grip of the market and 40 years of unchecked neoliberalism.

It also falls short of another litmus test. The legislation does not prevent another P&O scandal taking place. Rogue employers can still sack workers on the spot and replace them with cheap superexploited labour from other countries.

RMT is very experienced in dealing with bad bosses but like other unions, our hands are tied by some of the most repressive trade union legislation in western Europe.

Anti-trade union laws have prevented us from exerting our industrial power, allowing the battle between capital and labour to swing in favour of the bosses and causing long-term damage to working-class communities.

Thatcherism ripped up the industrial foundation of this country. The pound was floated, industry was offshored, and the national assets built by generations of workers were sold off in a fire-sale for a fraction of what they were worth.

We were left with a service- and big-finance-dominated economy with communities stripped of stable work, identity and any real power to determine the course of their lives.

Many people’s everyday experiences are marked by chaos and insecurity, in employment, standards of living and housing.

The antidote is an organised economy and wider society with a strategic role for the state driving investment combined with credible industrial planning to bring back high-quality jobs and good housing.

This however is only possible with public ownership of our energy, steel, and transport industries. Without this, the country faces terminal decline.

Capitalising on the chaos is the populist right who are seeking to take advantage of people’s increasing desperation.

The rise of Reform UK isn’t a mystery. It’s a symptom of people feeling abandoned — by politicians, by the system, and, yes, even by our movement when it’s been pushed out of those communities, through insecure employment replacing good-quality jobs in industry that were taken away.

People believe there is no change of direction with a government that is again cutting public spending instead of investing and a political class that has been wedded to leaving their communities at the mercy of market forces that have driven down living standards and rapidly changed demographics.

Many are also tired of what they believe to be a brand of left-wing politics that is only interested in cancelling and condemning vast swathes of the population, rather than using our traditions in the socialist movement to make the case for real change.

Only an organised society can defeat the toxic politics of division which means the reintroduction of sectoral collective bargaining, to put the union movement back where it belongs — rooted in working-class life, organising, educating and fighting for a better standard of living for our people, by building unity and strong community.

A natural progression from achieving those improvements would be the right of trade unionists to take secondary action in support of other workers taking a stand.

It is outrageous that the law stops me from backing other workers when they are under attack. If I see a nurse or a postie fighting for their rights, I should have the right to stand with them, not be silenced by legislation. Because when workers can stand together, concessions can be achieved more easily.

Some people worry that the right to take solidarity action will lead to more strikes. On the contrary, I think it will lead to more and better settlements for workers, because bosses will be forced to reckon with a potential escalation of a dispute which they will want to avoid.

If Labour is serious about change, they need to back this agenda. Because tinkering around the edges will not work.

The narrow by-election Reform win in Runcorn and huge gains in local councils tells us working people are unhappy and want change.

The change we need to offer to the whole working class, to blue collar, white collar unemployed and disabled — those of all racial and religious backgrounds — is a fundamental shift in who has power in this country.

Wealth and power need to be redistributed into the hands of those who make our country work. And away from oligarchs, corporate bosses and those politicians that collude hand in glove with these vested interests.

May Day weekend is the perfect time to reaffirm our commitment to our people, our class and to put trade unionism back on the front foot.

Any hesitation or failure to act risks consigning our movement to just another footnote in history. And we must not allow that to happen.

Eddie Dempsey is general secretary of RMT.