OVER the last 30 years there has been a slow, patchy, inconsistent and faltering return to an organic bottom-up organising culture in British trade unions, based primarily on a renewed understanding of the dynamics of class conflict at work.

Truthfully, this evolution was not assisted in any major fashion by the Labour government of 1997 to 2010, whose focus was on individual rather than collective employment rights that could be organised around, enforced as they were on a case-by-case basis through employment tribunals. 

With the prospect of another Labour government, unions must learn the lessons of our failure to capitalise on the last one to grow our organisations.

The bottom-up industrial militancy we’ve seen in 2022 and ’23 has reduced to ashes the failed “partnership and politics” retail approach to union-building of the 1990s. 

Few unions these days seek to delegate responsibility for their future strength to Parliament, the employers or the media.

But our history is there to learn from. And it must be remembered that in Britain, the deepest roots of this emergent class-based organising approach lay with the 1993 union Re-sign campaign. 

1993 saw the Tories announce their latest masterplan to destroy and disable unions once and for all — the Re-sign legislation which required every existing union member in Britain to rejoin their union. 

This was clearly a direct attack on working-class organisation from the representatives of the employer class in the context of a wave of industrial disputes. 

It was also laden with upper-class sneering, derision and assumptions about union members by the Tories based on decades of swallowing their own anti-union propaganda.

The British trade unions rose to the challenge and membership increased, as a result of simply going into every workplace and asking our members — and their workmates — if they still wanted their union. 

The organising lesson was there for even the most die-hard “partnership and politics” union leaders to see. 

And a new politics of bargaining, organising and campaigning began to emerge from this dramatic attack. 

Union-building, it turned out, was still a matter of class conflict, not of flogging insurance and access to the law for a fee. The Tories never forgot this, but we had to relearn it and then re-earn our credibility with our members and prospective members.

As a direct result, five organising principles emerged that consciously aim to keep class at the heart of union-building. 

First formed by Battersea and Wandsworth TUC Organising Centre in the mid-1990s following the Re-sign campaign, and adopted more widely across the movement, including GMB@Work, they are:

1. The workplace is the building block of the union. Whether the workplace is defined as the phone app, your own kitchen, the warehouse, the shop or the office — it’s at the point workers see and feel our exploitation that unions build power.

2. Each workplace should aim to be organised to deliver a super-majority in a ballot of members — so workers and managers alike feel the union’s power on a daily basis and between disputes.

3. The employer’s interests are different and opposed to working people’s. Employers want as much work for as little money as possible from working people, where union members seek the opposite and control over our working lives. Human resources departments act to obscure this basic conflict. Everything we have at work was fought for by unions and not given to us — even the weekend.

4. It is the process of industrial relations, bargaining, campaigning and organising that builds unions, much more than the results. Successful union-building is ultimately democratic, inclusive, bottom-up and inside out and focused on the whole workplace/workforce having a claim on the table, permanently. Industrial relations is a continuous process of attrition, banking and moving on.

5. People are strongest when they organise themselves — union organisers must avoid the trap, now amplified by social media, to become the centre of attention in a campaign and avoid crowding out emerging leaders from the organising workers themselves and undermining their union-building. Workers will organise best and first within their existing solidarity networks.

Union and community-builders take a material and collective approach to class politics as set out in the five principles above. This approach embraces the dynamic nature of class conflict and relationships both within and between groups of people and deploys it as its main tool for creating unity as a foundation of union-building. 

We should not shy away from discussing class as organisers and activists. For a union organiser you’re working class if you have to work to eat and pay rent, stand in class conflict with those who would deny you this, and act to build working-class collective consciousness.

A retail approach to union-building acts to obscure the very class conflict union builders are seeking to expose and in the end represents the same old problem we faced with the philanthropy of the Victorian era — self-appointed but well-meaning middle-class tourists doing things “for” working people.

Instead union-building should actively seek to promote a collective and conscious working-class identity that defines itself against the employer and builds the union through conflict at work. 

If we act to suppress this consciousness in our organising we act on behalf of the employers and fall back into the failed partnership and politics policy prior to the 1993 Re-sign campaign.