This TUC Annual Congress in Manchester this weekend is a watershed. On the back of new research showing that Government spending cuts will hit the poorest 10 times harder than the rich, even before the Comprehensive Spending Review announces additional 25-40% Departmental spending cuts on 20 October, this challenge is going to define the union role for the next decade or more. Will the coming job cuts, on top of 2.5 million already unemployed, sap union strength even further beyond the halving of union membership since the 1980s or will it finally catalyse a fundamental grass roots revolt restoring confidence in the collective strength of workers as the only bulwark against the steady decline of the last three decades?
The grounds for this revival are very strong. Since 1980 wages as a proportion of GNP have fallen from 65% to 53%. This is an enormous drop in the share of the total national cake for wage-earners, paralleled by a huge rise for capital which is reflected in the colossal increase in earnings, bonuses, share incentive schemes, tax avoidance and major payoffs for the tiny super-rich elite. It explains why chief executives of the top 100 FTSE companies are now getting (rather than earning), at an average £71,350 a week, nearly 400 times the pay of their lowest paid employees on the national minimum wage (or below).
This may well be now the turning point where the excesses of greed for the few begin to be reversed and some measure of sanity and fairness as a condition for a civilised society begins to be restored. There are already precedents in other countries, most notably in France, resisting any further cutbacks in their standard of living and demanding that the rich who caused the financial meldown and have evaded paying their fair share for so long should now be brought to book.
Brendan Barber is right that a renaissance for the unions doesn’t herald a return to the 1980s. What is needed, as he realises, is for the unions to take a leading role in a broad popular front bringing together diverse community-based opposition – maybe ‘the Big Society’ beginning to exert itself, though not necessarily in quite the way Cameron expected or intended.
This is a now or never moment. A combination of benefit cuts, pay freeze, big new job losses, privatisation, restructuring, threats to pensions, home repossessions, and almost universal insecurity defines the task.
