Blog 12 - Promote Unionisation... We should organise like the business class do...

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I’d continue on the anti-outsider nonsense that's been dominating the news but we shouldn’t let conservative diversions like that make us totally neglect our own priorities. One is to boost the right to unionise. Most of what gets done in this world is by people who organise with others. By far the best at it are business people. Their organisation is as businesses - many of them vast organisations, with thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of us working under their direction across the globe. Our biggest problem is that while they are organised, in the central process of producing wealth and wages, we are mostly not.

Partly that’s because we allow unionisation to be unmentioned in daily life. A TV programme this week showed how some footballers lost their retirement money by letting dodgy financial operators handle it. And they have the tax people bankrupting them for unpaid tax on the dodgy schemes.

They were greedy and foolish of course. But they were rightly pleased to have come together at last to help each other fight the case. But why didn’t they and the programme talk about them not having done this first, way back? Then, they were already organised, in the player’s union, the Professional Footballer’s Association. Couldn’t they have asked the PFA for advice then? The PFA are a strong organisation and help their members in many ways. Though they might keep away from operating as financial advisers themselves, they might do what my union, Unite, did when I recently asked for, and got, a recommendation for a trusted financial adviser.

The need for organising, unionising, for mutual info and support, was neglected not only by the players but by the programme makers. You see it often in TV dramas where someone gets disciplined or sacked, in an industry where you know they’ll be unionised, and you don’t see them being represented by a union rep, and managers just acting as if all-powerful.

It was the same with the postmasters. They were each told for years by the organisation they worked under, the Royal Mail, that they were the only one mis-handling cash. They resisted individually, in ignorance of their shared plight. Some got bankrupted and some killed themselves. They did at last come together and win. But nowhere in the coverage is this point – it wouldn’t have happened if they had maintained strong union links.

Back to the issue of recent weeks in the UK – the collective meaning people attach to the ‘us’ of national identity. All the footballers were British, many of them white. The financial business people who mis-treated them were also British and white.

P.S. Angela Reyner supports the super-important Employment Rights Bill that conservatives are trying wreck, on behalf of their class, the business class. Let the MP’s sort out any minor wrong-doing, we need people like her on the much bigger issues of our rights and public services.

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