THE TUC will convene a summit in the next six months to agree a strategy to secure collective bargaining across most sectors of the economy.

Communication Workers Union leader Dave Ward moved a motion calling for the summit and for the TUC general council to follow it with a published collective bargaining strategy that can be agreed at next year’s Congress, so the labour movement can implement a common plan to restore workers’ right to collectively bargained terms and conditions.

Mr Ward said: “We delivered the new deal for working people,” which Labour is now committed to implementing. “Labour didn’t deliver it, it started here six or seven years ago.

“It’s given us confidence as a movement that we can go a lot further.” Collective bargaining would be crucial to ending “grotesque” inequality, levelling up the country and uniting the working class against racism, he stressed.

RMT leader Mick Lynch said Thatcherism had destroyed collective bargaining agreements that used to cover most British workers, but higher levels of collective bargaining across Europe in “modern, competitive economies” showed there was nothing old-fashioned about bringing them back.

National Education Union general secretary Daniel Kebede agreed, pointing to the way pay review bodies in education and other sectors had replaced collective bargaining, disempowering workers in the process. Above-inflation raises this year and last were only down to education workers having taken strike action and threatened more of it.

He also called for “new thinking” from the unions on school support staff bargaining structures, saying the NEU has 60,000 teaching assistant (TA) members but is currently excluded from the School Support Staff Negotiating Body, which recognises Unison, the GMB and Unite’s bargaining rights for TAs.