Kmflett's Blog

Heart Union Week 2025: learning to love the tradition of collective organisation & action

10-16th February 2025 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

As they usually do, unions and workplace organising face some challenges

In terms of strikes the figures which until recently were amongst the lowest since the early 1890s when records began rose sharply from mid-2022 although they have dropped back a bit with some significant disputes winning real advances and new issues arising.  The density of union membership still leaves a lot to be desired but overall trade union membership is steady and rising in some sectors of the workforce. Trade unions and collective action, partly thanks to Government intransigence from 2010-2024, have become popular again

Union membership still needs to be higher and industrial action in hospitality and by security guards shows that unions are quite capable of organising in less traditional areas of workplace strength.

This can and are changing very quickly. You need only look at the 1889 London dock strike- previously unorganised workers with a strike wave across the London and other areas of the UK to underwrite matters- to understand that periods of apparent quiet can suddenly explode.

It’s important also to grasp a wider context.

The reality is that if you are not a trade union member your ability to do much about any issue at work is very limited indeed. And if you are 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 broadly on the side of working people when it comes to the current Employment Relations Bill is a start but as Raymond Williams once noted its not just a question of kicking out the Tories, we have to keep on kicking. Bad bosses have not gone away.

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 in the 1890s.