Free Associations

On Friday I woke up and for a moment felt a bit smug. My column Battles on the NHS Frontline had finished and I was in all honesty relieved to have a few days off from the Siberian wind that seems to inhabit my soul since I’ve been writing about the NHS. Back to the warm-bath professional safety of Higher Education. But as I switched on the radio I realised that the public sector battle lines had swiftly moved on from health to higher education with the announcement of a new green paper on ‘teaching excellence’. Apparently lecturers need a Teaching Excellence Framework with tough targets and measured by student satisfaction surveys, in order to teach most excellently. Appearing to learn nothing from the Research Excellence Framework which has installed a culture of gaming into universities. Even by my shabby quantitative estimates if you really want to measure teaching excellence by how students feel then just give them all firsts and free booze. Simples. My head starts to hurt and I cease to wonder why only 0.2% of academics tell their employer when they are not coping at work. As someone who earns a crust from having coherent thoughts I attempt to pull myself together but before I’ve even got my head off the pillow another attack ensues. The Trade Union Bill which is being pushed through with indecent haste gets its final commons vote on Tuesday. The bill allows employers to use agency workers to replace strikers and striker organisers have to wear armbands and give their name to police. The Siberian wind returns, circling my poor political heart. This news item is followed by a salty-wound experience of George Osbourne arguing passionately for the living wage. Wipe away a welfare system built to support people in a low wage economy like the UK and replace it with a shift in wage policy. At which point I feel that I’ll never be able to get out of bed again. At the time it felt like an unbearable irony that later that day I was due to teach business school undergraduates about Varieties of Capitalism and international labour standards. The theory of neo-liberal economic globalisation and the system of international regulation that tries to balance this by setting minimum standards. Within this regime joining a trade union and have them bargain collectively on your behalf is a human right, a concept of decent work that has been bred out of the next generation of workers and managers. The Freedom of Association being one of the four fundamental principles at work - along with not employing small children, not discriminating against people and not using actual slaves. Some days you can't join the dots either for yourself or your students. Its times like these that you need a few friends to stop that making you actually fall apart. So let me introduce you to Jo, Ozlem and Gerry. Jo Wolf, a philosopher and a dean at one of the highest ranking universities in the UK, wrote a piece in the Guardian that day that stopped me walking off in a huff from my profession. Defending academics is not a popular gig but using his ruthless logic honed from a career of actually thinking deeply to argue that if you over-regulate grown up people they turn into children. Instead of teaching they end up gaming. Playing the system to get good evaluations all at the expense of actually teaching the people in the classroom. Jo was my tutor in the days when you could study subjects like philosophy without a second thought about employability. He was the first person to take me seriously enough to help me to think - to follow the logic, substance over style. He also taught me about Marx which led to my Che years. When we met again in London 20 years later my feelings of gratitude were such that I didn't punch him when I found out he was never actually a Marxist. In this age of mis-information academics like Jo have enormous value because the care about the actual facts.  This was the point at which I was able to unlock my office door.  On my desk was a new publication, Working for the Economy: The Economic Case for Trade Unions by the economist Ozlem Onaran. Ozlem is very dear to me, the person who sat me down and told me exactly how to play the academic game. Her working class Turkish roots cutting through the romance of academe and laying out the well trodden route into the world of business schools, home to a surprisingly free thinking bunch. The first time I met Ozlem was on a picket line where her debate about pensions with an HR manager led the guy on the platform with a megaphone to ask her to keep her voice down. She didn’t.In this country if you’re a progressive economist you struggle to work the Research Excellence Framework so she walks the thin line between being a professor and writing stuff that actually speaks to the real world of work. Things like the fact that in the UK trade union density has declined by 50% since the 1970s when our neoliberal economic model first hit the scene and with it a breakdown of collective bargaining. No more sectoral bargaining, just company by company, less and less each year. This is not about the decline of the cartoon version of trade unionism - dinosaur structures and the dinosaurs within them taking a pop at the gaffers for laffs. The decline of collective bargaining is actually a loss to all of us who wanted to get a wage rise any time soon. Its also a real loss to our economy because when people on low and middle incomes earn more, say the living wage, they spend more. Public sector workers spend on average 80% of their wages in the local economy. If they lose their jobs or get paid less then the whole economy contracts. Over the last 40 years of union decline its estimated that we’ve lost £27.2bn to the UK economy. She had me at "wage-led growth".  It was at this point that I was able to open my work email. In amongst the teaching observation forms and submitting my research plans for the next REF I received a copy of an interview I’d done with Gerry Looker for the frontline Surviving Work Short Courses I’m running at the Tavistock Clinic. I met Gerry a while back in a hospital in Nottingham to find out how he, unlike most of the organised left, had managed to organize so many people into a union. The man bucks the trend. One of the things that has happened as the NHS falls into crisis is that the politics of collective action have shifted. Whether you see this as a radicalisation of the workforce or desperation its no longer a question of whether to organise into a union, its about how. Everyone, from psychiatrists to junior doctors are trying to organise so Gerry’s experience is uncharacteristically in demand. Gerry is en vogue. Gerry has that quiet and solid way that comes with experience. The years of workplace battles won and un-won leading to a digested politics that becomes part of your DNA. A profound understanding of the complexities of working life but a simple recipe including asking people what they are facing at work and  listening to the answer. A respect for working people and a simple dogged desire for something that is fair.  Being in a room with Gerry is a bit like a psychic hug. To be with someone who has seen the very best and worst of working life, who knows they can withstand the inevitable attacks that come in contexts of insecurity, and who still genuinely likes other people enough to risk organising them. You could do worse than learn a few things from Gerry by watching our conversation here. In an increasingly low wage economy, these are the people that we all need to freely associate with. So lets follow the logic of what is at stake tomorrow in the Commons debate about the Trade Union Bill. A: There is a reason why public sector workers from health, to education are being blamed for something they didn't do and punished with a system of regulation and impossible targets.  B: This strategy aims to hide the underfunding of public services and to destroy the last organised sectors who are in any position to oppose this.  C: Once this level of trade union organisation is gone we will never, ever get it back again. D: If the entire history of wage bargaining is anything to go by, without unions there will be no collective bargaining and any policy about the living wage will remain just that, policy. E: Whether its minimum or living wages, none of us have the capacity to secure our rights on our own. We need to freely associate to do anything of any significance. F: Whatever your political orientation, the economic case is in favour of us not letting our unions fail. Tomorrow the Commons will decide on whether to pass the Trade Union Bill. Tell your MP, today and right now, to oppose the bill. Click here.