The Unite the Union leadership election ought to be a moment to take stock of its supposedly radical and militant leadership, argues Kevin Crane

‘BACK TO THE WORKPLACE’ proclaims the promotional material currently circulating online for the re-election campaign for Unite the Union’s general secretary Sharon Graham. Five years on from a win that was widely viewed as unexpected, this is very much a return to the same rhetoric she was leaning on back then: she poses as standing for a no-nonsense, worker-organising approach. Back in 2021, this appealed to a broad slice of that mass trade union’s diverse membership and significantly caused a split in Unite’s left-wing network. The outgoing leadership’s favoured candidate, Steve Turner, retained the official support of the Unite left and many branches. He lost, however, significant support to Graham, and this included sections of the hard left who believed that Graham’s counter-position of ‘politics’ to ‘organising’ could potentially see a turn towards greater workplace militancy and, possibly, the beginnings of a working-class fightback against austerity. Many of these voices on the left have resumed supporting her this time around… only in a lot of cases they are finding it difficult to sustain after half a decade of her leadership in practice, and particularly her interventions in the past half year.

For all the insistence that Graham and her allies have that they are strictly about the workplace, she has had lots to say about politics recently, none of which has been particularly leftwing. As the state and the political establishment of Britain are driving to massively increase spending on weapons and war- at the expensive of every other state function and public service – Graham has popped up in public again and again to agree that increased armaments manufacturing is exactly what the British working class needs. Far from expressing any kind of nuanced support for tipping public money into the arms trade (which only a relatively small portion of Unite’s highly varied membership work in) she has continually come out as an extreme voice in support of this transfer of cash from welfare to warfare. She has also yet to comment on the estimates by multiple economists that such a move will be extremely bad for the British job market, with potentially 10,000 or more workers facing the chop as the weapons business simply does not provide employment on the scale of public services and transport infrastructure.

Earlier this year she accused Keir Starmer of ‘dithering’ on defence spending hikes and even called for chancellor Rachel Reeves to be sacked for daring to suggest that Britain might need to at least consider the affordability of more missiles and killer drones. The closest Graham ever comes to moderating her support for the arms trade is expressing the hope that the government can pay for all these deadly toys without too many cuts to public services or social care, but never directly confronts the fact that almost all government, state and military officials have made it clear that they are explicitly intending to make such cuts in order to benefit the military.

If there is one thing the General Secretary cares about almost as much as arms companies, it is fossil fuel companies. Together with the leader of the GMB union, Gary Smith, Graham has been calling for renewed North Sea drilling ‘to benefit workers’. As with so many other institutions in our society, there is a certain black comedy in the trade unions taking utterly backward stances on the question of climate change just as the real horror of global warming is becoming inescapable to millions of people. It’s also pretty funny when you consider that the Unite and GMB leaderships frequently get involved in messy petty-political squabbles with each other and completely fail to establish unity between their members when engaged in actual industrial struggle. They can only put aside their differences to indulge in some soft climate denial and warmongering.

Graham’s staunchly right-wing positions on these things aren’t just propagandistic, though. She doesn’t think Unite being non-political should restrict her interventions but does apply that limitation to other members and activists. She has, for some years now, been criticising the Palestine movement on the grounds that they pose a (completely trumped-up) threat to her members and used this as grounds to distance Unite from the wider anti-war movement. She hasn’t stopped there, though. In the past few weeks she took the unprecedented step of banning members of the union’s community organising wing from participating in a demonstration outside parliament that combined the issues of high energy bills with climate change. Such an injunction would be a severe thing to do under any circumstances, but what made it outrageous was her official explanation for the ban: Greenpeace were a co-sponsor of the event, which is apparently an organisation that Unite is unable to compromise or cooperate with in any way! Now, I am not a Unite member, and it may be the case that at one of its conferences this was democratically agreed by elected delegates of the union without my being aware, but I suspect this has simply been an arbitrary restriction on activists’ liberty as part of a lurch towards more right-wing political positions.

Those elements of the radical, even revolutionary, left still backing Sharon Graham are now doing so largely on the back foot. The argument for continuing to support her essentially comes down to one thing only: her insistence that she represents a stronger organising strategy than any rival, or than her predecessors. The theory is that her ‘back to the workplace’ rhetoric represents an opening for more direct industrial struggle that could become a general increase in working class mobilisation against capitalist crisis. This would be a bit of a tricky thing to balance with her increasing closeness to corporations and the state, even if it was somewhat justified. What simplifies matters is that it isn’t justified. Graham’s big talk about the workplace has not proved to be a genuine step forward for Unite in particular or the labour movement in general. I would argue that what we have seen a is loss of the positive features of Unite’s previous administration, with few real gains, whatever is claimed with the use of un-checkable statistics and tough talk.

Union leaderships: neither one thing nor the other

Almost everyone on the left, barring some odd expressions of anarchism, supports the trade unions, but revolutionary socialists argue that this support shouldn’t be unthinking or uncritical. This differs from, say, leftwing social democrats, who regard the job of the left as to simply propagandise for the unions as the representation of the working class more broadly. Our position has always been to say that the unions are hugely important to the working class, but hey are not an uncomplicated expression of working-class interests and aspirations.

The trade union bureaucracy sits between groups of workers and employers, expressing workers’ rights but also having to accomplish compromise with the employers’ power. They are highly contradictory due to this complicated position. So while the unions can provide unity among workers within their own membership they can also become a source of division between their members and workers who are in other unions or none. They can help workers realise collective power against employers, through strikes and other forms of collective action, but the bureaucracy can also play a key role in disciplining workers and maintaining capitalist order at work.

The people who form the buffer in this clash between fundamental forces within our society are the full-time leaders and organisers for the unions. Historically, we call this group the ‘bureaucracy’. No matter how committed members of this bureaucracy are to the cause of the union’s membership – and they are frequently very ideologically committed – they are not themselves workers. They depend on the machinery and prestige of the union itself for their status, relevance and livelihood and that has an essential impact on how they operate. These factors have led to a long history of trade union leaders acting as much as a brake on workers’ struggle as to them being leaders of it.

The point of recognising this complication is understanding that while the character and intent of union leaderships does matter, it is not the most important condition in class struggle. An extreme example of this can be seen from the fortunes of the National Union of Mineworkers in the later 20th century: they won their greatest ever victory in 1972 when their general secretary was a conniving bastard who worked for MI5 and then suffered their greatest defeat a decade and a half later when they were led by a proud communist. The key difference was that in the early 1970s, the quality of workplace organisation was vastly better and the terrible union leadership they had couldn’t do anything to prevent the members from having an immensely effective struggle.

Having a more socialist leadership is not, therefore, the most important factor in winning industrial disputes. It can certainly help – but only where that leadership is facilitating the development among the at-work membership of the union (often called the ‘rank and file’) which requires strong union democracy, the development of capable and confident workplace representatives, and engagement in wider movements that can help inspire other workers. In many unions, however, leaders with such qualities have often been kept well clear of leadership positions by ruthless and well-organised right-wing factions (supposedly ‘moderates’, but there was nothing moderate about them) who ensured the most viciously pro-state and pro-establishment men got the jobs.

The hold of the traditional right in the union movement collapsed hard at the start of the 21st century, with a generation of much more radical figures suddenly rising to the top of key unions, much to the annoyance of the British establishment and Tony Blair’s New Labour government. This group included men like the transport-sector RMT’s Bob Crow. Mark Serwotka of the PCS civil-service union and Billy Hayes of the CWU postal workers union. As stated above, despite being far to the left of all their predecessors, they were still union leaders in the position of union leaders, so even a man with a reputation as militant as Crow would still act to wind down disputes if he felt workers were pushing too far, too fast. They did however, all create a generally far better landscape in which union reps could get out and organise, as well as proudly linking the unions to wider social movements, including opposing Tony Blair’s wars.  

Unite did not exist at this time, however the most important precursor to Unite – the Transport and General Workers Union (T&G) – was absolutely caught up in the wave of radicalisation. T&G general secretary Tony Woodley enthusiastically associated himself with the ‘awkward squad’ of left union leaders, as did the man who followed him and went on to establish Unite, Len McCluskey. When Sharon Graham’s supporters compare her favourably to the old guard, it’s Woodley and McCluskey they are talking about. And that’s where I think a combination of basic errors and silly falsehoods are creeping into their arguments.

Will the real left leadership please stand up?

Both Woodley and McCluskey were notable for being extremely enthusiastic for using the energy of mass social movements, like the anti-war and anti-fascist movements, to re-energise the trade unions. This was a big turnaround from the right-wing leaders that had preceded them. The creation of Unite the Union was the culmination of a series of mergers and consolidations of older unions that had been steadily losing members for twenty years thanks to neoliberalism and the Thatcherite attacks on workers’ rights. The thinking that had driven most of the leaders up to that point was essentially one of pure pessimism and therefore of seeking a managed decline for the unions as a whole. It was likely that part of the reason why GMB didn’t merge into Unite, and thus still exists, is that the left turn driven by the new T&G heads didn’t appeal to the solidly Blairite leadership that had managed to keep control of GMB, and which still runs it to this day.

After McCluskey took over and Unite was consolidated, he sought to extend the ties of the new organisation to wider left politics on two fronts: one was setting up Unite Community as an explicitly movement-based arm of the organisation, the other was reconnecting with the Labour Party to try and get more leftwing people into positions of influence within it. This actually went a lot further than many of us thought it would: it was important in getting Ed Miliband elected Labour leader in 2010, and then crucial to the project of Corbyn’s Labour leadership between 2015 and 2020. Unfortunately, as we all know, that became the focus of one of the bitterest political struggles of our times.

When McCluskey reached the end of his final spell as leader, then, it had been a rough couple of years. The trade union left, particularly within Unite, had exerted itself hard to make a socialist leadership of Labour work, been defeated by enemies from within and without, and there was a lot of demoralisation and exhaustion. That context makes a split in the union’s left network somewhat understandable, but it doesn’t legitimise false arguments.

Sharon Graham’s leadership campaign had the appearance of being insurgent by arguing that almost twenty years of overly political leadership had neglected the struggle of workers on the ground, something that she would work to reverse. It was messaging that many disparate groups could read into what they wanted to see. If you were on the radical left, either burned out by the experience of trying to work within Labour or never even having believed that was possible to begin with, you could choose to see this as a call-to-arms for more strikes and more direct confrontations with exploitative employers. If you were significantly to the right of that, you could see it as an opportunity to ditch leftist ideas about social movements and seek a return to the declinist, economic partnership strategies of the 1990s. Who’d be more right in that dichotomy, do we think?

The first 18 months of Graham’s new administration did see an industrial struggle upswing… but it had to, because it was by now 2022 and the cost-of-living crisis had begun between the shocks following COVID and the Ukraine war. Unite members were engaged in a lot of struggles, however this was also true of other large unions like GMB and Unison, as well as almost the entire rail workforce, the postal service and huge chunks of the health sector.

It is difficult to argue that Graham represented, throughout the early-decade strike wave, a particularly radical union leadership. To use one key area of local government workers as an example, Unite’s strategy around bin workers has not been any different, or any more successful than its rivals. Bin workers could, and should, have been an absolutely key front in resisting austerity in this country: they operate literally in every locality, and their work is completely essential to public health.

Due to the absurdities of both British local government and decades of privatisation, their employment terms and conditions are a messy patchwork of directly employed local government workers and outsourced contractors. Rather than fighting all these individually bankrupt employers in a series of incoherent battles, it would have made far more sense for bin workers across the country to have formed a common front and demanded central government take action to ensure a living wage for all. This would, however, have required the divisions imposed by the fact that bin workers are distributed across three unions – Unite, GMB and Unison – to be overcome. Unlike support for BAE Systems, Sharon Graham and Gary Smith were not able to find any way to overcome their differences to accomplish this.

The major unions’ tactics throughout the high-water mark of strike action was marked by  keenness to promote localised disputes, but reluctance to go for large scale, direct confrontations with the central government that actually imposes austerity. These disputes were also thoroughly limited to workplaces and sectors where the unions already had significant memberships. Graham has only gone ‘back to the workplaces’ Unite has already been to, and there hasn’t been one set-piece strike in an unorganised workplace. GMB has actually been more pro-active on this point, albeit with mixed success, trying to get established in Amazon warehouses.

Graham’s noisy proclamations on the defence and fossil fuel industries stand in stark contrast to key sectors where she would not be siding with some sort of big corporate partner. There were no demands from her to sack the chancellor when blast furnace steelworks were being shut down, for example. Nor did she make such an intervention more recently when the supposed arc-weld replacement that was meant to relieve job losses in South Wales was subjected to huge delays.

Ask yourself, what are you intervening for?

There are very solid criticisms that can be made from the left of both Tony Woodley’s and Len McCluskey’s terms as union leaders, and we do have to be honest that the overall health of the trade union movement in Britain is absolutely awful. In 2011, just as austerity measures were being imposed, the sheer weight and breadth of the trade union movement meant that the Trade Union Congress was able to get its constituent member organisations to put well over 250,000 people on the streets in protest. A similar call today would be unlikely to deliver that number.

The unions have significantly declined in numbers and influence, with collective bargains now being rather rare in private sector employment. The presence of unions in wider movements is also utterly diminished, with them having played little role in the mass Palestine movement and severely struggling with the growing appeal of the far right to their own members. Clearly things need to change.

There’s been a lot of writing about how to revitalise the trade union movement produced over the past couple of decades, much of which really boils down to the simple fact that the unions need capable reps and activists in workplaces to grow and build up workers’ confidence. It’s true that the social movement and left social-democratic approach of the previous Unite leaders had a limited success, but it’s not the case that the hard turn away from that approach has improved things. Sharon Graham does not have a great record of activating workers in the workplaces she says she champions. Her approach has been no less top-down than one would expect of any other conventional union leader and recent Unite disputes do not show signs of having brought through the ordinary day-to-day leadership that is so vital to genuine growth.

It is a poor argument to point to this or that shortcoming of previous leaders as a sufficient reason why the much better previous direction of the union during ‘doesn’t count’. As described previously, revolutionary socialists should expect any trade union leader to have limitations, and it is inherent in holding the position. Clearly there are concerns about financial wrongdoing in the recent past, but it is very unlikely that any one political tendency has a monopoly on that failure, and it still isn’t a solid political reason to support Sharon Graham in this election.

In some ways, the most absurd public statement by Graham was her declaration that letting Ed Miliband become chancellor under the incoming Andy Burnham government would be a ‘noose round the neck’ of the British economy. It’s not simply that the arms spending hikes she favours are clearly very bad for the socially useful economy. Nor is it just that Miliband is a previous leader of Labour, who really isn’t an especially radical leftist. The real rub that this is rhetoric intended to appeal to the right and big business and that it is coming from the present leader of the very union that helped Miliband originally to become party leader in 2010. Statements like that aren’t the words of someone who’s got a masterplan to lead radical working-class struggle to roll back the power of the billionaire oligarchy, they resemble nothing more than the defeatist attitudes of the old trade union right that preceded the ‘awkward squad’.

The offering here is a completely backward-looking set of positions, and a left supporting them will simply squander its own credibility. Regarding the election, it is far wiser to back the challenger Simon Dubbins, who is identified with the previous leadership, but at least promises something of a return to a positive engagement with left politics and wider social movements. Much more importantly than the election, however, is for the left to be making engagement in the movements actually happen by doing some of the following:

• Start a proper debate about why the economy is working so badly for working class, not one that dances around key political questions
• Put the arguments that the solution to be to oppose the drive to war but also to champion a shift to post-carbon economy as a better way to both protect and create jobs
• Reconnect trade union members with international solidarity, anti-fascist and anti-war movements