[vidarh]

Most unions support Labour because like in most of Europe the Labour party was literally founded by and for the labour movement and the unions. Hence the unions are also represented in the governing organs of Labour as well, as is the case in most Labour parties in Europe.

Of course there certainly are people in unions who do not support Labour, but the historical connection is there because the Labour parties were largely formed as an extension of the work started in and around the unions.

[chrisseaton]

I get the historical connections, but when you present it to a person today and tell them 'and some of your money will go to the Labour Party' and they say 'well why on earth would I want to fund those people?' it all starts to seem like a bad idea.

All arguments seem to circle back to a vague idea of 'but they represent you', for both unions and Labour. I'm sure that's what they think they're doing, but the Conservatives and the Greens also offer to 'represent' me. It's not convincing.

[vidarh]

With the Greens that might be an issue, but I'd argue that most people who consider themselves represented by the Conservatives will be just as uncomfortable being represented by most unions - the very concept of a union is firmly left wing, and many of the large unions in the UK are politically left wing enough that they're a key support base for Corbyn. They're not supporting Labour for fun - they're supporting it because Labour is he closest to the unions goals. If members don't like the goals of the union then they should find another union that represents them better.

[chrisseaton]

> If members don't like the goals of the union then they should find another union that represents them better.

They do, or they just don't join a union at all.

Wasn't this conversation about why people might not be to keen to join unions?

If the unions don't care about membership numbers then there's no issue. If they want to increase their membership numbers then aligning themselves to, and worse than that actively funding, one party, that many people don't support, will be an issue that makes that harder.

It's not just the Greens - people who could be interested in joining a union but wouldn't want to fund Labour might include Socialists, Communists, Liberal Democrats, yes Conservatives as well (Conservative Workers & Trade Unionists for example), UKIP, and so on.

[vidarh]

> It's not just the Greens - people who could be interested in joining a union but wouldn't want to fund Labour might include Socialists, Communists, Liberal Democrats, yes Conservatives as well (Conservative Workers & Trade Unionists for example), UKIP, and so on.

In the US union membership is a big issue. In the UK not so much. The unions do certainly care about membership, but they also care about actually having influence over the issues that matters to their members, as that's what they're for. At some point you need to choose if it's more important to represent everyone, or represent those who do join you well.

As it stands there's very little indication it'd be worth it for most UK unions to lose the influence they have in Labour. Consider that trade union support for Corbyn was greater than in Labours regular membership, for example - in other words, most of the unions have tended to lean to the left of Labour, not towards any of the other UK parties. Labour leaning UKIP members have largely returned to the fold, after the Brexit vote (and many places contributed to Labours result in the 2017 election). The far left have either embraced Labour again under Corbyn or at least accept it as an acceptable choice. Even TUSC and CPGB recommended people vote Labour most places.

This is a "problem" that mostly seem to be a problem to people who are usually not themselves unionised or interested in being unionised but who dislike the additional support it brings to Labour.

Put another way: If a substantial number of unionised people in the UK wanted unions affiliated with other parties, they can form them, or someone would form them and people would join. The Tories have tried at least twice (with CWTU that you mentioned being the latest incarnation) - it hasn't worked.

Instead what's happened after Corbyn is that unions that severed links with Labour during Blair has re-affiliated (most notably the Fire Brigades Union). RMT has not reaffiliated, but instead supports TUSC, to the left of Labour, but endorsed Corbyn in the Labour leadership elections. There are still other unaffiliated union options as well, as well as options to reserve yourself against affiliation in most unions affiliated to Labour (which means your money doesn't go to Labour and you don't get a vote in Labour leadership elections), so this is an artificial concern.

But if anything, UK unions have consistently been to the left of mainstream UK politics, even when some of their members end up voting for parties actively opposed to the same interests they've voted for when electing their union membership.

The proportion of members that reserve themselves against affiliation with Labour has typically also been low.

> Conservative Workers & Trade Unionists

... is a group set up by the Tory party as an attempt at trying to win over union support from Labour, that has totally failed at getting any traction, because it was started from the top with basically no bottom-up support. It was presented in 2015 as a major thing, and then quietly shoved under the carpet when they didn't manage to get anywhere.

One thing is conspicuously absent from their gallery page [1] for instance: More than a handful actual workers and regular members, as opposed to Tory party staffers, MPs, MSPs, MEPs and Lords. If they can't muster a room full of actual workers to front a "union", that say it all.

If they succeed at organising workers that feel unrepresented by Labour-affiliated unions in sufficient numbers to actually influence Tory policy, then great. But so far it has been a PR stunt from the Tory party.

To put it in other terms: The largest Tory led "union" was Conservative Trade Unionists (now "Conservatives at Work"), which at it's peak had at most a few tens of thousands of members, at a time when there were more than 10m unionised workers in the UK. It's been in steady decline since.

[1] http://www.toryworkers.co.uk/gallery/

[chrisseaton]

This is all interesting stuff and makes a lot of sense.

I'm thinking more about non-traditional potential unions. Like if people seriously tried to set up a computer scientist union and tried to unionise a large proportion of workers at white-collar places like Google in the UK, I would imagine that some of the push-back they would get would be, for example Liberal Democrat voters not wanting to pay for Labour election campaigns.

Maybe a computer scientist union could simply choose not to be associated with Labour, then.

[vidarh]

I think any union covering more "white collar" type jobs probably would want to remain unaffiliated. Some also do for other reasons - e.g. Prospect [1], which is for engineers, managers and scientists. Their main reason has been that they organise a lot of people in the civil service and other parts of government, and e.g. BECTU (the broadcasting union) disaffiliated from Labour when it merged with Prospect for that reason, but it's likely that parts of Prospect's membership would also be more politically diverse than many other unions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_(trade_union)