Interest in trade unions and their politics is no more, and they only have themselves to blame
Until the grip of ideological working-class romanticism is cast off, the irrelevance of the unions will long remain.
This week, Unite union’s election for a General Secretary elected a surprise winner, Sharon Graham. Outlets were asking what to make of her election, and what it means for Labour. But, to be honest, it seems the question really is: who actually cares?
Looking at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s research on the issue, it is clear the worker has very much checked out of union politics. Union membership has been in continuous decline since the 1970s, reaching a record low in 2016, and hasn’t really recovered all that much since then.
“It’s all Thatcher and the Tories”, unionists might reply. By having restrictive trade union laws, we stopped the unions having the power to fight for workers, and so the people lost interest. But, quite frankly, that is a inaccurate deflection.
The fact is, unions lost the working man by becoming middle-class pressure groups. If you are one of the select few holding membership of a trade union, you’re more likely to be a middle earner, earning £500-£999 a week, rather than be in any other income group. And even then, that doesn’t guarantee participation, as only twelve per cent of Unite members bothered to vote in their recent leadership election.
Graham was actually right, in a sense, when she revealed her belief that Unite needed to stop its ‘obsession’ with the Labour Party. The Labour Party itself has, for a while now, succumbed to the same problem: middle-class liberal members romanticising the working class for their own ideological benefit. I just wish that was what Graham meant by her comment.
The fact is the vision of the unions as unapologetically by the working class, for the working class no longer holds in reality. Until the grip of ideological working-class romanticism is cast off, the irrelevance of the unions will long remain.
