Nathan Street reports on the decisive win by the left candidate in Britain’s biggest union

The left candidate Andrea Egan has won the UNISON General Secretary elections. Egan decisively beat the incumbent Christina McAnea with 59.62% of the vote in a 2 candidate election. Unison, representing public sector workers, is the largest trade union in the country with over 1.4 million members, so this is an important victory. To be led by someone of the left committed to being an organising and campaigning union is a step forward for the union and the left generally.

There is often some unpredictability in union elections results, with a lot dependent on who actually turns out to vote. In the previous election in 2020, McAnea was elected General Secretary for the first time with 47.7% of the vote. Then the left vote was split between 3 candidates. Following that, the ‘Time for Real Change’ grouping of the left in Unison coalesced. This election is positive evidence for the left that unity and discipline around a single candidate delivers victory. Whilst the left vote mostly stood pat just coming in for a single candidate, McAnea’s votes cratered from 63,900 in 2020 to 39,353 votes now.

McAnea received the vast majority of nominations from upper echelons of the union – from the National Executive Council, 5 service groups, and 11 regional councils compared to Egan’s 2 service groups and 1 regional council nomination. But at a branch level the nominations between the two candidates were closer (270 branches for McAnea with 206 branches for Egan). This suggested there was a disjoint between the weight of the bureaucracy behind the incumbent and the branches and rank and file membership. This has been proved in the results. However, with turnout at only 7% it shows the work that needs to be done by Egan to engage, mobilise and transition a union that has for too long been structured around servicing instead of organising.

Egan is a social worker and lay member from Bolton as branch secretary of her local government Branch. In 2022 she was expelled from the labour party for retrospectively sharing articles of a since proscribed group. She campaigned on a platform of ending Unison’s subservience to the Starmer government, to ensure transition into an organising union, committed to taking a social worker’s wage instead of that of a general secretary, and to make the union more inclusive and internationalist. This victory is a decisive step for the left in the union, but still a lot of work remains at all levels to put the manifesto into practice. Central to this is the recognition of the transformative role the Palestine movement has played on progressive politics within Britain. This needs to be generalised into the fight against the far right and the restoration of pay justice in the public sector.