Heart Union Week 2023: time for widespread trade union organisation in craft beer
13-19th February 2023 is ‘heart’ unions week. Of course 14th February was 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. The bottom-line idea is to get people to join a union.
One area where it would be good to see unions is craft beer. 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 can’t 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 won’t 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.
Both Unite and the IWW are organising in craft beer currently. They deserve support and joining is a good start.
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