>In the British general election of 2019, the Labour party, historically the voice of the working class, was routed across many of its heartlands. Parliamentary constituencies that would never previously have countenanced voting for the Conservative party suddenly did so in large numbers. Labour was wiped out in places it had for years taken for granted.
>
>The Labour party is but one wing of Britain’s labor movement; the other being the nation’s trade unions. Indeed, it was the latter which begat the former: More than a century ago, the party was formed, in the words of one of its former statesmen, “out of the bowels of the trade-union movement.”
>
>Though tensions have often existed between the two wings, their fortunes have always been closely intertwined. And just as the party is now battling to recover its position after more than two decades spent alienating its core working-class voters, the trade unions today stand largely neutered and irrelevant.
>
>Union membership in the UK has been halved over the past 40 years, with far fewer employers likely to formally recognize a union for bargaining purposes. As such, the ability of the trade union movement to intervene industrially and politically on behalf of workers is severely diminished.
>
>For those of us who believe passionately that trade unions are a force for good, their marginalization in the workplace and wider society is a tragedy. There was a time when unions were a prominent feature of national life—the movement’s leaders as well known and ubiquitous across the media as any government minister. Now, large numbers of workers, particularly of the younger generation, barely know what trade unions exist for.
>
>“There was a time when unions were a prominent feature of national life, the movement’s leaders as well known and as ubiquitous across the media as any government minister.”
>
>Most advances secured over the generations by British workers—a minimum wage, paid holidays, improved health and safety regulations, and more—came as a direct result of sustained trade-union campaigning. But things went badly wrong. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher pushed through a raft of anti-trade-union legislation designed to cut the legs from under the movement. By elevating the demands of finance far above those of productive capital, her economic policy caused widespread deindustrialization and, with it, the loss of millions of unionized blue-collar jobs.
>
>Rather than try to arrest and reverse the decline, much of the trade-union movement was content to manage it. As time went by, unions effectively gave up on the private economy and retreated to their public-sector comfort zone. It wasn’t that the opportunities for private-sector union membership had disappeared; on the contrary, with the decline of heavy industry came the rise of new professions—call centers and the “gig” economy being two examples—whose unscrupulous practices cried out for unionization. But by this point, unions were falling under the spell of the emerging professional and managerial class whose positions as experts and overseers of the new private economy had exploded in number.
>
>The members of this new class viewed the world from an “enlightened,” metropolitan vantage point and had little understanding of the lives of those toiling in provincial Britain. As their share of the economy grew—from the ruins of deindustrialization, no less—their particular economic interests and social values gained greater political currency. It was no coincidence that, around that same time, the trade-union movement began to hitch its wagons to this “PMC” and its precepts—identity politics, increased immigration, and personal libertinism—that socially fragmented and economically atomized the workplace and beyond.
>
>The favoring of a bureaucratic and managerial style of politics went hand in hand with unions themselves adopting more and more bureaucratic and managerial machineries: We have seen in the UK over recent years, chiefly as a consequence of multiple amalgamations, the emergence of the “super union”—a sprawling and monolithic entity that has supplanted many of the smaller, independent unions. Worse still, it is bereft of much of the dynamism and democratic accountability with which those unions were more likely to be imbued.
>
>While unions still articulate the case for wage and workplace justice, one is just as likely these days to hear support for Black Lives Matter, transgender rights, or open borders as one would demands for higher pay and shorter work hours. Much as with American unions, progressive issues have supplanted bread-and-butter organizing. In 2020, United Teachers Los Angeles demanded the defunding of the police. It isn’t impossible to imagine one of the more radical unions on this side of the pond doing the same. For millions of workers, this kind of thing is, of course, not in their interest.
>
>Any demand or campaign that doesn’t fit with the individualist, progressive-managerial agenda faces resistance. For example, I recently touted the idea among union colleagues of a campaign for a “family wage” to supersede the “living wage.” One might think that trade unionists would favor a demand for the economy to be reordered so that families could enjoy a dignified quality of life on a single wage, rather than both parents being compelled by financial imperative to go out to work, or even for single parents to hold two jobs. Not these days. The reaction was exceedingly hostile, with even the head of campaigns for the trade unions’ umbrella body—the Trades Union Congress (TUC)—inveighing against the idea on the grounds it was a backward proposal designed to keep women in servitude. (I had not even suggested that it must be the mother who stayed at home.)
>
>Such devotion to progressive-liberalism helps explain why British trade unions didn’t lift a finger in support of the likes of the yellow-vest uprising in France or the truckers in Canada. No matter that these groups, as working-class as they come, were doing the basic stuff of advocating for their rights as workers and citizens. No, these were the wrong type of working class. The yellow vests waved their national flag as they marched and so were clearly not much in favor of economic globalization; the truckers were defending their right to self-determination. Thus, these two groups were “reactionary” and to be given a wide berth by PMC-captive trade unions.
>
>In a recent high-profile legal dispute in Britain, a gender-critical activist successfully sued a think-tank after it sacked her for arguing that people can’t change their biological sex. Instead of seeing the outcome as a victory for free speech and women’s sex-based rights, much of the trade-union movement, the TUC included, lamented the outcome and condemned the activist.
>
>It is a measure of the extent to which unions in Britain today are betraying their historical purpose that they would turn their backs on ideas, campaigns, and groups of workers with which they would once have been only too proud to associate. Our trade-union movement is today a shadow of its former self, little more than a mouthpiece for the London liberal class, and without resonance across much of post-industrial Britain. In short, the movement has turned woke, and the working class is paying the heaviest price for it.
Thank you for the umpteenth reminder that Embery is as brain dead as the common conservative cabinet minister.
Good article. Paul continues to make a number of very important points which are met with derision by the usual suspects.
I like Paul but he’s another who has fallen down the gender rabbit hole. It’s a far right trap and he fails to see he’s working for those trying to destroy what us left of the unions.
4 comments
>In the British general election of 2019, the Labour party, historically the voice of the working class, was routed across many of its heartlands. Parliamentary constituencies that would never previously have countenanced voting for the Conservative party suddenly did so in large numbers. Labour was wiped out in places it had for years taken for granted.
>
>The Labour party is but one wing of Britain’s labor movement; the other being the nation’s trade unions. Indeed, it was the latter which begat the former: More than a century ago, the party was formed, in the words of one of its former statesmen, “out of the bowels of the trade-union movement.”
>
>Though tensions have often existed between the two wings, their fortunes have always been closely intertwined. And just as the party is now battling to recover its position after more than two decades spent alienating its core working-class voters, the trade unions today stand largely neutered and irrelevant.
>
>Union membership in the UK has been halved over the past 40 years, with far fewer employers likely to formally recognize a union for bargaining purposes. As such, the ability of the trade union movement to intervene industrially and politically on behalf of workers is severely diminished.
>
>For those of us who believe passionately that trade unions are a force for good, their marginalization in the workplace and wider society is a tragedy. There was a time when unions were a prominent feature of national life—the movement’s leaders as well known and ubiquitous across the media as any government minister. Now, large numbers of workers, particularly of the younger generation, barely know what trade unions exist for.
>
>“There was a time when unions were a prominent feature of national life, the movement’s leaders as well known and as ubiquitous across the media as any government minister.”
>
>Most advances secured over the generations by British workers—a minimum wage, paid holidays, improved health and safety regulations, and more—came as a direct result of sustained trade-union campaigning. But things went badly wrong. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher pushed through a raft of anti-trade-union legislation designed to cut the legs from under the movement. By elevating the demands of finance far above those of productive capital, her economic policy caused widespread deindustrialization and, with it, the loss of millions of unionized blue-collar jobs.
>
>Rather than try to arrest and reverse the decline, much of the trade-union movement was content to manage it. As time went by, unions effectively gave up on the private economy and retreated to their public-sector comfort zone. It wasn’t that the opportunities for private-sector union membership had disappeared; on the contrary, with the decline of heavy industry came the rise of new professions—call centers and the “gig” economy being two examples—whose unscrupulous practices cried out for unionization. But by this point, unions were falling under the spell of the emerging professional and managerial class whose positions as experts and overseers of the new private economy had exploded in number.
>
>The members of this new class viewed the world from an “enlightened,” metropolitan vantage point and had little understanding of the lives of those toiling in provincial Britain. As their share of the economy grew—from the ruins of deindustrialization, no less—their particular economic interests and social values gained greater political currency. It was no coincidence that, around that same time, the trade-union movement began to hitch its wagons to this “PMC” and its precepts—identity politics, increased immigration, and personal libertinism—that socially fragmented and economically atomized the workplace and beyond.
>
>The favoring of a bureaucratic and managerial style of politics went hand in hand with unions themselves adopting more and more bureaucratic and managerial machineries: We have seen in the UK over recent years, chiefly as a consequence of multiple amalgamations, the emergence of the “super union”—a sprawling and monolithic entity that has supplanted many of the smaller, independent unions. Worse still, it is bereft of much of the dynamism and democratic accountability with which those unions were more likely to be imbued.
>
>While unions still articulate the case for wage and workplace justice, one is just as likely these days to hear support for Black Lives Matter, transgender rights, or open borders as one would demands for higher pay and shorter work hours. Much as with American unions, progressive issues have supplanted bread-and-butter organizing. In 2020, United Teachers Los Angeles demanded the defunding of the police. It isn’t impossible to imagine one of the more radical unions on this side of the pond doing the same. For millions of workers, this kind of thing is, of course, not in their interest.
>
>Any demand or campaign that doesn’t fit with the individualist, progressive-managerial agenda faces resistance. For example, I recently touted the idea among union colleagues of a campaign for a “family wage” to supersede the “living wage.” One might think that trade unionists would favor a demand for the economy to be reordered so that families could enjoy a dignified quality of life on a single wage, rather than both parents being compelled by financial imperative to go out to work, or even for single parents to hold two jobs. Not these days. The reaction was exceedingly hostile, with even the head of campaigns for the trade unions’ umbrella body—the Trades Union Congress (TUC)—inveighing against the idea on the grounds it was a backward proposal designed to keep women in servitude. (I had not even suggested that it must be the mother who stayed at home.)
>
>Such devotion to progressive-liberalism helps explain why British trade unions didn’t lift a finger in support of the likes of the yellow-vest uprising in France or the truckers in Canada. No matter that these groups, as working-class as they come, were doing the basic stuff of advocating for their rights as workers and citizens. No, these were the wrong type of working class. The yellow vests waved their national flag as they marched and so were clearly not much in favor of economic globalization; the truckers were defending their right to self-determination. Thus, these two groups were “reactionary” and to be given a wide berth by PMC-captive trade unions.
>
>In a recent high-profile legal dispute in Britain, a gender-critical activist successfully sued a think-tank after it sacked her for arguing that people can’t change their biological sex. Instead of seeing the outcome as a victory for free speech and women’s sex-based rights, much of the trade-union movement, the TUC included, lamented the outcome and condemned the activist.
>
>It is a measure of the extent to which unions in Britain today are betraying their historical purpose that they would turn their backs on ideas, campaigns, and groups of workers with which they would once have been only too proud to associate. Our trade-union movement is today a shadow of its former self, little more than a mouthpiece for the London liberal class, and without resonance across much of post-industrial Britain. In short, the movement has turned woke, and the working class is paying the heaviest price for it.
Thank you for the umpteenth reminder that Embery is as brain dead as the common conservative cabinet minister.
Good article. Paul continues to make a number of very important points which are met with derision by the usual suspects.
I like Paul but he’s another who has fallen down the gender rabbit hole. It’s a far right trap and he fails to see he’s working for those trying to destroy what us left of the unions.