Union Week 2020: time for trade unions in craft beer
10-16th February 2020 is ‘heart’ unions week. Of course 14th February is Valentine’s Day but the week underlines that ‘love’, or perhaps fellowship, is collective as well as individual.
https://www.tuc.org.uk/heartunions
Events are going on across the world of work. On Monday evening for example I joined a call with TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady and other union representatives about sexual harassment at work which is a key theme of Union Week 2020.
The bottom line idea is to get people to join a union.
I thought about that over the weekend when news appeared on social media of a craft brewery worker sacked on day one for being a trade union member. It appears his previous employer had been in touch with his new one.
That suggests an employer’s blacklist in some craft beer companies and that is illegal as is the disclosure without their permission of someone’s union membership.
Sacking someone on day one btw is not illegal in general. Because under the Tories ‘workers party’ Government you don’t get employment rights for two years.
It would be good to see craft beer unionised. Only a few craft breweries currently employ enough people to justify a full-scale recognition and negotiation framework. Where they do they’d find that their brewery worked a lot better for having a mechanism for properly sorting out issues. They would also find they’d lose a lot less skilled workers who walk out because they have an issue they cant see a way of resolving.
For craft beer workers even in small breweries there are significant benefits to union membership. Representation when appropriate of course but also professional advice and help across a wide range of issues.
The reality is though that if you are not a trade union member your ability to do much about issues at work except leave is very limited indeed. And if you are a member then there is the perpetual work of making sure the union effectively represents people- that only comes from an active membership not a benign General Secretary! It will also help if you are actively politically. A change of Government that is actually on the side of working people remains long overdue sadly.
However self-activity is the start. As the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm noted the world wont change itself for the better on its own. People are required for that, and people organised in some form of collective activity, which is why being in a union is as important now as it was a hundred years ago
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