Len McCluskey - Why You Should Be a Trade Unionist

This eBook is licensed to Kier Kirby, kier@kierkirby.co.uk on 04/14/2020

This eBook is licensed to Kier Kirby, kier@kierkirby.co.uk on 04/14/2020

LEN McCLUSKEY

This eBook is licensed to Kier Kirby, kier@kierkirby.co.uk on 04/14/2020

First published by Verso 2020
Len McCluskey 2020

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-787-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-788-3 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-789-0 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
LCCN: 2019952254

Typeset in Monotype Fournier by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

This eBook is licensed to Kier Kirby, kier@kierkirby.co.uk on 04/14/2020

CONTENTS

This eBook is licensed to Kier Kirby, kier@kierkirby.co.uk on 04/14/2020

A number of people have helped me with the writing of this book, but I would primarily like to thank Jennie Walsh, who worked closely with me for nearly two years, and without whom it would not have been possible. Any errors in the history I tell here are, however, entirely mine, as are the views I express.

Thanks to Howard Beckett, Charlotte Bence, Louisa Bull, Tony Burke, Gail Cartmail, Pauline Doyle, Victoria Egerton, Alex Flynn, Diana Holland, Sharon Graham, Liane Groves, Asif Mohammed, Jim Mowatt, Andrew Murray, Frances OGrady, Mick Rix, Lauren Townsend, Steve Turner, Tony Woodhouse, John Usher and everyone else who helped me to focus my thoughts, recall memories, check facts and express why I believe we all should be trade unionists. My apologies to those colleagues and comrades who, over the decades of my own trade union activism, have been influential in shaping my politics, but whom I have not named. No one is forgotten.

Leo Hollis at Verso gave invaluable feedback and support in helping to shape the structure and direction of the book, as did Andrew Murray. Thanks, too, to Mark Martin and Tim Clark at Verso for their skilful copy editing. It was a remarkably pain-free experience.

This book has been researched and written during extraordinary and polarised times in British politics. As it goes to press, we are in full general election campaign mode. I sincerely hope that by the time Why You Should Be a Trade Unionist reaches bookshops that this nation has achieved a lasting, credible settlement, one that heals our divisions and gives hope of a fairer future for all the people of this country.

Len McCluskey
November 2019

This eBook is licensed to Kier Kirby, kier@kierkirby.co.uk on 04/14/2020

Just look him in his eyes and say
Were gonna do it anyway

Labi Siffre

I joined the Transport and General Workers Union (T&G) more than fifty years ago, when at the age of eighteen I started work as a plan man on the Liverpool docks. As I walked through the dock gates on my first day, someone gave me a form and said: You join the union here, son.

At the time, I had a choice of jobs and the expectation of job security. In fact, I was only intending to work on the docks for a year. I had been accepted at a teaching college in Birmingham. My mate, John Foley, who was coming with me to college, decided to take a year off (long before gap years had been invented), and I did not want to go without him. He went on to become a brilliant head teacher, for forty years. I got a job and waited for him. I actually got three job offers and only made up my mind which one to take the day before I was due to start. The other jobs were in insurance, a much safer bet in those days. But I chose the path less trodden and started work for the Port of Liverpool Stevedoring Company.

Liverpool was a trade union city and I knew what unions were. I came from a working-class family, living in a two-up-two-down house, with parents who used to say theyd cut their arms off before theyd ever vote Tory. I didnt have to fight for my right to join a union others had done that before me and I was soon actively involved in mine.

I was a child of the 1960s. Revolution was in the air: in dress, music and politics, and, of course, with the civil rights movement in America, Northern Ireland and Vietnam. The docks were a brilliant and vibrant place to be a young man; they were filled with the most knowledgeable and funny people who taught me a lot. Not all of them were sympathetic to the long-haired, left-wing students protesting in Paris and the United States, but the Liverpool dockers understood class issues. These included what was happening in Chile and South Africa, and our debates were informed by the feeling that an attack on one trade unionist was an attack on all of us.

Not long after getting involved in the union, and winning a fight for younger workers to be paid the same as their older colleagues, I was persuaded to become a shop steward, a position I held for the next ten years, quickly reaching senior shop steward. People then started suggesting I should become a union officer. I didnt really know what this involved, other than it meant working full-time for the union and would take me away from my beloved Liverpool docks after eleven very happy years working there. But I hoped I might be good at it, so in 1979 I applied, and a fortnight later I was appointed a T&G regional officer. I was based in Merseyside, but my remit increasingly spread throughout the North West.

As a regional officer I was involved with just about every sector in which the T&G represented workers. I was active in every trade group, from transport to auto manufacturing to agriculture and the voluntary sector. After ten years I had risen to the position of national secretary, and then in 2004 I was named assistant general secretary. Finally, seven years later, I was appointed general secretary of Unite the Union, which had been formed in 2007 as a result of a merger between the T&G and Amicus.

This was a period of tremendous upheaval. Some of the responsibility for that turbulence has to go to a person who got a promotion the same year I became a regional officer. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher was elected as prime minister, famously declaring that there is no such thing as society. Or rather: Im all right, Jack. The idea that the only reason any of us are on this earth is just to look after ourselves was, to me, a repellent creed, alien to how I was brought up and to the world I wanted to see flourish. As I started my work across Merseyside and the North West, I saw a region, and a community, increasingly devastated by Thatchers vindictive policies towards ordinary working people, their industries and their unions.

I was very much in the middle of that storm. This was during the so-called Militant years of Liverpool City Council, and I was deeply involved in the Broad Left of my union at both regional and national levels. I was passionate about developing resistance to the onslaught of Thatcherism. For me, that kind of political work, alongside our industrial work, was fundamental to why we should be trade unionists. And today, having been a union general secretary through the long years of Tory austerity, Ive become ever more convinced that the trade union movement offers the only pathway to ensuring a better, more united future.