TUC Congress votes on collective bargaining and insourcing

Composite C01 Organising and Bargaining was moved the NEU and seconded by CWU.

The motion noted that “union membership has been on a downward trend for four decades, currently standing at 22% of the workforce, with less than 50% of public sector workers and less than 12% of private sector workers in a union. Younger workers are also less likely to join a union and new research shows a similar trend with lower-paid workers… The decline in membership has been accompanied by growing inequality. Real wages for most workers are barely above their pre-2008 level.”

The motion called for the TUC to make “concrete steps” towards sectoral bargaining and structures that embed union organisation, and to campaign for the Labour government to address growing work and wealth inequality. This will include resisting attempts to weaken the provisions of the Employment Rights Bill.

The motion also called on the General Council to demand the government fulfils its pledge of the “greatest number of insourcings in a generation,” and to make union recognition a condition for receiving public funding in all sectors.

Speaking in support of the motion for PCS, assistant general secretary john Moloney said:

“Labour's pledge was clear and unambiguous and no doubt everyone here could recite it by heart and that is, they would oversee the greatest wave of insourcing this country has ever seen. I can report from the UK civil service, where the Labour government has complete control, that we haven't seen a wave of insourcing. We haven't even seen a ripple of insourcing. We've actually seen no insourcing whatsoever. Not one worker has been insourced, nor are there any plans to insource any work. This is despite the fact that certainly for facility management contracts in-house is cheaper.”

John told Congress out that outsourcing represents “indirect race discrimination where the majority of facility management workers are black, on worse terms and conditions than their white counterparts inside the civil service.”

He asked Congress to pass the motion to “bring our in-sourced workers home.”

The motion was carried unanimously.