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Membership now
recovered from Thatcher years: USDAW's organising efforts bear fruit The long decline in trade union membership has been “well and truly” reversed, says USDAW general secretary Bill Connor. For the first time in a decade, the union membership has topped 314,000, which Connor describes as a “significant milestone” in the union’s recovery.
Bill Connor (left), here with AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, has a good reason to be pleased with his union's membership development. Much effort has been put by USDAW into organising and organisation development, with good results. For the first time, numbers have passed the 314,000 mark. At home in the United States, John Sweeney is engaged in a hard trade union struggle, helping UNI Commerce affiliate UFCW defend supermarket workers' rights. “We have well and truly reversed the haemorrhage of membership which began with Thatcher’s vicious anti-trade union laws in the 80s, culminating in the early 90s with Major introducing legislation that required unions to gain regular re-authorisation from members who paid their contributions by deductions from wages,” he said. “It was their clear intention to cripple and destroy the trade union movement, but we have survived to see Thatcherite policies consigned to the dustbin of history and the Tories banished to the political wilderness. Labour government improved the climate “The election of a Labour Government clearly improved the climate for trade unions and I believe that during Tony Blair’s second term we will go from strength to strength. We can now be confident of exceeding our recruitment target of 85,000 new members this year and realistically set our sights on the half-million mark.” Bill Connor paid tribute to the recruitment efforts of the union’s 6,500 shop stewards and the full-time organising staff, backed by the recent influx of recruitment and development officers and TUC Academy trainees.
In Britain's largest retail company, USDAW has a large membership and a well established social dialogue with management. The union has also given active support to UNI Commerce affiliates in other countries, seeking to organise in Tesco and to gain recognition by management. Beside an upturn in membership, Usdaw has signed in recent years 40 new negotiating agreements and consolidated relationships with the likes of Tesco, the nation’s largest private employer, where nearly 100,000 members enjoy the benefits of a partnership agreement. “We and the Government believe partnerships are the way forward in industrial relations, replacing confrontation and disagreement with a network of consultation and agreement at every level of a company,” explained Mr Connor |
