Photo: Fran Freeman
From the 1980s until the 2020s, the story of the British labour movement was one of decline.
Grace Blakeley is a staff writer for Tribune Magazine and author of Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom (Atria, 2024).
When Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979, the labour movement was at the peak of its power. Workers had shown that they could bring the economy to a standstill and extract concessions from both bosses and politicians. Thatcher sought to put workers in their place, an aim she achieved by introducing harsh anti-trade union laws, engineering a recession that left 3 million people unemployed, and turning the power of the British state against striking workers.
As a result of this offensive, the strength of the labour movement in the UK declined in both absolute and relative terms over successive decades. Union membership peaked at 13 million in 1979. By 2017, that figure had fallen to 6.2 million, equivalent to 23.2 percent of workers.
As their membership ebbed, the established unions became more conservative. They focused less on growing their memberships and fighting for higher wages, and more on the provision of services like legal support and insurance. There was a consensus that new sectors like the gig economy were effectively impossible to unionize.
This began to change in 2017, when the decline in union membership stopped and even started to tick upwards. In part, this change was the result of the growth of the British Left and a mass influx of new members into the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, many of whom also became union members.
Organizers sought to increase the assertiveness and radicalism of the labour movement to provide the foundations for a socialist electoral project. They even started to organize in new sectors where unions had previously struggled to take hold. Strike action took place in companies ranging from McDonald’s to Deliveroo.
The failure of Corbynism and the beginning of the pandemic dashed these hopes. Unemployment increased and enforced home working hindered new strike action. Union membership began to fall once again.
Second Chances
Yet the cost-of-living crisis provided an opportunity for what was left of the labour movement to prove its ongoing relevance. There has been an increase in industrial action, as well as union membership, since 2022. But many of the largest unions are still stuck in the “servicing” model that they were forced to adopt during the long period of decline after the 1980s.
While unions are beginning to recover their strength, the rank and file often don’t see their union membership as part of socialist politics. Most of the big unions have supported Keir Starmer’s Labour government, despite his failure to fulfil the promises he made on workers’ rights. Moreover, many union members have voted for firmly anti-union parties like the Conservatives and Reform.
In this context, organizers at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s London Office developed a new training programme for unionists: Workers’ Power — Organise to Win! The programme combines tactical training with lessons on the history and importance of the labour movement, with the aim of politicizing unionists.
For 40 years now, the trade union movement has been decimated, and so have these institutions of working-class education.
The programme was inspired by the success of another foundation initiative, Organizing for Power (O4P). O4P is an online training programme that the foundation ran alongside the renowned organizer and strategist Jane McAlevey, who passed away last year. In its first five years of existence, the programme trained more than 40,000 organizers from 115 countries in the basics of McAlevey’s tried-and-tested approach.
Having witnessed the success of O4P, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation organizers saw an opportunity to develop a similar training programme for trade unionists in the UK. Launched in late 2023, it’s proven to be a vital space for carrying on labour movement traditions and generating new ideas and enthusiasm in the process.
Organizing to Win
I recently sat down with programme organizers Joe Beswick and Deborah Hermanns about the ideas behind the programme. Joe explained, “We have a system which is breaking down and lots of people are looking to alternatives. Why has the rise of the far right not also been mirrored by the rise of a powerful, confident Left? Part of the answer, we believe, lies in a lack of political education.”
The issue isn’t a lack of training opportunities within existing unions. Today’s unions are generally pretty good at providing training programmes to help rank-and-file workers get more involved in union activity. The issue is a lack of what Joe calls “materialist education”, like courses on political economy or the history of the labour movement.
“While there are some great examples out there, it’s far from widely available. When I first joined a union, when I worked at Morrison’s, I was invited to loads of different courses, but there was nothing like this on offer. There was nowhere where I, as a worker, could find out about how the economy worked from a workers’ perspective. That’s what we wanted to change.”
The course is in part inspired by the success of a nationwide political education programme run in the Communication Workers of America Union. But another source of inspiration is the history of worker education in the UK. “In the twentieth century, the labour movement was a very, very powerful force in society”, Joe told me. “A large part of that came from a network of working class educational institutions. Some of that came from the trade unions. But working-class communities also had libraries and workers’ education centres.”
As my grandad would have attested, things look very different today. “For 40 years now, the trade union movement has been decimated, and so have these institutions of working-class education”, says Joe. “We’re trying to bring that back.”
Labour vs. Capital
So, how does it work?
“We thought it was important to link an analysis of the world with practical organizing training”, Deborah told me. “We didn’t want people to feel disempowered and learn how bad things are without coming away with the tools to change them.”
The first thing the course teaches is the last hundred years of economic and political history. “We try to explain how the economy has changed over time, and what that means for the working class. We want people to understand words like ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘austerity’”, says Deborah. “At the same time, we also tell the history of the trade union movement. We want them to come away with this idea that the working class is one of the two most powerful players in the world, and that they are part of that.”
The second part is teaching people how to organize on the basis of what they’ve learned. “We teach people how to have a really good conversation in the workplace”, Deborah explains. “That could be convincing someone to join the union, but it could also be to convince someone to get involved in a protest or something else.”
Through the whole course, we try to build up this sense of anger, and then give people the tools to go away and build their trade union membership, to start disputes in their workplace, to feel like they’re part of working-class history.
When the training is complete, participants collectively develop a plan to put their learnings into practice, and to grow the power and size of the movement. “They might say ‘I'm going to, in the next six weeks, recruit 10 members’, and then write down the names of the people they’re going to approach.”
The training also focuses on building relationships and helping workers from different backgrounds to understand each other. “When we reflect back at the end on what we’ve learned from the course and from each other, the atmosphere in the room is often quite emotional and quite powerful — sometimes there are even tears”, says Deborah. “It does create this feeling that everyone has been on this transformative journey together.”
Building Power
The programme started off through a close collaboration with the Bakers’ Union in November 2023. The results were really promising. “After we’d run four courses with the Bakers’ Union, with maybe 50 to 60 participants in total, those recruited around 300 new members.”
Since then, they’ve provided the training programme ten times to five different unions. They’re hoping to run more than ten courses this year.
I asked Joe and Deborah what they’re hoping to achieve moving forward. “The primary point of this is to make people feel powerful. We want people to think ‘I'm part of this long lineage of history of struggle, which has been very successful in the past.’ We don’t want to romanticize social democracy, but we also don’t want to step away from how impressive it was to go from the start of the twentieth century, when the working class in this country were really not treated as human beings, to victories like the NHS.”
In that sense, the course has been quite successful. “One of the participants from the Bakers’ Union got so engaged afterwards that he just spent days going from one Gregg’s to the next. I think he recruited about 50 people. There was also a young factory worker who came to the course. He was quite shy, hadn’t done anything like this before. Within a few months, he ended up being on the national executive of the Bakers’ Union.”
Another central goal is to recruit people who might otherwise be targets for the far right. “One of our target audiences is a union member who might be open to lots of the new weird and wacky fascist ideas and conspiracy theories knocking around at the moment”, says Joe.
“We confront this quite head-on in the course. We talk about how the primary tool that the ruling class uses to divide us nowadays is migrant hate. I think we can honestly say that our course has played a role in insulating people from some of these far-right narratives.”
Their priority is now to offer the course to as many unions as possible. Rather than going to the union leadership and trying to offer the course from the top down, they’re focusing on engaging ordinary members to push for the training to be delivered at their union branches.
“Our approach is based on the idea that you don’t remember a lot of the facts that you hear, but you do remember how you felt when you heard them. Through the whole course, we try to build up this sense of anger, and then give people the tools to go away and build their trade union membership, to start disputes in their workplace, to feel like they’re part of working-class history.”
If you are a union member in the UK and want to learn more about the programme, get in touch with Deborah Hermanns: deborah.hermanns@rosalux.org.