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The same philanthropic model guides living wage campaigns at UK universities today. Academics, students and union officials have pressured university managers to boost pay for low-wage workers on campus, using tactics from media campaigns to artistic interventions that have often proved effective.

Trade Unions: Resurgence or Demise?

As with the Domestic Workers Alliance, however, they tend to work over the heads of the workers who stand to benefit from the campaign, and who must defend those gains from future attacks by university management. Unless that changes so that member-led democracy replaces charity as the guiding principle of the movement, these campaigns and alliances will fail in the longer term. If craft unionism is a dead end and philanthropic unions suffer from a deficit of democracy, then what of industrial unionism?

The broad, radical thrust of that tradition has not energised the mainstream of the unions for some time, but its spirit still lives on. Its legislative victories in city after city from New York to Seattle prove to previously passive workers that strikes and mobilisations can work.

Trade Unions: Resurgence or Demise?

The same spirit animates a growing number of trade unionists in Britain. Best of all, new unions have taken up the task of organizing precarious workers where the existing ones have failed. Working with food delivery workers at Deliveroo and migrant cleaners and service workers at several London universities, they rely on direct action by an active and engaged membership to force concessions from employers. To promote unity between Spanish-speaking and English-speaking members they began English-Spanish language exchanges. And they have strengthened the skills, capacities and militancy of their members on the picket lines and in the wider community.

At institutions from the School of Oriental and African Studies to the London School of Economics, they have waged successful strikes to secure better sick pay and holiday pay, and to end the outsourcing of their jobs.


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In April their struggle against outsourcing moved to cleaners, security guards and other workers employed by agencies for the central administration of the University of London. Their struggles have set an example for other trade unionists to follow. It does involve a fight for the real control of those unions by their members—a struggle as old as the labour movement itself. These fights go on. The President of the Teamsters, James P.

A day strike in February and March has transformed my own union, the University and College Union UCU , whose national leadership faced harsh criticism for its apparent willingness to end the strike on any conceivable terms. UCU leaders can now no longer rely on a rubber stamp from an inert membership, and the possibilities for a campaign by and for casual academic workers have never been greater.

The exact form that unions take as organizations is less important than the spirit that guides them. Craft unionism means further decline and irrelevance. Philanthropic unionism means eternal dependence on fickle liberals. Inclusive, industrial unionism remains the only tradition with real democratic potential. It alone has the wide vision needed to organise the millions of precarious workers alongside those with greater leverage and bargaining power.

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The Future of Trade Unions in Britain

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