The Problem With Sharon Graham

Two years ago, I was a contributor on a podcast for the Workers Party of Britain on the issue of the trade unions and the Labour party. With me on the panel was Joti Brar, the then deputy leader of the Workers Party, Paul Embery, noted trade unionist and author of the book Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class and John Larkin, a WPB member and trade union activist from Liverpool. We discussed how the trade union movement had retreated into a comfort zone, that being organising predominantly in the public sector or public sector-adjacent areas of the economy.

The 1980s: A Decade of Defeat

The trade unions, having faced a heavy defeat in the mid-1980s with the ending of the Miners’ strike, began a long and as yet unending transition from organising in workplaces to servicing their memberships – instead of creating working class leaders in workplaces through education of members and having strong, vibrant and active democratic structures, they instead focussed on framing trade unions as a sort of insurance policy, that can be called upon when one gets into bother at work: A sort of workplace AA that can come and rescue you. They also abandoned the principle of building class consciousness and using class consciousness as a tool to organise workers in their workplaces and in their communities to resist any and all attacks made on them by the ruling class, replacing class politics with dead-ends like identity politics.

When talking about trade unions, it is extremely easy and entirely understandable to allow the conversation to become quite pessimistic in nature. There are so many things that are deeply wrong in the trade union movement, not least its leadership, who are as distant and detached from their memberships as they have ever been. They have become beset with petty bourgeois ideology such as identity politics, which have very little purchase in the working class and in fact serve to divide and atomise workers, not unite them. That said, I remember in the podcast I spoke on what I called the ‘green shoots of recovery’ appearing in the trade union movement with the election of Sharon Graham as General Secretary of Unite the Union in August 2021.

The Ascension of Sharon Graham

Sharon Graham ascended to the position of General Secretary of Unite having framed herself as the left candidate who was willing to bring change to the union and serve as an active advocate for her members in all the industries that Unite organise. Graham beat the ‘establishment’ candidate, Steve Turner, who had already served as one of Unite’s Assistant General Secretaries for three years and was considered the favourite to inherit the role from Len McCluskey, who had chosen to retire after over ten years as the head of the Labour party’s biggest trade union backer. In truth, Graham had been part of the bureaucratic layer of Unite for many years before she became General Secretary and wasn’t the rebellious outsider that her supporters had cast her as. She was every bit as inculcated in the ethos of a trade union bureaucrat as any of her rivals and understood very well the political culture which existed within Unite and its predecessor, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (colloquially known as the T&G).

Over two and a half years on from the election of Sharon Graham and with a General Election taking place on 4th July, the apparent green shoots of recovery that she signified when she became General Secretary seem to have withered and died. Anyone who has perused her social media output over the last few weeks would have seen Graham making bold statements about Labour having a chance to make real change and her union holding Labour’s ‘feet to the fire’ when it comes to workers’ rights. But the truth is that Labour is not a party for workers and never has been, and the most contemporary example of this is the merry dance that they led the trade unions on regarding the ‘New Deal’ for workers.

Unite and Their Fealty to Labour

At the end of May, it was revealed that Labour would abandon huge chunks of its ‘New Deal’ policy, including its previous pledge to make zero-hour contracts illegal, as well as softening the language on allowing workers to be undisturbed by their employers in their time off work. Rather than compelling employers to treat their employees more fairly, the ‘New Deal’ would instead encourage ‘constructive conversations’ and ‘working together’, empty words which amount to nothing for workers and nothing to worry about for the employers. Graham and Unite, reportedly apoplectic at the party rowing back on pledges that the trade union movement mistakenly believed that Labour had made to them, took to social media to decry this latest betrayal, yet as is almost always the case in these circumstances threatened to do absolutely nothing to bring Labour back into line.

The biggest single lever that the trade union movement has over the Labour party is to withdraw its funding. The amount of money that the trade union movement hands over to the Labour party is dwarfed by the amounts given by corporate interests and private individuals, but it still stands at a substantial £5.9m per year, which represents just over a quarter of all the party’s donations. If that were to be withdrawn, Labour would be severely stymied as a major bourgeois political force, yet Graham and her cohorts in the trade union bureaucracy have failed to even threaten to withdraw funding in order to leverage some concessions from them.

Some reactionary commentators would have you believe that the Labour party is dragged by the nose by the trade union ‘barons’ which bankroll it, yet with the movement only contributing about a quarter of its donations, not only does it not bankroll them, it doesn’t control them, either. The truth is that the relationship between the Labour Party and the trade union movement has always been a fractious one which has developed into a downright dysfunctional one in the last thirty years or so. It is Labour which controls the affiliated trade unions, which is partly why the British ruling class is so keen to see Labour come to power on 4th July: They will be much better able to make attacks on the working class than the Tories in their current state will, because Labour will have almost the entire trade union movement in their back pocket to divert working class resistance into ditches and dampen down workplace agitation as the Government leads the way in eroding their terms and conditions.

Why do the trade unions remain affiliated to Labour?

There are myriad reasons for the trade union movement’s continued and uncritical fealty to the Labour party, but we will focus on just three. The first is the belief that the trade union movement ‘gave birth’ to the Labour party – they created it, so the last thing that they would want to do is to walk away from the very thing they brought into existence. But this is an ahistorical assertion. The Labour party was brought into existence by a combination of the most privileged sections of the workforce (the Labour Aristocracy) and petty bourgeois organisations, including the Fabians, who were essentially liberal in outlook but also advocated for theories including eugenics.

The second reason is that in the trade union movement there are activists and bureaucrats who are exactly the same in terms of background and world outlook as the activists and bureaucrats in the Labour party. In essence they are the same people and as a cohort they are instantly transferable between the two entities, in fact history has shown that this is exactly what happens – bureaucrats from the trade union movement have frequently found themselves at similar levels within the Labour party and vice versa. It is this relationship, with the tentacles of the trade union movement and the Labour party so intertwined as to be seemingly impossible to disentangle, which traps trade unions in the manacles of Labour.

Which brings us to our third reason. There are many within the trade union movement who identify that maintaining the relationship with the Labour party is a surefire way to gain the opportunity to become a councillor or even an MP in the future. Sam Tarry, the now former MP for Ilford South, was previously the Political Officer for the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association, a small rail and travel union. I also know of other examples of people who have become more active in the trade union movement solely as a gateway to becoming a Labour MP.

Sharon Graham: The Archetypal Trade Union Bureaucrat

But having understood at least some of the reasons for the trade union movement’s servile relationship with the Labour party enduring despite the overwhelming evidence to support the two splitting up for good, we must ask ourselves why Sharon Graham has persisted with her failed and futile prodding of the party rather than leading a movement within her trade union to disaffiliate.

Sharon Graham is a trade union bureaucrat by trade and, whatever her proclamations on social media, is as committed to the continuing relationship with Labour as anyone who has led Unite or the T&G before her. To the likes of Sharon Graham, Unite remaining affiliated to Labour is completely immutable, despite the best efforts of groups in the wider membership to put the matter of disaffiliation in front of Unite’s policy conference. Sharon Graham, more than anything else, represents the interests of the layer of the trade union movement she comes from: She is a bureaucrat, the like of which is as common in Unite as it is in Unison, GMB, CWU or indeed the Labour party. Graham knows that she is there to act every bit as much in their interests as Unite’s rank-and-file members, which includes protecting and maintaining the osmotic relationship between the trade union and Labour bureaucracies.

Graham has become the latest in a long series of false dawns in the trade union movement: She arrived promising radical change and became a nothing more than a force for conservatism – for keeping things the way that they’ve always been.