The Unite Housing Workers Branch (LE1111)

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Sanctuary Housing strike:  “It does not take a genius to see that the longstanding issues over terrible service provision at Sanctuary and its awful treatment of workers are linked. Sanctuary acts like the worst kind of corporate outsourcer than a non-profit organisation: Amassing mountains of cash and paying its CEO a fortune while taking a race-to-the-bottom approach to workers and tenant services. That’s why Sanctuary’s London workers are striking. They have the full power of Unite behind them.” Read more here

More local coverage of the strike:

Unite GS on Labour and the election

Will Labour rebalance the country in favour of working people? I don’t think so

“I have watched as corporate lobbyists push to water down Labour’s pro-worker policies. We, the labour movement, must push back”

Sharon Graham writes in The Guardian today (see below), “The imbalance in power in the workplace is borne out by two facts. First, weekly median pay for full-time workers in Britain is lower in real terms now than before Labour was elected in 1997. Second, the profit margins of the average British business have increased by 30% since before the pandemic.”

Sharon Graham

Sharon say’s, “any actual advance of the right to bargain would be viewed as a direct challenge to British capital. Power in this country is increasingly held by business elites and their acolytes in Westminster. It is they who frame the debate behind closed doors. Not workers, trade unions, or anybody else for that matter. There is no serious alternative to the status quo being considered. This in a country where a fifth of food bank users are in working households.”

Our branch called for a referendum of Unite members on our ability to support candidates that support Unite policy and called for the union to support Jeremy Corbyn and Emma dent Coad if they stood as independent candidates. The committees and delegate conference of the union voted this down so our union is funding the campaign of a former private health company executive against Jeremy Corbyn for example. These are issues that we will need to continue to debate, and many branch members will support non-Labour candidates who support union policy in this election. Branch members should come to the next branch meeting or email officers if they want to attend.

Feet to the fire

Unite may be Labour’s biggest affiliate, but our job first and foremost is to defend workers. I make no apology for holding Labour’s feet to the fire on workers’ rights – no matter how uncomfortable it might make some or what criticism is laid at my door.

Of course I want a Labour government, but that doesn’t mean I will sit on the sidelines and applaud while it caves in to the business lobby and rows back on its commitments. The Labour leadership’s penchant for reneging on promises has been a theme of its time in opposition.

The new deal for working people – first proposed in 2021 – was a good start, with promises to ban fire and rehire and zero-hours contracts and end the qualifying period for basic rights at work. But holes remained: there was still no detailed plan for the expansion of collective bargaining, which is the only tried and tested method of redistributing profits to workers.

Nevertheless, it was a strong base. But instead of building on it, the Labour party decided to unwind many of its commitments. During the national policy forum consultations where these were discussed, Unite was the only affiliate to not vote for the “new” document that day.

Reading the words on the page, it was clear to me that there were rowbacks on individual rights, including zero-hours contracts, where Labour has ultimately changed its policy from an outright ban to workers now having a theoretical right to a contract with regular hours.

Right to organise

But it was the tightening of the noose around the neck of new, straightforward rights to organise for trade unions that presented the clearest indication of change to me, a bureaucratic web impeding the right for a union to access a workplace in order to organise it. The corporate lobbyists were unsurprisingly gaining a foothold. The third and fourth editions of the new deal have led us down a similar path.

The imbalance in power in the workplace is borne out by two facts. First, weekly median pay for full-time workers in Britain is lower in real terms now than before Labour was elected in 1997. Second, the profit margins of the average British business have increased by 30% since before the pandemic.

Is Labour going to change in any serious way the balance of forces? I am increasingly sceptical. The rowbacks on specific issues, such as moving away from a total ban on fire and rehire, signal the direction of travel. For further evidence, look at the planned introduction of sectoral bargaining, which is now on life support.

Limited to one sector and lacking any sort of clarity as to whether actual negotiations on issues such as pay will take place, this important policy will without doubt be watered down still further as part of the much-trumpeted “consultation”. If collective bargaining is not restored to a respectable level, the new deal will not deliver real change for workers where it matters, in their pockets.

If there is an irony to this point, it is this. Both parties talk about delivering high growth, as if it were the only solution to all our ills. Well, collective bargaining is one way to help deliver this. In a report commissioned by Unite, the economists Özlem Onaran, Alexander Guschanski and Thomas Rabensteiner found that restoring collective bargaining coverage to the same levels as 1996 would lead to a 2.8% rise in GDP.

Challenge to power of British capital

But of course, this solution is ignored. Why? Because any actual advance of the right to bargain would be viewed as a direct challenge to British capital. Power in this country is increasingly held by business elites and their acolytes in Westminster. It is they who frame the debate behind closed doors. Not workers, trade unions, or anybody else for that matter. There is no serious alternative to the status quo being considered. This in a country where a fifth of food bank users are in working households.

In a two-party state with an antiquated voting system, it can appear that we are trapped. There is no alternative, we are told. Beg the rich for scraps – don’t tax them. Bang pots for the workers – don’t pay them. But there is an alternative. We don’t need to be stuck with artificial fiscal rules. Other choices can be made. We can choose to invest, not cut; to tax wealth and to re-fund our NHS. We will begin to map out the possibilities as part of Unite’s workers’ manifesto.

There are some who think not commenting during elections will bring dividends afterwards. I don’t think there is any evidence to support that. It is easy sometimes to overstate the power of being “allowed in the room” and easier still to sing to the choir when the stakes are low. But if we are to deliver different outcomes, not just crumbs from the Labour table, then we will need a different strategy. Now is the time to stand up and say what we believe is required to deliver real change.

If there is any lesson from the shifting sands of the faction wars within Labour, it is this. It will be up to those of us outside parliament to build for tomorrow. We have no choice other than to move the Overton window ourselves. We can’t wait for a hero to arrive or engage in futile personality politics.

Britain needs a pay rise. But if anyone is going to “make work pay” then they are going to have to do more than mouth the words. So yes, vote Labour. But do it with your eyes wide open and don’t be afraid to push for more from a party built to be the workers’ voice.

4 June 2024

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Unite: Profit margins up 30% across the board

Largest post pandemic profit margin study

Unite's latest report has analysed nearly 17,000 companies in the UK and found that average profit margins have soared by 30% compared to the pre-pandemic period.

This report is the largest post-pandemic study of UK profit margins to date. We have exposed that corporate profiteering isn’t confined to just the largest companies or those in a select few sectors. Profits have spiralled out of control everywhere.

Companies of all sizes and from almost all sectors, from banks to shipping firms and veterinary practices, saw pre-tax profit margins rise, even as wages have fallen in real terms and investment has slumped, the analysis shows.

“This is why our economy is broken,” said the Unite general secretary, Sharon Graham. “Because of the choices of executives, investors, and politicians who choose short-term profits and fat dividends over investing in our industries and public goods.”

The report has been covered in mainstream media. The Guardian notes Until last year, the Bank of England largely attributed inflationary pressures on companies to wage rises at the behest of workers, appealing to employees to forgo higher salaries to help slow down price rises. But a growing body of evidence suggests that persistent high inflation has come in part from companies setting their own prices rather than passing on the benefit of falling costs in the form of price cuts, a process that has been called “greedflation”.

Isabella Weber, an economist from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said central banks responded to profit-led inflation by tightening monetary policy, such as raising interest rates, triggering another round of windfall profits at the expense of ordinary people.

Weber said: “Central banks have reacted to sellers’ inflation by hiking interest rates. This has created yet another opportunity for extraordinary profits, since banks reaped higher returns on their assets but did not pass them on to savers. Simply put, the strategy to fight sellers’ inflation and rising unit profits has been to create yet another opportunity for windfall profits.”

This report is the third in a series of contributions on profiteering. Our aim is simple: to uncover who has really profited from pandemic and the inflationary pressures that have followed.

Key Findings

• Average profit margins have increased by 30% across our sample of nearly 17,000 companies.
• In total, the companies we analysed made £156 billion more profit over 2021 and 2022 than if margins had stayed at 2018 levels. That’s equivalent to £5,500 extra spent by every UK household.
• The FTSE 350 companies are paying 20% more to their shareholders, through share buybacks and dividends, post-pandemic than they were pre-pandemic.
• Net investment by FTSE 350 companies also fell from £37 billion per half year in 2018 and 2019, to £9 billion between 2022 and 2023.
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The full report is available here.

15 May 2024

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