Building, organising and winning for members

How trade unions can help build a fairer a society was discussed at the event which heard support for the PCS national campaign from socialists Andrea Eagan (Unison) and MP Ian Byrne.

A panel at the event consisted of Andrea Egan (Unison’s recently-elected general secretary), Ian Byrne (MP for Liverpool West Derby and food poverty campaigner) and PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote. They discussed the problems facing the UK, and the task of trade unions: building a fairer society and fighting the far right.

“No choice but to fight”

Andrea Egan gave examples of health care workers at Unison winning in their workplaces and inspiring others all over the country. This only happened through collectively organising for industrial strength. She said:

“Through those disputes we have learned that when workers fight and when they believe they can win, a successful strike changes people. It builds confidence, it builds leadership and I build collective power. We have seen workers transformed, discovering on picket lines their solidarity and what it means.

“We are at a point where we have no choice but to fight. Millions of people in this country are struggling, public services are pushed beyond breaking point, workers are exhausted and disrespected, while wealth piles up at the top.

“It falls to trade unionists to change this country, from organising and standing together in the workplace and saying ‘enough’. We must demand nothing less than a transformation of society itself. Where public services exist for need, not profit.”

“The task before us all”

Ian Byrne praised PCS and spoke about his work in the last five months collecting evidence of poverty with his Right to Food campaign. He said:

“It’s been heartbreaking to see the scale of poverty in what is one of the richest countries in the world. But communities are still organising, coming together and showing solidarity where successive governments have failed. You see public services stripped to the bone, wages scaled down and outsourced workers treated terribly. This is a result of political choices. One woman running foodbanks in Northumberland said: ‘Don’t you dare call my community disadvantaged… call it what it is: asset stripped.’

“Insecure work and poverty are directly connected. Outsourcing means lower pay, worse security, fragmentation of public services. Labour’s commitment to the biggest wave of insourcing in a generation must be kept and enacted. Without secure work, decent wages and collective bargaining there can be no serious strategy to tackle poverty.”

“United we stand”

Fran Heathcote thanked Ian for his support and congratulated Andrea on her election win. She celebrated victories won by PCS members and gave a message for the coming year:

“PCS can be really proud of the progress that we made. Long-running strike action at the ONS has ended all individual office attendance mandates across the civil service. 

“We’ve secured major wins for members working on facilities management contracts. Those workers would have been civil servants had their jobs not been sold off the company that pays the least. We brought the government to the negotiating table and achieved coordination across three contractors. These workers tend to be black and minority ethnic workers, working across several jobs. Many of them had never been in a union and they took this action. It got them better pay as well as basic conditions like sick leave.

“On pay, we’ve secured above-inflation pay deals across much of the civil service, and arm’s-length bodies. But we must continue to negotiate for pay restoration, low pay and greater coherence. It’s an absolute nonsense that there are over 200 sets of pay negotiations arguing of over the same pot of money. It’s an absolute nonsense that we have tens of thousands of members on Universal Credit because they don’t get paid enough by the government.

“We need fair pay. You cannot have a strong growing economy without increasing consumer demand. If people aren’t making ends meet, they aren’t out there spending. Increased tax revenue outweighs the cost of boosting pay in the first place. Our social security campaign basically says this: don’t demonise benefit claimants, don’t demonise people fleeing their countries, and tax the rich. If we don’t offer solutions, people will turn to Reform who want to attack workers’ rights, public services and social security, while cutting taxes for the super-rich.

“United we stand divided we fall. Never has that been more true. The enemy is not in this conference centre – the enemy are the forces who would see workers’ lives worsened.”

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