The federation claims to have organised a phenomenal 2 million workers into 200 unions in barely a year. Of course, many of the new independent unions have their roots in the underground workers’ struggles throughout the past decade. And without clear ways to keep membership records, the total figure may be in doubt, but as an accurate figure emerges it will still be the single most impressive organising effort I’ve ever come across (And this is just one of the two new independent federations: the Egyptian Democratic Labour Congress (EDLC) claims to have signed up 214 unions with a seven figure combined membership also).

Legitimacy means everything to this nascent movement. So long denied a voice in the workplace and a voice in society, they are determined to be democratic and everywhere. “We bid farewell to land-lord run unions” of Mubarak, said Kamal Abou Aita, the acting President of EFITU.

And they did so in meticulous-style: each of the 264 delegates would vote, one-by-one, walking up onto the congress stage, showing their ID, filing out their ballot and putting it in a large glass box for the entire hall to see. “How powerful is that?” I thought after the first few votes. “How long will this take?” I thought after three hours and only 140 delegates in. More hours passed and I realised that these guys have pyramid-building patience and that I’d nodded off and drooled a bit.

But by then the party had set in. Us international guests filed some dead air time by firing off our best platitudes from the podium. I took the liberty to pass on your solidarity, and then joined in a few chants that I didn’t understand. By the time I left the congress in the wee hours the votes for the finance committee were only just rolling in.

What about the role of women in this new Egyptian union movement I hear you ask? Sure they were at the forefront of the revolution but early photos I saw of this new union movement showed a room full of men, straining the definition of middle-aged.

But today’s congress showed progress and promise. “It fills us with pride that the youth represent the vast majority of our union organisation, and that women play a pivotal role in our union,” said Abou Aita. And I could see that he wasn’t wrong.  Further, it was these delegates that moved an amendment to EFITU’s constitution to put in place a 25 per cent quota for women. No mean feat in this part of the world.

But the journey for women’s empowerment in Egypt will be a long one. Take this sobering passage from the ILO’s latest global employment trends report on Egypt, Libya and Tunisa (page 75):

The unemployment rate for young people in the region was 27.1 per cent in 2011, the rate for women stood at 19.0 per cent and young women faced an unemployment rate of 41.0 per cent.

Even where they have a job, “female workers and those in the private sector work in slave-like conditions”, concluded Kamal Abbass, the acting leader of the EDLC, after describing the extreme overtime, poverty wages and high levels of harassment they face. With British business sourcing from these export zones of “slave-like conditions”, we need to play our role.

The new unions are still very much workplace based, yet to make connections with those in the same sector, or region, but the links are emerging.  But workshop sessions throughout the week are pulling together key workers in the same sector, their respective global sectoral union federations helping with the speed-merger-dating.

And bizarrely, it got exciting: “We have formed 23 committees! And I’m on the fishing committee!”, yelled out one speaker to thunderous applause and more infectious chants that I didn’t understand. I wished I was on the fishing committee.

These workers are from workplaces across Egypt. I spoke with welders, justice ministry workers, bus drivers, teachers, farmers, postal workers, and nurses. Abou Aita also spoke proudly of the vulnerable – “peasants, casual workers, informal economy workers and street vendors” – swelling their ranks.

What impressed me greatly is that these folks aren’t waiting for some legislative silver bullet to deliver a union movement to them. They are going out there and making it under laws that haven’t changed since Hosni Mubarak owned the country.

And it’s tough. Most of them don’t have offices, and are barred from opening bank accounts. All of them face workplaces where the official stooge unions of the old regime are still collecting compulsory dues against the wishes of the workforce. To join a real union in Egypt you have to pay double.

Further, the new government may be dominated by Islamic parties that swept the recent elections, and a new law on trade union freedoms is yet to be enacted. But these won’t stop this chanting hall of workers whose time has come. They’ve already sunk their roots too deep.

Burma has long been a labour rights hellhole: rampant forced labour, banned unions and jails full of activists – all reasons why the EU has long maintained economic sanctions against the regime.

But things might be changing. A year ago, there were an estimated 54 trade unionist and labour activists behind bars. Now we think there are only half a dozen left.

Yet the tide of change has only reached so far. While it has been widely reported that the government has eased restrictions on trade unions, it hasn’t yet. Despite passing a Labour Organisations Law (And yes, let’s shorten that to “LOL”), in October last year, the government still hasn’t implemented it. Several unions have tried to register under the LOL but have been turned away by a government, that insiders say is desperately trying to form its own puppet unions.

The Federation of Trade Unions – Burma (FTUB), forced to operate in exile is still dubbed a terrorist organisation. For the new law to have any credibility this has to change.

According to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the LOL itself, written without any input from unions, is “…so ambiguously drafted in key places, so lacking in critical detail and so disconnected from surrounding law…” that its benefits to workers are in doubt. Further, the law gives government officials far too much power to decide which unions can register, what collective bargaining can actually occur and what strikes or other actions are permissible.

And even if the law was better drafted, it can easily be overridden by laws providing for “law and order, community peace and tranquillity,” according to the constitution drafted by the Generals. And old repressive decrees still remain in force. Nevertheless the law, if ever implemented, will be a positive step beyond the current blanket ban on trade union activity.

Yet the blackest mark on labour rights against the current government is it’s failure to end forced labour. The FTUB, and the Federation of Trade Unions – Kawthoolei (FTUK) have most recently documented in exhaustive detail, “the persistence of widespread forced labour practices by civil and military authorities in almost all of the country’s states and divisions” (see page 241). The government has faced decades of withering international criticism on this issue and knows exactly what it needs to do to eradicate it.

Without such action, the western businesses that are threatening to flood into Burma will almost certainly be benefitting from slave labour. And the TUC and our Burmese sister organisations will be the first to blow the whistle on them.

There are other areas urgently needing change. As the Burma Campaign UK have pointed out, a key test will be the upcoming budget of a government which spends “almost 20 times more on the military than it does on health.”

So there has been a some positive but limited progress on labour rights, and I personally think that this should be recognised. So let’s relax e.g. travel bans against those who have proven to be genuine reformers in the new government. But the key economic sanctions should stay in place until we have free and independent trade unions and the end of forced labour in the country.

Striking workers and supporters marching on 30 November. Photo: TUC

We’ve always said that the November 30 strike was a tremendous success. Once you take into account the number of workers taking part, the range of unions and occupations – some of whom had never struck before – the level of support across the country was brilliant.

Of course, some publications and commentators had decided even before the strike took place that it was a flop.

Well, today’s monthly employment figures from the Office for National Statistics provide a definitive rebuttal. They include the first set of industrial dispute statistics covering November and they show that the number of working days “lost” to disputes (the ONS’s language, not mine) in November was the highest for 20 years:

Whenever there’s large scale industrial action there will always be people who are eager to tell us that it was a failure. In every major dispute, a new generation of activists learns that these people don’t know as much as they pretend.

If you know anyone who was depressed by those articles, show them these figures. They might cheer them up.

Jesse Norman MP. Cartoon © Alex Hughes

If I was to tell you that today, a former employee of an industry that in 2009 received a bailout from the taxpayer amounting to over £1 TRILLION (and that still owes over £450 BILLION) was to move a motion attacking volunteer workplace union reps and demanding that unions should be forced to repay employers for the time they have negotiated that allows workplace reps to represent employees and negotiate with employers, you would think I’d taken leave of my senses.

But that’s exactly what is going to happen today when Jesse Norman MP, a former Barclays Investment banker stands up and moves a 10 Minute Rule Bill in the House of Commons.

As he moves the motion Mr Norman will no doubt quote the dodgy figures provided for him by the so-called Taxpayers Alliance.  If he’s consistent in pushing the spurious narrative of the Trade Union Reform Campaign, he’ll make no mention of the benefits that result from the work undertaken by workplace reps.

Next week, the TUC will publish the results of research that will prove that paid time off for union reps is an investment not a cost and will set out the significant benefits that accrue to employers and society. The research will also explain just why the figures used by Mr Norman and the TPA shouldn’t be taken seriously.  We’ll also be highlifghting via a series of case studies the work that reps do, not just in representing employees but working with employers.

For the time being, we can only watch on in amazement at Mr Norman’s outrageous chutzpah!

One of the more spurious yet central reasons why right wing front groups hate union reps getting paid time to represent employees and negotiate with employers is because they’ve convinced themselves that this frees up cash that unions (or at least the minority of them that affiliate) can then give to the Labour party.  And a union trying to influence public policy is the thing they hate the most – apart from unions themselves obviously!

But wait – what’s this? It seems that unions aren’t the only groups that give cash to political parties.

A recent analysis by the FT of official electoral commission data found out that one group of people has been particularly generous to the Conservative party.  Over the last 10 years hedge fund managers have donated more than £14 million to the party, including more than £2million since the general election.

Now you may think that this a bit dodgy given the Tories’ opposition to things such as a Robin Hood Tax and apparent support for lowering the 50p tax rate; but no, it’s ok.  That’s because when asked if such donations influence party and therefore government policy, Conservative HQ said;

“There is no question of individuals either influencing policy or gaining unfair advantage by virtue of their financial contributions.”

So there you have it. Anyone (and I’d assume any organisation) who makes a donation to a political party in the hope that it will buy influence is clearly wasting their money.

Maybe now the members of the aforementioned right wing front groups can stop accusing humble TUC staffers of “running money laundering operations for the Labour party” and chill out a bit.

Their latest opus sets out what it calls a ‘scandalous subsidy for unions’ conflating facilities and facility time for union reps in the public sector, with other types of support such as that provided through the Union Learning Fund – an initiative that has won widespread support from employers and Ministers alike.

Leaving aside the usual mistakes and/or deliberate omissions (the NFU is a ‘union’ apparently though I can confirm they have not indicated their official support for the TUC’s Day of action on November 30,  and there is no mention of the fact that in some cases unions make payments toward the costs of facilities and time-off arrangements) the report’s major flaw is that it purports to highlight the COSTS (allegedly £113m) of such support, but studiously avoids any mention of any BENEFITS that may accrue from such support.

Thus the traditional cost/benefit analysis’ that most organisations or individuals would use to assess whether or not something represented value for money, is replaced in the world of the TPA by a slightly more simplistic ‘cost – and only cost -analysis’.

But fear not. A rigorous cost/benefit analysis of public support for union facilities and facility time was undertaken by the Department for Business in 2007. This found that the benefits of union representation far outweighed the costs to the tax-payer (we’ve summarised this in the past).

In fact it showed that reps across the public and private sector give their employers and fellow employees about £115m of their own time every year (at 2007 prices) – which by neat coincidence slightly exceeds the £113m that the TPA claims unions receive in public support. But the benefits of union representation go way beyond the time that union reps put in of their own accord.

Across the public and private sector the analysis concluded that union reps accounted for:

• Savings to employers and the exchequer of between £22m – £43m as a result of reducing the number of Employment Tribunal cases;
• Benefits to society worth between £136m – £371m as a result of reducing working days lost due to workplace injury and;
• Benefits to society worth between £45m – £207m as a result of reducing work related illness.

In addition, using the same formulae used in the BERR report but with updated figures, it can reasonably be estimated that the work of union reps also results in;

• Overall productivity gains worth between £4bn to 12bn to the UK economy;
• Savings of at least £19 million as a result of reducing dismissals;
• Savings to employers of between £82m – £143m in recruitment costs as a result of reducing early exits.

One would have thought that an organisation that claims to want to SAVE the tax-payer money would therefore be rather in favour of unions. But instead Britain’s ‘independent grassroots campaign for lower taxes’ (no sniggering at the back) seems, as a point of principle, to object to government spending ANY money that may support trade union reps carrying out their duties, even if that money generates higher, real and measurable benefits for employers, the tax-payer and UK PLC as a whole. Hmmm.

This doesn’t really seem to make any sense at all. But then little about the TPA makes sense. One would have thought a significant grass-roots organisation could have mustered more than a few hundred people for its ‘Rally against the Debt’ just weeks after the TUC mobilised half a million to ‘March for the Alternative’. And for an organisation that talks a lot about the need for financial transparency, its own ‘Annual Review’ is somewhat opaque on its major sources of funding (recently raised here as well).

Of course the largest, most democratic organisations made up of grass-roots ‘tax-payers’ in the UK are actually trade unions – whose six million members in the public and private sector do pay tax, do use and value public services, and who are actively supporting union campaigns to make taxes fair. If that sounds like you, don’t despair – there is a Tax Payers Alliance for you as well!

• Physios union the CSP  voted 86%yes on a 66% turnout
• NHS radiographers in the SoR voted 84% yes on a 58% turnout
• Chiropodists union the SCP voted 85% with a 52% turnout
• Members of the FDA, which represents senior civil servants, voted 81% yes on a 54% turnout
• And professional and specialist civil servants union Prospect voted 75% yes, with a 52% turnout

There are more announcements to come, with ballots in Unite, GMB, NASUWT, Napo and more all set to close later this week.

And remember to check out www.pensionsjustice.org.uk for mythbusters, posters, leaflets and more about the campaign in the run-up to 30 November.

Over the next few days unions including UNITE, the GMB and a host of others will be announcing the results of their industrial action ballots over pensions.

As sure as night follows day– and as we saw after the UNISON ballot result  last week –right wing commentators and politicians will be out in force bleating loudly about ‘low turn-outs’ and ‘weak mandates’.

Here are five reasons why moans about turnouts and mandates are disingenuous:

1)    People in glasshouses…

Talk of mandates is a bit rich coming from a coalition government that failed to win a clear majority at the last election. Only 23.5% of the electorate voted for the Conservatives in May 2010. Only 1 in 7 voters cast a vote for the Liberal Democrats. Together both parties failed to secure a majority of those eligible to vote. And yet, despite this lack of a mandate, they are pushing through reforms that they either couldn’t even be bothered to put in their manifesto (‘no top down reform of the NHS’ anyone) or that directly contradict those that they did (tripling tuition fees).

2)    If governments really want to improve turnouts they should make it easier for people to vote

Insisting on people taking part in a home postal ballot is clunky and destroys any link between the issue at hand and the act of voting. When I vote for anything I like to be informed. I like to know what the issues are; what other people are saying about them; what the arguments for and against might be.

It would make sense if having had that discussion with my colleagues I could then cast my vote in the workplace, or maybe even on-line during my lunch-break  or at the end of my shift. But the legislation doesn’t allow you to do that. Instead you have to go home, wait for your ballot to arrive, and then make a trip to the Post Box.

Is it not a bit bizarre that in the 21^st century I can vote for my worst/favourite candidate on a reality TV show by phone, on-line or by text but that if I want to cast a vote in an industrial action ballot I have to do so by such a prescriptive, and for many people unintuitive, route.

If the government was serious about improving turnouts in industrial action ballots – rather than scoring political points – it would get rid of balloting ‘red-tape’ and allow people  to vote in a way that suits them and would also maximise turnout. One for the ‘Red Tape Challenge’ maybe? Don’t hold your breath.

3)    Not voting is not the same as voting no

The lazy and politically motivated assumption amongst many politicians and  media commentators is that if people don’t vote for industrial action, they are in effect voting against industrial action. Is that really the case? Is this the way we assess voting patterns more broadly? As I’ll set out later there are lots of reasons why people don’t vote – but the fact that they don’t vote, doesn’t mean that if they had they would have voted against taking industrial action.

Just for once I’d love to see a newspaper headline which said (using UNISON’s figures) ‘6.4% of union members vote NOT to take industrial action’. Again, don’t hold your breath.

4)    The ballots in the run up to November 30 are a huge exercise in democracy

We love democracy in this country. We especially love it when it takes place in other countries. Even the most right-wing newspapers go weak at the knees at the sight of people going to the polls for the first time in countries emerging from despotic regimes, and rightly so.

The exception to this enthusiasm for democracy appears to be industrial action ballots. But isn’t taking part in a collective act of democracy a good thing?

We should value the fact that – taking the Unison ballot result – over 300,000 people took part in a significant democratic event that for once had nothing to do with a TV show.  And even more so in an era where we are constantly told that people are disillusioned with politics and the democratic process in general.

Such participation runs totally at odds with the government’s narrative that society is broken and civic engagement is in decline.  And what a breath of fresh air the decision making processes of unions are – based on the will of hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, of ‘ordinary’ men and women – and not the whims of a cabinet-sized group of multi millionaires.

You know what I’m going to say next. Isn’t this just about the best example you can find of the ‘Big Society’ in action?!

5)    There are lots of reasons people don’t vote

In the UK we work on the basis that as well as having a right TO vote, people have a right NOT to vote.  This is underpinned by the belief that no inference should be taken from a decision not to vote.  These principles apply as equally to industrial action ballots as to those  processes by which we elect councillors and MPs.

The reasons why people don’t vote are many and complex. Sometimes they don’t think the issue is important enough to them. Sometimes they genuinely can’t make up their minds and decide to sit the vote out and see what others think.  And yes, sometimes people are just too damn lazy.

I’d add a couple of other reasons that I think are relevant to the current round of ballots.

In the last few months we’ve lost over 100,000 public sector jobs. Public sector workers are trying their best to cope with arbitrary pay freezes at a time when inflation is running at over 5% and the real costs of living for families – the petrol you put in your car, the food you buy in the supermarket, the clothes you buy your kids – are rising even faster than that.

If you work on the assumption – and I do – that a vote for industrial action is a big deal for our members even at the best of times (its a vote which costs you money), its perhaps not surprising that some people have hung back and decided not to vote.

Secondly, the stark reality is that many of our members are loath to do anything that means they can’t do their jobs – they care about their patients, their pupils, the members of the public who rely upon them. They take pride in the work and the services they deliver.

But they are having to balance that commitment and that loyalty, with the realisation that the government’s proposals on pensions will mean paying more, working longer and getting less. Its a tough call – and in the face of that call, I guess some people have effectively decided to defer their decision in the hope an agreed settlement can be reached.

In that they are not alone.

Unions have made clear all along that they are prepared to negotiate a fair pensions settlement. But what we can’t accept is imposed changes that will leave millions of public servant workers out of pocket, and will render pensions promises made over a lifetime of service meaningless.

I’m proud to be active in, and work for, a democratic movement. I’m glad that at the end of the day decisions about how what unions do, and how they are run, rest with the members.  And, I’m not too keen on taking lessons in democracy from those who when they are looking for votes promise one thing, and when elected deliver another.

Poster at Occupy LSX. Photo: victoriaintheworld

It’s not unusual when the TUC’s Leading Change group visits the US each year for the trip to coincide with a significant event that provides a context for the discussions we have.

In 2005 the US Labour movement had split just a few months before we arrived and in 2008 the trip came in the initial aftermath of the financial meltdown and just days before the election of Barack Obama. The context to our visit to Harvard University last week was provided by the Occupy Wall Street and other similar protests in what now amounts to around 900 cities across the globe.

All week, alongside the presentations and discussions on strategies for trade union revival, a debate took place on what, if anything, was the significance of the ‘Occupy’ protests for the anti cuts movement and trade unions and what it would be appropriate for unions to do to provide support.

Fortunately, in addition to the groups own individual and collective knowledge and experience some great minds from the US labor movement were on hand to inform the discussion.

In addition to our host, Elaine Bernard from the Harvard University Labor and Work Life Programme, we had David Weil of Boston University speaking about capacity and leverage; Kris Rondeau, pioneer of what’s been called “relational organising” and the lead organiser of the the campaign that successfully organised workers at Harvard University; Damon Silvers a senior advisor to the President of the AFL-CIO and Marshall Ganz who has devoted his life to organising, worked with Ceasar Chavez organising farm workers in the 60s, developed the Camp Obama activist training and who now teaches organising at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

The discussions took place all week both within and outside the formal sessions and what follows are the conclusions that I drew from them that I considered to be the most significant in relation to the work of unions in the UK as we fight the cuts and campaign for an alternative economy.

1. That the ‘Occupy’ protests are significant if only because they represent a nascent social movement for social justice.
2. That they have created an opportunity for all progressive movements to which trade unions can and must respond.
3. That whilst they have been successful in raising awareness they haven’t yet created a crisis of power. They (up to now at least) lack coherent demands and as such have no obvious target.
4. That unions must be respectful of this movement’s structures (or lack of) and that whilst our reaction so far has been better than to similar movements in the past, we must be careful not kill it with kindness.
5. That we can give practical and policy support and advice in three ways. Firstly, we have resources such as cash, buildings and people (such as our own activists) that the movement could use. Secondly we can assist in the process of bringing coherence to their demands whether these be in relation to taxation, regulation of banks and/or key issues such as unemployment and housing. And finally we can help in getting them to think about end games. Put simply, how does the campaign develop so that it can begin to apply real and effective pressure on those who can give them what they want?

Whilst I believe that unions have much to learn from the ‘Occupy’ movement and others such as UK Uncut, neither am I one of those trade unionists who believes that their development gives cause for us to enter into a period of self loathing where we question everything about ourselves.

I like the way that they are totally issue focused and the easy entry points for participation in their actions. But we have much to offer them not least, given that we’ve been around for a couple of hundred years, a few tips about sustainability.

I’ve said previously on these pages that the current period of crisis is the major organising moment for our generation of trade unionists. Our job, now increasingly working with the ‘Occupy’ protests and others is to turn the anger into hope and then effective and decisive action.

There is a common perception in the UK (and indeed across much of the industrialised world) that people are becoming less and less likely to engage in community and voluntary activity. In the UK – as Becky has vlogged – membership of both political parties and trade unions has fallen markedly in the last 3 decades. In the US, the phrase ‘bowling alone’ taken from Robert Putnam’s book of the same title has come to express the sense that society is becoming more and more fragmented; that the traditional informal and formal groupings that bind us together have become weaker and less prevalent; that our social ‘networks’ are increasingly based in the virtual world rather than the real one.

Politicians have seized upon this narrative. David Cameron has prescribed the Big society as the cure for ‘Broken Britain’ (stop sniggering at the back); the mainstream left have countered with the ‘Good Society’ and a clear strand of the Blue Labour project is to (re)create the ‘organizing structures and practices’ which can help people come together around local campaigns and shared political aspirations.

It’s this traditional narrative of ‘Broken Britain’, the sense that our social realm was in decline that Henry Hemming set out to write about. What he actually ended up writing was very different. Rather than charting the death of associational activity, ‘Together’ highlights what Hemming describes as ‘a nationwide surge of associational activity in Britain’.

Acknowledging that many of the larger traditional ‘associations – the WI, Rotary clubs, Working Men’s Clubs and, yes in many cases, unions – have experienced decline, Hemming charts an explosion in the number of clubs, associations,
community organisations and voluntary groups active across the UK.

But as well as charting the unheralded growth of associational behaviour in the UK, and the positive impact that has for individuals and society more broadly, ‘Together’ also offers practical insights for unions and others  as to what helps groups form, sustain themselves and be effective.

Those that Hemming identifies as ‘Machers’: people who ‘articulate what an association could be’; who co-ordinate their group and remind people of their responsibilities; who step back and give others the space to develop and shine; and who have a thick enough skin to take the flak when things go wrong, unions will readily identify as activists and potential reps. How we identify union ‘machers’ and ‘maintainers’ – those who help to sustain local organisations –  how  we support and develop them, are key questions for unions at a time when our rep base is declining and aging.

‘Together’ also helps highlight the important role that the internet can play in helping ‘real-life’ groups can coalesce and sustain themselves. On-line activity is not a substitute for meeting face to face, and basic human interaction but it can help groups keep in touch, to sustain their conversations between formal meetings and enrich the quality of those conversations and activity.

We have such a strong starting point – over  6 million members; 200,000 workplace reps; the ability to organise and mobilise when we really put our minds to it and work together (March 26, or the 35,000 we turned out at Conservative Party conference just 3 weekends ago).

Our organisational DNA is infused with the practical experience that by coming together, we are so much more than the sum of our parts.  ‘Together’ is a useful reminder that solidarity lives and breathes in many different ways, and in many different places. For every national demo, there are dozens, if not hundreds of small anti-cuts groups meeting in church halls, community centres and front-rooms (the False Economy web-site lists over 200 such anti-cuts groups). Knitting together these disparate but essential strands of our movement, is a an essential part of our wider campaign to stop this government’s programme of cuts and reforms in its track, and our longer term objective to build stronger, more effective unions.