Jason Turvey | Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)
Comrades My name is Jason Turvey, I am a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), I serve on my party’s central committee and am also the industrial officer. On behalf of my party, I send comradely greetings to you all and hope that your conference is a great success.
I have been asked to speak to you for a few minutes about trade unionism. While it isn’t the easiest of tasks to confine everything that I would like to say about trade unions to a few minutes, I will try to elucidate the contemporary situation of trade unionism in Britain. In Europe generally and Britain in particular, social democracy is truly the enemy within. The forces of the trade union bureaucracies, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the Labour party have, for over a hundred years, coalesced around a number of key roles that they perform on behalf of the British ruling class.
• The first is to act as the ruling class’s manager of working-class resistance.
• The second is to subvert working-class anger and divert it to avenues which best suit the ruling class, including imploring workers to vote for the imperialist Labour party.
• The third is to deploy all the tools at its disposal to stifle working-class struggle, including by restricting workers’ struggles to the tight confines of legality, deploying bureaucracy to kill the urgency and momentum that workers have built, and to shut down disputes in the shortest possible time at the lowest possible cost to themselves.
The Trades Union Congress, along with the bureaucracies of almost all the trade unions, are in effect an arm of the British state machine.
The objective of any trade union is to enable workers to harness their collective strength in the workplace so that they can act in defence of their pay and working conditions. But servility to the system of imperialism generally and, in Britain, to the imperialist Labour party in particular has led unions to shift steadily away from to task of local workplace organisation and towards political lobbying, litigation and the pursuit of legislative reform—along with tokenistic campaigns that purport to be in the interests of so-called ‘minority groups’, but in fact only help to further divide and weaken our ranks.
The truth is that in the modern period unions have all but abandoned the very core of their power—that of organised labour—and our movement has as a result become a shadow of its former self.
Disconnect between members and the leaderships
One aspect of this degeneration is seen in the atrophying of internal democracy within the trade union movement.
Elections for general secretaries now typically garner a vote of less than 15 percent of the entire membership, while in April 2025 the NASUWT, a British teaching union with over 250,000 members, elected their GS with a turnout of just 2.9 percent of its members. Many trade union officer posts are being filled—even at a national level—by unopposed candidates nominated by a single branch. In some cases, senior officers are not elected at all, but are installed via opaque ‘selection processes’.
This disconnect between members and those who are supposed to lead them is the direct consequence of the union bureaucracies having steadily abandoned the real interests and ignored the real views of their members over many decades as British industry was shuttered and pay and conditions were relentlessly forced down with little or no meaningful resistance.
A vibrant and healthy internal democracy is a vital condition for waging effective trade union struggles not only so that we can hold our leaders to account, but also to encourage active member participation, to engender an ‘organising’ model, and to build trust between members and those in the leadership.
Members must feel empowered by their reps and officials to become leaders in their workplaces, not find themselves and their struggles a hostage to the actions of unaccountable bureaucrats whose real loyalty is to our class enemies, and who are more interested in being rewarded with generous pensions and peerages than in helping the working class to defend its interests.
How can we reclaim and transform our unions?
Every paid position in our trade unions, from organisers to the general secretary, should be filled via election, with no ‘professional activists’ employed from outside the organisation. Members should have the right to recall any elected official who fails to carry out their instructions. And, crucially, all officials should be paid no more than the average wage of their union’s members.
The ability of any trade union, and of the trade union movement as a whole, to act in the interests of working people depends upon rebuilding a vibrant and extensive base of workplace organisation in which the mass of members are empowered to participate.
Our party believes that revitalising the British trade union movement starts not at the top of trade unions, but at the grassroots levels—in workplaces and branches. Organised and active members can and do create considerable upwards pressure within trade unions which compels those charged with the management of the union to act—even if to do so is against their personal (career) interests.
We believe that such grassroots activity starts with workers launching campaigns within their individual trade unions to reinvigorate democracy in the union, and to do everything possible to spread awareness of and participation in their campaign to other trade unions and to the wider working class.
Their campaign should include the following demands (and any others their members consider to be necessary):
• To break all links with the British Labour party and with any Labour-aligned or Labour-like forces, all of which serve the interests of the British imperialist ruling class not of the workers.
• To dismantle every trade union’s Labour-aligned, capitalist-friendly bureaucracy.
• We must replace all those officers who have been loyally serving imperialism, disempowering the members and promoting imperialist wars.
• We need to abolish all special perks for union reps and officials, including ending expense accounts, paying officials of any union the average wage of their members. Officials should be appointed through a free and open ballot of the membership, and members should have the right to recall any elected official at any time for any reason.
• We must refuse to comply with anti-trade-union laws when they conflict with our members’ ability to organise and withdraw their labour. Bringing back genuine democracy to the union means refusing to allow the state to oversee our elections, finances or other internal business, which must be run according to rules set by the members, not by the government on behalf of the employers.
• To build up strike funds, which should be held in diverse and resilient ways, so that workers can use their collective power in earnest and the union cannot be blackmailed with the threat of sequestration.
Only by taking these difficult but necessary steps can the working class transform our trade unions. Thank you for listening and solidarity!