Frances O’Grady: ‘My members are the wealth creators, but don’t get a fair share’

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/13/frances-ogrady-tuc-my-members-real-wealth-creators

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Stirring images of striking miners at Orgreave, and the treatment meted out to them by the police at the height of the dispute in 1984-85, were in the news again last week, as it was announced that there will be no formal investigation of the incident. This is the picture of trade unionism that is seared on the British consciousness – militant, male, unflinching in the face of both police brutality and the equally implacable Mrs T.

Frances O’Grady, the TUC’s general secretary – sitting in her cheerful wood-panelled London office on a sultry day and wearing a flowery sundress and sandals – hardly fits that stereotype. Yet with David Cameron and his Conservative colleagues emboldened by their surprise victory at the general election, the leader of today’s trade union movement feels she is having to settle scores that date back to those days.

“They are looking at the hit list from the 1980s, and playing the old tunes to entertain certain backbenchers,” she says of the new government’s approach.

She’s talking in particular about the trade union bill, announced in last month’s Queen’s speech, which will raise the threshold for participation in strike ballots to 50%, and restrict party political contributions from trade unions to those members who have deliberately opted in.

The bill is fronted by the avowedly Thatcherite new business minister, Sajid Javid – whom O’Grady has already met – and she sees it as a deliberate attempt to limit the unions’ influence, both in the workplace and in public life.

If the government were really interested in making workplace ballots more democratic, she argues, it would allow unions to use electronic voting. “If democracy is the question, that’s the answer. But if it’s about an attempt to remove and weaken our bargaining power, and give employers opportunities to drag us through the courts – that’s when you go down the route this government is proposing.”

But her real beef with the government’s approach is that it’s a waste of ministerial time and energy, at a time when there are deep-seated problems in the economy.

“I suspect if you ask any employer out there what is a priority for them,” she says, “suppressing dissent in the workplace is unlikely to be high on the list.”

Like many on the left, she is still recovering from the shock of the scale of May’s electoral defeat for Labour. Some – not least several candidates for the party leadership – have drawn the lesson that they need to junk Ed Miliband’s manifesto, embrace aggressive deficit-reduction and adopt a more conciliatory approach to “wealth creators”.

But sitting forward on her chair as the sun streams through the window, O’Grady – who is on fighting form – offers a different analysis: “What was very clear was that the issue of economic competence, which everybody knows about, was up there.”

But she believes that by allowing the debate to be framed by the Conservatives’ priority of imposing fresh spending cuts, Labour left itself without a positive message.

“I think once Labour was caught in the headlights of deficit reduction as the only game in town, it was going to become progressively more difficult to convince people that, actually, the real problems the country faces are about investment, productivity and delivering higher-skilled jobs and higher living standards, so that everybody gets a share in growth.”

Instead of conceding, as several of the main candidates for the Labour leadership have – including Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall – that the party spent too much in the runup to the financial crisis, O’Grady says Labour should have been bold enough to rubbish the idea that the catastrophic economic downturn was caused by Labour’s loose grip on the purse strings.

“The very idea that it was spending on Sure Start children’s centres that brought down the economy is clearly nonsense, and Labour should have been a little bit more self-confident and said: ‘We’re not going to play to your tune: here’s what we think needs to happen to build a fairer economy’.”

As George Osborne embarks on another round of cuts, which he is expected to outline in more detail in his budget on 8 July, O’Grady intends to keep on making the argument that the spending squeeze risks undermining the country’s already woeful productivity record.

“We do need to invest – in transport, in communications, in skills and, in fact, in our public services – because unless we have an educated and trained workforce, unless we have healthy workers, we are not going to be able to tackle that pretty grim picture on productivity, which caps our aspiration and caps our living standards.”

Having worked closely with Vince Cable, the Lib Dem business secretary who lost his seat in May, and with new Tory ministers keen to show their cost-cutting mettle, she is concerned about whether Javid will put as much emphasis on industrial strategy.

The TUC’s own polling, carried out after the general election, suggests that it would be wrong to read the result as a ringing endorsement of the coalition’s approach.

“It wasn’t because Labour was seen as business-bashing,” she says. “On the contrary, there is an appetite in the country for a real toughness on some of these excesses in business and the banks. Whether that’s tax or whether that’s top pay, a lot of people feel strongly that business has been let off the hook.

Unless we have a trained, healthy workforce, we can't tackle productivity, which caps aspirations and living standards

“Out in the country, there is still this simmering anger against extreme inequality: unfairness, tax dodging, concentrations of wealth and power that have a real impact on everybody else’s lives,” she says. “There’s a risk in the understandable disappointment of the election result that Labour will throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

The Conservatives’ approach to tackling Britain’s productivity shortfall against other major economies – which risks jeopardising the recovery – is to slash red tape and devolve more powers to regional governments, creating what Osborne calls a “northern powerhouse”.

But O’Grady says the government also needs to think about the treatment of workers. “If you’ve got a really demotivated workforce, how are you going to get better productivity out of them? If people are worried about their futures, and are not getting the skills and training they need, there is a point where that resentment begins to kick in to real life.

“Maybe a few more bosses need to walk the floor and hear it for themselves.”

She is also concerned about the potential impact of Cameron’s proposed renegotiation with the European Union, in the runup to the in-out referendum the prime minister has promised to hold by 2017.

Conservative backbenchers hope Cameron will manage to wriggle free of some of the social legislation imposed at European level, which CBI president Sir Mike Rake recently called “lifestyle regulation”. O’Grady is pro-European, but she fears that public support for EU membership will “wither on the vine” unless it offers people more than just a stake in a market.

“If this renegotiation is about worsening workers’ rights by the back door, you’re not going to win the votes you need,” she says. “As Jacques Delors famously said, people don’t fall in love with markets.”

She believes, however, that her biggest challenge over the coming years, while under fire from a government keen to undermine the unions’ power, is one that would be familiar to those striking miners 30 years ago: fighting for her members’ livelihoods.

Unions have not always been good at penetrating the new kinds of workplace that have increasingly come to characterise Britain’s ultra-flexible labour market: outsourced, casualised and riddled with zero-hours contracts.

But she sees a new role for the union movement in expressing some of these frustrations, and using the organising and dealmaking skills she has honed over decades of tough confrontations, to win victories for today’s workers.

“It is about building people’s confidence and skills and the solidarity to look after each other at work,” she says. “We know that some people still feel very angry about the unfair distribution of the rewards of their labour: they’re the bloody wealth creators – and they are not getting a fair share.”

FALL FROM POWER

Trade union membership is in long-term decline, with collective bargaining rarer and workforces fragmented by outsourcing, zero-hours contracts and the use of agency staff. Membership peaked at around 13 million in the mid-1970s: the latest government figures show that by, 2014, that had fallen to 6.4 million (see graph, above left).

Successive governments have tightened the rules over strike ballots, and the government plans to table a trade union bill in the current parliament to insist that turnout must be at least 50%. In “essential public services”, including transport, at least 40% of those entitled to vote must back action if it is to be allowed to proceed.

Strike action is dramatically rarer than it used to be. In 1984, more than 24m working days were lost to industrial action; by last year, with the sharp decline in membership and the collapse of heavily unionised, labour-intensive industries, that had fallen to 786,000.

Trade union Influence on politics is also under attack: the trade union bill is expected to include an insistence that members must regularly “opt in” if part of their membership fee is to go to the Labour party.

Labour has also sought to reduce the influence of union “barons” over its policies. Tony Blair’s redraft of clause IV of the party’s constitution was partly a power struggle with the unions. More recently, changes to how the party’s next leader will be elected, enacted by Ed Miliband, were also aimed at lessening the power of the union block vote, though individual members will still be able to register as supporters and vote.