Trade Unions

Baroness Prosser Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Prosser (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Foulkes for putting this debate down. It is both important and hugely timely.

It has already been mentioned that we in the United Kingdom are an unequal society, and that inequality is getting wider. In fact, according to the book The Spirit Level, an academic study of the western world, we are second only to the United States in inequality. As that book points out, that inequality brings with it a society which is out of balance, out of kilter and not happy or cohesive. I fear that the forthcoming Trade Union Bill, should it go through in the way in which it is currently envisaged, will only make matters very much worse.

The debate thus far has pointed out a lot of the things about trade unions which we never hear about. If you believed everything we read in the press or watched on the television, you would think that the trade union movement was a proscribed organisation. It has already been mentioned that we have been insulted in the past, and therefore an opportunity to demonstrate the hugely useful and valuable role that unions have played over the years is very welcome.

I will touch on three aspects: education and training, which has already been mentioned quite widely; the international work of unions; and equalities. My noble friend Lord Griffiths put it very succinctly in talking about the work of trade unions as an educator, describing their contribution to the social fabric of society. In the 20 years that I was employed by the Transport and General Workers’ Union as was, I must have seen thousands upon thousands of examples of people going through the union education programme and coming out at the end of it more confident and competent. Of course, that education covered such things as learning about health and safety, legislation which covers workplaces, equalities, how to be a good shop steward or branch secretary—all of that. Also, however, to correct something the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, said, the trade union education hugely covers the whole area of literacy and numeracy. That was started by NUPE, long before Unionlearn came into being. That programme patched up the education gaps suffered by so many people in our society and enabled those older workers to learn and to catch up with their learning in a comfortable and supportive environment.

I can give many examples of the huge number of people I have come across who have moved on up through education, but I will mention just two. A woman who sat on the national women’s committee of the old T&G came from Bristol, worked in Bristol University as a cleaner, and was a single parent. She lost her job because she injured her back. She had already participated in a lot of trade union education and therefore after she had lost her work had the confidence to go on and learn further, and ended up going back to Bristol University as a lecturer. Another woman worked in Pendleton Ice Cream outside Liverpool; she was our convenor there and was made redundant when the factory closed. She was another example of someone who rebuilt her confidence on union learning and education; she also went on to become a lecturer. Those are just two tiny examples of my experience of union members who have the capacity and the ability but have never had the opportunity, and the trade union movement is the organisation that gives that opportunity to them.

Unionlearn, as has been said, is a massively successful experiment. It is an organisation funded by government and it pays back to government in spades, as has been mentioned, because of the greater earning power of the workers whom it trains and educates, because of the ability of those workers to participate in increased productivity, and by their spending power. Yet the funding for Unionlearn has been diminished and diminished. It is now hardly able to operate, despite being hugely popular with employers as well as employees. Clearly, however, it is not overly popular with the Government.

The second area I will touch on, very quickly, is international work. For 11 years I was chair of the women’s committee of the International Chemical & Energy Workers’ Union. The British TUC is the most respected trade union organisation worldwide. It has given training, assistance and confidence to newer organisations that have been set up around the world. The TUC sent massive numbers out to east European countries after the fall of the Iron Curtain, training those workers and union reps on the whole question of democratic structures, how to be a good steward and a good representative. Solidarity, the Polish trade union which of course helped to bring about the fall of the Iron Curtain, was then seen as a great hero—admiration that is ironic from a Government who have always taken a less-than-encouraging approach to the UK trade union movement. After the dreadful tragic collapse of Rana Plaza, who was first on the scene? IndustriALL, the international union, was out there, taking evidence, gathering information to ensure that those damaged workers were able to gain some recompense for what had happened to them.

Finally, I will comment on the whole question of equalities. Unions were the first organisations to identify the use of targets, use reserved seats—when I first joined the TUC in the early 1980s we already had reserved seats for women—and get proportionality on committees, and they work with companies up and down the land enabling those companies to use positive action to bring forward underrepresented groups within their workforces.

I think the word “partnership” has been mentioned only once in this debate, but that is what it is—a partnership between representatives of the workers and the employers, and in good workplaces that partnership brings benefits to all sides. Sometimes unions are described as greedy. As JB Priestley said, there is nothing wrong in asking for the moon, but it is very wrong to just take it.