Photo: Ian Allinson ©Steve Eason”
Ian Allinson is a trade unionist and socialist activist in Unite, which is among the two biggest unions in Britain, with some 1.4 Million members. In 2017, he stood as the rank and file candidate for union General Secretary, coming third with 17,143 votes.
He spoke to voice.wales about the current election, the political role of trade unions and the importance of grassroots union organisation.
voice.wales
Hi Ian, thanks for talking to us. First off, tell us a bit about yourself.
Ian Allinson
Yeah, I was a workplace activist for decades and on the Amicus and then Unite executive for 10 years, and I stood as a rank and file candidate for unite General Secretary in the last election. I’m currently heavily involved with Manchester Trades Council.
voice
Okay, thanks. Why did you decide to stand as a candidate for Unite General Secretary in 2017?
Ian
Because I was concerned that the debate was going to get pulled to the right, as an argument between Len McCluskey, the incumbent, and Gerrard Coyne, who was a right wing candidate. Both were senior officers in the union.
And really, I felt that the union wasn’t moving forward in the way it needed to. With the scale of attacks workers were facing, the union just wasn’t responding as forcefully and effectively as it should.
And I thought there were a lot of arguments that needed to be put into the debate about, you know, empowering the members themselves, but also around political issues. Len McCluskey had come out with some quite weak comments around migration that I thought pandered to some of the right wing arguments too much. The need for a just transition around climate, which is obviously going to affect nearly every worker’s job in one way or another, was also important.
voice
And obviously, at the moment, there’s an election going on for Unite General Secretary, and there’s no rank and file candidate, but there’s three different candidates on the left: Howard Beckett, Sharon Graham, and Steve Turner. What are your thoughts on the current election?
Ian
Well, I mean, again, there’s the clear right wing candidate: Gerard Coyne. I think the force behind him is a lot weaker than it was last time, because last time, getting him in was seen by the Labour right as a way of attacking Jeremy Corbyn. So there was a lot of support from outside of Unite, you know, financial and propaganda support in the press and so on, trying to make sure that he did well. That doesn’t seem to be the case this time in the same way.
Then you’ve got Steve Turner. I should say all of the other three candidates are also senior officers in Unite and have been part of the leadership of the union for years. So in a sense, they’re all continuity candidates, but there are differences between them.
So Steve Turner narrowly won the nomination of the United Left, which is the main faction in Unite, the one that supported Len McCluskey. In some ways he’s seen as possibly, even more than the others, as the kind of continuity candidate. He doesn’t seem to be arguing for any particular change in how the union operates.
Howard Beckett also stood to try to get the support of the United Left, and narrowly lost, but stood anyway, and that kind of broke that faction into parts.
His candidacy is very heavily based on his kind of political positions. So he’s one of the main Unite representatives on the Labour Party’s National Executive. And he’s on the face of it coming out with some good statements around lots of political issues, which is really positive. But in terms of the industrial side of things, which obviously is the core of what the union’s about, he seems to combine, you know, some good support for strikes, protests and so on, with a kind of servicing model, which is the idea of the union as a third party that provides services to members rather than really having much of a feel for worker’s own collective action as being at the core of things on a day to day basis. So from my point of view, I think he’s quite weak on the industrial side.
And then you’ve got Sharon Graham, who’s currently the head of organising and leverage, who’s campaign is kind of the inverse of that. So very strong on the need to build more workplace power and be more effective, and she’s putting some good things out about allocating resources into industrial sectors and to equality strands.
But she’s been very noticeably silent on all the more political issues facing members. So she’s said, as far as I can see, nothing on Palestine, on climate, Kill the Bill, you know, all the kind of current issues. And she seems to be saying that, ‘well it’s up to members to decide what position they take on things.’ But we’ve already taken a position on Palestine: in favour of supporting the Palestinians and supporting BDS and so on.
So that seems very weak. And it’s quite worrying, because if you had somebody in the leadership, you expect them to not just passively follow whatever groups of members happened to be saying, but to actually argue for things and try to give a lead in some way. So that’s quite worrying, particularly when there’s some difficult issues, climate and arms diversification are good examples, where it’s very easy for groups of workers to pursue quite kind of sectional short term interests, against the interests of the class as a whole.
voice
And obviously there’s now a fierce debate about the Unite election and who specifically should be the single candidate on the left to take on Gerard Coyne, after all three left candidates got on the ballot. You yourself were accused of splitting the vote when you stood, what’s your response to that and your thoughts on the current situation?
Ian
Yeah, I was accused of splitting the vote. And I think, you know, there’s obviously a genuine worry there. But I think it also ignores the fact that the turnout in these elections is just appalling. And having a range of candidates who actually stand for something can help increase the turnout, and also give an alternative outlet for people who might want to vote against the incumbent. So I think it was a lot more complicated than people made out.
But I also think that the hypocrisy of some of those arguments was exposed when the United Left, which was the main faction in Unite and that backed Len McCluskey, having talked so much about splitting the vote, then organised to vote down proposals to move the General Secretary elections away from being first past the post in order to avoid that situation again. They were determined to keep it as first past the post, because they thought as a united faction that gave them an advantage over other candidates. Obviously, that’s come back to haunt them now, because the United Left is in effect split three ways. What’s left of United Left are backing Steve Turner, a significant chunk are backing Howard Beckett, who came close to Steve in the United Left hustings, and another significant chunk are backing Sharon Graham.
So that really has come back to haunt them. And I hope we’ll fix that the next time we have the opportunity, so that we can have a more serious debate about what sort of union we need, rather than this kind of very inward looking electoral speculation and horse trading that goes on with the first past the post system.
In terms of the situation now, my understanding is that the candidates are meeting and talking about what will happen and obviously to a significant extent that’s outside their control. And when you’ve got three senior officers of the union all claiming to be the left candidate, it seems likely that people may be thinking about their future careers as well as about the election. That process I think, is made more difficult by the fact that we know from from previous elections that with turnout so low, and members so disconnected from the union structures and the branches and workplaces that do the nominations , there’s a very weak correlation between nominations and votes.
I mean McCluskey got many, many times more nominations than Coyne and yet was run close to him on the voting. So people are rightly worried about Gerrard Coyne, you know, he would represent a significant shift to the right in the union and create a lot of problems for members in terms of what strategy he’d pursue industrially as well as politically.
So people are right to be concerned about that and wanting to make sure that he is defeated. How that will pan out in terms of candidates pulling out, I guess we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of those meetings.
voice
There was something you touched on at the end of your previous point I just wanted to pick up on. You said about workers pursuing their own sectional interest above the class as a whole. Obviously that comes into the question of the environment, but also when you’ve got workers the arms industry.
In Airbus in North Wales, I was told recently that they have a big connection to the Israeli military and also targeting migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean. And Unite in Wales has done a lot to keep those jobs and champion the industry. What’s your response to union officials, and even workers, who want to support the arms industry because it provides jobs?
Ian
Well there’s always been two visions of trade unionism, I suppose. You’ve got one which is workers collectively organising to defend what they’ve got and maybe try and advance a little bit, but that inevitably then reflects who’s a member today, and can easily fall into being quite short term and sectional.
And then you’ve got another vision of trade unionism, which is much more about social justice, and the class as a whole. And historically, you can see both of those currents within what’s now Unite. Parts of the union came from a kind of craft union tradition that at its worst fought to keep women out of the workforce and fought to prevent so-called less skilled people being brought into the industry and so on, rather than fighting for everybody’s interests.
At the other end, you have new unionism at the end of the 19th century, the mass unionisation of what were called unskilled workers, but it’s probably better to call them easier to replace workers. This is where people understood that if they wanted to make advances, they had to include all workers who could potentially be used to take their jobs and replace their labour.
So this type of unionism tended to take on much more of a class character and a much broader kind of political agenda as well. So this isn’t a new debate, this is something that goes back centuries.
And socialists, in my view, have to take the position of the class as a whole and our long term interests. And that means trying to show people how, you know, taking that sectional short term interest just doesn’t deliver even on its own terms.
I mean, if you take the defence industry, which you mentioned, unions in defence have, by and large, adopted a partnership approach with their employers to try to lobby for more funding for the arms industry. And they’ve seen hundreds of thousands of jobs go while doing that and failed to actually make a case, and win alternative employment, and we’ve seen devastation to communities.
And we’re clearly seeing people now nervous about the same process with lots of jobs being lost in the North Sea. And at least some of the workers around the North Sea oil industry recognise that they need to be fighting for a just transition to a decarbonised economy, rather than imagining that they can hold on to jobs that are already disappearing.
voice
Thanks, just moving on to the question of the rank and file, or grassroots union organisation, which you alluded to there. Why is it important for groups of workers in unions, who maybe don’t have senior positions within the union, to get organised in the face of the attacks we’re seeing from employers today?
Ian
Well the fundamental division in society is between bosses and workers, but once we start organising into unions, for a union to function and survive on any scale, for any length of time, you need people employed by the union to operate it and to allow it to function in a sustained and reliable way.
And that creates a layer of people whose main day to day function is acting as mediators between workers and employers, trying to bargain over the terms of our exploitation if you like.
And so there tends to be, over time, a pressure on those people. And the higher up you go, the greater that pressure is not to forcefully pursue the interests of the workers, but to try to find a deal. So they’re more interested in getting a deal done than they are on what the content of the deal is, because after all they don’t have to work under the terms of that deal. It’s not their jobs on the line in the way it is for the workers themselves.
So historically, there have often been tensions between workers, union members if you like, and the officers of the union, particularly when there’s conflict with workers and bosses.
Most of the time, most union officers are sort of more left wing and radical than most workers and members are. But when groups of workers start to fight back, they find out quite quickly who their friends and enemies are. They learn rapidly about the struggle and tend to then find that they’ve left the officers behind who have more entrenched positions and are a balancing between, at any one time, the minority of workers who are kind of actively in struggle, and the majority who might not be.
So you get this conflict emerging within the union as well as between workers and bosses.
And in my view, the most effective kind of way to pursue that in worker’s favour is for rank and file workers to organise in unions, of course, but also to organise independently so that they can act for themselves and also put pressure on union officials to act in their interests when they’re failing to do so.
voice
When you say organise independently, do you mean within their unions or with groups of workers in other unions or industries?
Ian
Well even at a workplace level, just the capacity of workers to take decisions and take action without needing to go through and get the approval of the official union structure. You know, that’s kind of step one.
In many industries, there’s more than one union so it can involve workers organising across union boundaries. It means building networks so that people can deliver solidarity to each other, whether or not the union apparatus wants that.
And you can see that that’s particularly important in the context we’ve got today with the anti union laws, where the way they operate is to make the union liable if workers take action that doesn’t fit within the very, very restrictive anti-union legislation.
So the people who work for the union are understandably very protective of its funds and its buildings and its apparatus, so very reluctant to see action which challenges or breaks the anti-union legislation. So, when such action happens it is overwhelmingly organised by workers outside the official union structures.
So in construction, for example, where work is so volatile, it’s almost impossible for workers to go through the formal ballot process required by the law to strike. It’s much more common for people just to walk off the job unofficially without union sanction, and try to get results that way. Which after all, is what people have had to do for hundreds of years. Ultimately, our main protection is in sticking together, not the law.
voice
Just turning onto more recent issues, I was wondering if you could explain a little bit about the recent fire and rehire dispute on Manchester busses, and about how some of that stuff you said about the rank and file, and the union bureaucracy, came into play?
Ian A
Well fire and rehire, or what’s more formally known dismissal and re-engagement, is where an employer tells workers they’re going to be dismissed unless they accept worse terms and conditions. And then ultimately, if they have to, they do actually dismiss them and then offer them re-employment on those worse terms and conditions, which is really putting a gun to workers heads and makes the contract they’ve got pretty much meaningless.
And that’s been rife during the pandemic. I mean, it’s something that’s gone on for years but the TUC estimates that since the start of the pandemic, around 10% of workers in the UK have been subject to fire and rehire, which is absolutely appalling.
And you can see the scale of the employers offensive. And sadly, whilst there’s been some notable fightbacks, there’s been too few instances of workers standing up to those threats and defending their terms and conditions.
Here in Manchester, one of the main bus companies Go-Ahead, which is across quite a lot of England and internationally as well, they have a subsidiary Go-Northwest that runs quite a chunk of the bus services in Greater Manchester.
And they implemented fire and rehire to try to push through a host of changes to cut pay, cut sick pay, longer hours, and also, and in some ways, perhaps more fundamentally, to try to break the ability of the union to be consulted and bargain over future changes.
So it’s really quite a major attack. And the workers voted overwhelmingly to strike over that. And they ended up taking 12 weeks of continuous strike action, which is exceptional these days, to take continuous action for so long. And they did succeed in getting a deal.
They got fire and rehire dropped, they got the company, the Go-Ahead Group, to promise never to use fire and rehire again. And they pushed back on most of the attacks on their terms and conditions, but they did make concessions in a few areas. So overall, a really important win to defeat fire and rehire and one that should be inspiring workers everywhere.
In terms of how the relationship with the rank and file and the bureaucracy played out through that, I guess from my point of view, I think the action could have been resolved much more swiftly and possibly on better terms if a slightly different course of action had been taken at several stages.
And one is that Unite did deploy what’s called the leverage campaign, which means applying indirect pressure on the employer and on people who are key decision makers in that, but they were very, very late to deploy that.
And that was because they got bogged down in talks in Acas that really didn’t seem to be going anywhere. So it was a long time before they deployed that. So that didn’t help. And then perhaps more fundamentally, the other thing that could have really accelerated the resolution and put the workers in a stronger position was spreading the action beyond the one bus garage that was directly involved, when clearly the dispute was costing Go-Ahead an absolute fortune.
They were paying subcontractor coach companies to run scab services and they were spending a fortune on that. So this must have been authorised at group level. And yet, if anything, it seems like strikers were discouraged from visiting other bus garages to try to talk to the workers there about what action they could take.
And certainly, even locally in Manchester, where there are other bus companies running other bus depots, it would have put enormous pressure on Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester Mayor, if other bus garages had started to take action as well.
Now, with the anti union laws, none of those other drivers could lawfully have taken action in support of the Queen’s road garage that was out on strike. But it would have been incredibly effective for them to take action over their own issues, at a time when Go-Ahead was so vulnerable. And certainly when the capacity to provide scab services in Manchester was exhausted already by a strike at one garage, if other garages had come out over their own issues, then the pressure on Andy Burnham to step in and say that any company engaged in fire and rehire would not get those contracts in the future would have been absolutely enormous.
voice
That’s really interesting. I mean, what do you think the state of play is when it comes to strikes in general. Do you think there’s an uptick in action, or is that just wishful thinking on the left?
Ian A
I think it depends how you measure it. When you look at the strike statistics, people often focus on the number of days lost, as they call it in the stats, to strikes. And those figures get very heavily influenced by typically, big public sector strikes where you’ve got people across the whole of England or the whole of Britain or whatever involved, and those can involve hundreds of thousands, or even millions of workers.
And that tends to distort the figures. And we haven’t seen a huge amount of action in the public sector. There’s been bits of action in schools over Covid and so on, and also in higher education as well. But the public sector hasn’t seen any of the really huge strikes during the pandemic. What we have seen, though, I think, is increasingly serious disputes in parts of the private sector.
So a number of strikes have taken place or been threatened, and that I think is being caused by the scale of the employers offensive. So employers are either genuinely being affected by the pandemic and trying to pass the cost on to their workers, or are seeing the pandemic as something that weakens workers’ bargaining power by making them more afraid of losing their jobs, so they’re taking the opportunity to try to drive down pay and conditions while the labour market is in a bad state.
I think another factor is that inflation is low. So for many years, employers have been able to drive down their costs simply by holding pay rises down below inflation in many industries, but with inflation so low and the economy in a bad state employers seem to be in more of a hurry so they’re resorting to fire and rehire, and that’s a red rag to a bull to a lot of workers.
Workers can see how unfair that is and how the law allows that, but doesn’t allow workers to take the kind of effective action that will make it easy to defeat.
voice
And just finally, we’ve seen some incredibly political and international action by workers recently, both in Palestine with a general strike and in terms of dockers refusing to load Israeli arms cargo. How do you think we argue for workers in Britain to take action in solidarity around more political issues?
Ian A
I think part of it is about starting with things you can win. So, in the case of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, in support of the Palestinians, there’s lots of things people can do, perhaps on a smaller scale. How many unions at workplace level have approached their employer and asked them about their procurement policies, in terms of what goods and services they buy from Israeli companies? It might be that food in the canteen, it might be some IT supplies, it could be any manner of things. But there are demands around those issues, which are not life threatening to the employer, but where people could win change and where they could do some campaigning and organising around.
And it’s notable. I think there’s been a tradition for some years of more unions sending delegations to Palestine to see for themselves what conditions are like. And I think, wherever people manage to do that, you get people coming back with an incredible commitment, and understanding of the situation, and being able to talk to other workers about why this is an issue they should care about in a much more human way, rather than it seeming like a very distant issue. So I think that’s something that we should be trying to encourage.
But I do think we’re seeing a general shift towards being much more supportive of BDS. And we just need to make sure that doesn’t stay at a policy level and that actually gets discussed at a workplace level.
That’s the practical steps people can take. Now in terms of the bigger ticket items like stopping the arm supplies, I attended one of the protests at Elbit the other week, in Oldham. It’s the company that makes most of the drones the Israeli military uses. There’s been regular protests outside their factories for years. Clearly that’s really ramping up, there were occupations in two of the factories last week in Leicester and Tamworth. The demonstration in Oldham was huge, much bigger than we’ve ever seen before.
So clearly the pressure’s increasing, but not all of these firms are well unionised in the first place. That makes it much more difficult than the stories like Nae Pasaran, when workers in Scotland took action at Rolls Royce against jet engines being sent to Pinochet’s Chile.
So the fact that worker organisation is much weaker than it was in the 70s makes it that much harder I think to take action from the inside, but we have to keep arguing for it. On the docks, the dockers claim that one of the barriers is they’re not allowed to know, for security reasons, what is in different cargoes they’re shipping. So that makes it more difficult in the UK to block cargoes than some other countries. But I’m sure if the will was there, people could be following cargoes coming from different suppliers for the arms shipments and trying to disrupt them.
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