LABOUR is now in power. The New Deal for Workers, which the CWU championed through the labour movement to secure it as TUC and then Labour policy, forms the basis of important employment rights legislation revoking recent Tory anti-union laws and advancing workers’ rights, though it doesn’t go as far as we want in some areas.

At the same time, the far right are on the rise, as we saw in the big vote for Reform UK at the election, racist rioting in August and mobilisations on our streets.

The trade union movement needs to act against growing racism and fascism. We need a strategy to defeat it.

Each union should commit to making their workplaces anti-racist workplaces. All unions already do some of this work. We should strengthen our commitment to anti-racist education.

But to address the root causes of the rise of the far right, we need a clear, positive agenda at the same time focused on what the movement is doing to raise living standards.

Working-class people of all races and religions are facing very similar struggles wherever they’re from. The root problem is the imbalance of power and wealth in Britain. The levels of inequality in our society are unsustainable and that is behind the wage stagnation that we’ve seen for years. 

We should make a much clearer connection between these issues. Our job is to unify the working class. That involves two things: expressing our anti-racist values and mobilising working-class people against racism, and setting out what we are going to do to address the common problems faced by the whole class. If you’re talking about one but not the other, then you’re not addressing the root of the problem.

That takes us back to the New Deal. It is about empowering workers. We’ve been pushing that as a union for seven or eight years and I’ve always been clear that there are elements to it which are about legislation, but there are elements that depend entirely on what unions do.

We’ve got some of the legislation. We need to see a bit more, particularly on collective rights, but there are opportunities to improve on that in the consultation, particularly on access to workplaces. And we can press for laws expanding on the New Deal in this parliament.

But there’s something we can do immediately that doesn’t rely on legislation: agree a common bargaining agenda across sectors of the economy.

Our successful motion to the TUC Congress this autumn called for a collective bargaining summit within six months, with the aim of delivering a practical plan to be approved at next year’s TUC and then implemented by unions.

We look at each sector of the economy, which unions operate in each, across public and private sectors. We agree on what the wages should be. We set minimum standards on hours, terms and conditions, including maternity pay, sick pay. 

And we commit to bargaining on all those points with all the companies that operate in the sector — and publicise the fact that the trade union movement is setting out common bargaining agendas to raise pay, terms and conditions for everyone doing that type of work.

If, by the way, we link this to the government’s attempts to raise taxes without hitting working-class people, that raises the whole area of bogus self-employment. Common bargaining agendas would put us in a stronger position to argue to the government that it should act on the single status of workers. You’re either a worker, or you’re self-employed.

A lot of companies abuse this status to place the burden of tax, holiday pay and so on onto the worker. 

If you look at Royal Mail, the government’s recent National Insurance increase will have a significant impact on its costs — it estimates something like £120-30 million a year on even a 2 per cent pay award, which is not to say we’d even agree to 2 per cent — but its competitors in the growing parcels market are using supposedly self-employed workers to deliver the parcels, and they don’t pay a penny extra.

So unless you address the single status of workers, you incentivise bogus self-employment, weight the tax burden on working people’s shoulders and the race to the bottom continues.

A common bargaining agenda puts pressure in the opposite direction and helps you organise workers in companies that are not organised. If every union comes together in each sector and works through a programme for the sector, we’re into the next stage of expanding sectoral collective bargaining and can press to cement that through legislation.

We need to co-operate across unions on this. I know there are areas of competitive recruitment, but we need to ask ourselves what this competition between unions is actually achieving in terms of growing the movement and raising pay and conditions across the workforce. Is there a better way forward? One where we all grow, and where we expand into sectors of the economy where unions are currently weak?

And if we’re serious when we say we want to stop the rise of the far right, we have to take that whole-workforce approach. We have to have a common strategy that embraces the whole working class.

Taking the next steps ourselves isn’t counterposed to pushing Labour to expand the new legislation — it’s part of a strategy to make Labour do so, especially in two key areas — collective bargaining, and the single status of worker.

That will place unions in the driving seat on what sectors of the economy look like. If you look at essential services from post and telecoms to water or transport you’ve had a model where business leaders don’t create wealth, whether or not they ever did: they extract it, running down the service in the process.

Business leaders award themselves ever higher pay packets “because they’re worth it,” but we need a mechanism that stops them getting more pay unless they can show they’ve delivered on quality, improved the services they are there to provide, and grown jobs.

Labour needs to understand that if you want to grow the economy, improve public services, or improve productivity, the key to it all is moving away from this failed business model and giving workers a real say in what these businesses look like.

Not phoney partnership models — and not just workers’ voices on the board. We need something structural that allows unions to influence what modernisation should look like and, crucially, gives workers ownership of the way technology is used in their work, rather than it being a tool for the employer checking on what each person is up to every minute or every day.

Reshaping the whole economy is key to defeating the far right. If we really believe this is a trade union issue, we have to influence as many people as we can, which means looking outwards: we need to be out there campaigning for our vision of how to address the problems in our society.

We can create the united agenda that brings working-class people together, an agenda about living standards, the economy, jobs: one that ensures economic growth actually benefits ordinary people, because at the moment it doesn’t.

Trade unions can map out that campaign, as we did for the New Deal — we might call it New Deal 2. That’s what the TUC’s collective bargaining summit can deliver, if we can all come together to deliver it.