We have a chance to put right decades of decline – if the movement unites

DAVE WARD of the Communication Workers Union says unions must step up to meet the challenges of a transformed world of work

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THIS is the most important TUC in decades. With Andy Burnham in No 10 we have a historic opportunity to put right decades of decline — I agree with his analysis on that — and the crucial question for the trade union movement is what our role is in delivering a new social and economic settlement.

The trade union movement should support Burnham’s stated agenda of undoing 40 years of damage but we also see ourselves as having a distinct role — to unify working-class people and to improve their lives, at work and outside work as well.

This is a unique opportunity and we should set aside cynicism. We need to campaign for a new economic settlement just as we did for the New Deal for Workers, which we at the CWU first brought forward and which evolved into the Employment Rights Act.

We will not achieve change unless we take on the vested interests. Up to this point no political party, including Labour in recent decades, has dared to take on powerful vested interests. That is the test of this government but of our movement too.

Are we fit to deliver for working people in a world of work that has changed hugely and is changing fast right now?

Take Royal Mail. Our policy is for renationalisation. But we’ve also got to recognise that there are issues that need to be resolved to secure its future whether it is in public or private hands. How does it generate revenue when letters are in decline as a means of communication?

Democratic public control does come into that, as it does with those parts of BT which provide a universal service — it’s not something that can be answered purely within the company, government has a role. But we know that one of the sectors that can offset letter decline is parcel growth.

And that sector is like the Wild West. It’s at the heart of all the bad things happening around bogus self-employment, zero-hours contracts and use of technology like algorithms to exploit workers, while multinationals that have entered the UK market are not paying any tax or National Insurance here.

We have started what we call a level playing field campaign. We’ve got to introduce a single status of worker in this country.

One of our motions to the TUC makes it clear that this — moving employment rights on from what we’ve won through the 2025 Act — is our job as unions.

It’s time to reignite the New Deal campaign. One, make sure the existing Employment Rights Act is delivered in full. Two, go further: we need a single status of worker, sectoral collective bargaining and a wave of insourcing.

And we are continuing with our agenda of reforming the TUC because our movement suffers from a model that might have been fit for organising people 30 or 40 years ago but isn’t really fit for the challenge of organising workers in a totally different economy.

Unions need to recognise that greater co-operation across sectors of the economy is essential to raising standards. Do individual unions have the answers to these problems or do we believe in collectivism?

In our sector, for me, that means not one union trying to crack these multinational delivery companies, it means unions coming up with a strategy to drive up standards across the sector.

Arguably co-operation becomes even more critical with new access rights — because employers who recognise that to some extent they need to move towards the trade union movement, since the law has changed, may seek to dictate the terms of trade union engagement by playing unions off against each other with sweetheart deals.

That isn’t going to help anybody. And it’s part of why we believe we need a stronger TUC, with stronger democratic governance including a leadership elected for set terms, which is no criticism at all of current leaders.

The other side of that is that it is only through working-class unity that we can defeat Reform. To assert ourselves as the collective voice of working-class people — this is a massive challenge for the left, for the Labour Party, and for the trade union movement.

Every union needs to take responsibility for that, training reps, educating members in challenging the things Reform is saying. We have started some of those courses in our union.

But we also want to engage members in the workplace, and you do that by convincing them that the trade union movement is coming together to make their lives better. You don’t do anti-racism in isolation, you do it as part of a connected strategy.

Working-class politics has to be at the heart of it — and we believe our motion brings together the overarching challenge. We defeat Reform by delivering a new social and economic contract.

A lot of the anger pushing people to the far right is the sense they’ve lost control and currently issues like AI risk making that worse. Labour needs to recognise that you cannot talk about the biggest change in 40 or 50 years and not confront the vested interests who are changing the world of work in their interests, including by shaping the AI revolution for themselves.

As a union we are making progress in recruiting tech workers in this sector, we’re nearly at 7,000 members working in this field, all new, which gives us inroads into places where the technology is being developed, including at places like Google Mind where we have people joining the CWU — highly skilled people with a very strong view on the work they do and who owns and controls it, how it can serve the public interest.

Unions played a role in making it clear to Labour that Keir Starmer needed to go earlier this year because it was clear he had no strategy for the change needed.

We’ve spoken to Burnham about what we want and expect from his government — emphasising that that includes an end to factionalism in the party, and to suspending and excluding people when they challenge you.

But it’s up to us to deliver change by unifying working-class people and rebuilding collectivism. That’s what I want to see at TUC Congress.

Dave Ward is general secretary of the CWU.

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