If reports are to be believed, the country is now being run from a towering edifice in Bloomsbury. But when I meet the man who leads the trade union movement, he is keen to dispel the notion that he controls Britain.
“Rumours that the unions have somehow got the government in their pocket have been greatly exaggerated,” says Paul Nowak, who succeeded Frances O’Grady as general secretary of the Trades Union Congress in December 2022 (representing 48 unions and 5.5 million members).
History surrounds you in Congress House (a Grade II-listed building). Nowak’s office features wood panelling donated from trade unions around the world; the Cornish granite on the building’s façade was sourced from a variety of quarries to help relieve unemployment. The courtyard behind us features sculptor Jacob Epstein’s remarkable war memorial of a mother cradling her dead son.
After years of marginalisation, trade unions are now more central to British political life than they have been for decades. While Tony Blair was accused by former TUC head, John Monks, of treating the unions like “embarrassing elderly relatives”, Keir Starmer embraced them as social partners.
“You’re dealing with grown-ups,” says Nowak, 52, an amiable Scouser who first joined the GMB union while working as a 17-year-old at Asda. “When I started as general secretary, the first thing I said was that Rishi Sunak needed to sit down with me and other union leaders to try and resolve the disputes. But Sunak refused to meet me, Jeremy Hunt refused to meet me.
“This government has come in and the first thing they’ve done is resolved the disputes in rail and with the junior doctors and accepted in full the recommendations of the Pay Review bodies. That signals a much more positive set of relationships.”
Nowak, who meets regularly with Starmer and Rachel Reeves, adds: “It’s not about going in for beer and sandwiches or having a photo opportunity, it’s an engagement based on what we can do together to improve the lives of millions of working people”.
His first priority, on the eve of this year’s TUC Congress in Brighton, is ensuring that Labour delivers its Plan to Make Work Pay (previously known as the New Deal for Working People). This would see the government abolish most zero-hour contracts, ban “fire and rehire” and grant all workers full employment rights from day one.
“It would send a very clear signal across the public and private sectors that this government is serious,” says Nowak. “Boris Johnson, if you remember, promised a high-wage, high-skill economy but had no plan to actually get there.”
Nowak is also calling for the establishment of a Public Sector Workforce Commission to bring together unions, employers and independent experts to help repair “Britain’s broken public realm”.
Would he like to see public sector pay restored to its 2010 real-terms level? (As the PCS union and others are demanding.)
“Absolutely, in the face of the recruitment and retention crisis in our public services, we need to see pay restored. I’m not sure circling 2010 as an arbitrary place to start is the be all and end all because we had problems back then as well.
“But that’s absolutely the right aspiration for the government. How you get there and over what timescale is something that the commission we’re calling for could address.”
The political event that will define this autumn is Reeves’s first Budget on 30 October. Nowak has previously written in the New Statesman on the case for a wealth tax – a demand he repeats now Labour has taken office.
“I was in Spain a couple years ago talking to Spanish unions and the Spanish government about the solidarity tax that they’d introduced [on those worth more than €3m]. There hasn’t been an exodus of wealthy people.”
He also argues for equalising capital gains and income tax rates (so that the former is taxed up to 45 per cent rather than up to 28 per cent), a policy that Reeves has refused to rule out.
“I just think it’s crazy that the people who go out to work in a warehouse or a supermarket can pay a higher effective tax rate than someone who makes their income through shares or property. That to me just feels fundamentally unfair.”
Reeves’s decision to means-test winter fuel payments has prompted a revolt among Labour MPs and voters and Nowak calls for the government to offer further support in the Budget.
“There’s widespread concern about that and I know that the Chancellor’s got some hard decisions… How do you make sure that pensioners aren’t going to be going into the winter finding it difficult to pay those bills?
“I hope she looks in the Budget in the round about the support we can give to pensioners and to families, many of whom are in work, who are struggling to get by. We’ve got members who are scared stiff of losing their jobs because the cliff edge for Universal Credit is so extreme.”
Another issue preoccupying the union movement is Labour’s pledge to ban new North Sea oil and gas licences. Unite, the party’s biggest union donor, has called for “no ban without a plan” – a message that Nowak echoes.
“We all know we need to transition away from oil and gas. But the key thing is, what are you going to do to support those workers whose livelihoods depend on oil and gas? My dad worked in the North Sea in the 1980s, it’s not enough just to tell people ‘there’s going to be a just transition and in the long run there will be good green jobs going.’
“In places like Aberdeen you’ve got whole communities that have been built around these industries… You need to give people a concrete pathway from working in oil and gas to working in offshore wind or elsewhere. Don’t give people warm words. We’re still dealing with the impact of mismanaged industrial transition 40 years on from the closure of the pits.”
Starmer’s government has been accused of miserablism in recent weeks after the Prime Minister warned that “things will get worse before they get better”. Would Nowak like to hear a more hopeful message?
“I’m an Evertonian, so by nature I’m optimistic. Even though it’s a triumph of hope over experience,” he quips. “I understand exactly the message that Keir was trying to get across last week, it’s a sober assessment of the legacy the government has been bequeathed… I’m certainly optimistic and positive, you have to be. I’m a trade unionist because I want to change people’s lives for the better. I know it’s never going to be plain sailing with the Labour government or that we’re going to agree on everything, but fundamentally a Labour government is better for working people.”
For now, at least, the honeymoon between Labour and the unions is continuing. But stormier times lie ahead.
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