What now for trade unions and skills in the Burnham era?

The recent elevation of Andy Burnham to Prime Minister is bringing an element of optimism to those calling for a funded, coherent skills strategy for the UK. But what might this mean for trade unionists, and what should be our role? Will Burnham recognise the contribution that unions have made – not just to skills, but also to the wider purpose of education over the past 200 years – and the contribution we could continue to make?

When I began the research that ultimately led to Libraries Gave Us Power, my intention was that it would be about lifelong learning rather than skills, in the same way it was to be about member-learning and not activist education. That was (I think) an understandable approach; after all, it takes very little effort to argue that both skills and activist development are bread-and-butter issues for the movement. ‘Skills’ fits the collective outlook: negotiating on behalf of all workers. Lifelong learning though is more abstract, less obvious a benefit to the ‘economic’ role of trade unions. When trade unions become more technocratic and less value-based, it becomes harder to justify activity that appears to benefit the individual rather than the union.

On this, I’m reminded of the description of Rodney Bickerstaffe, General Secretary of NUPE and then, after mergers, UNISON.  Bick – as he was known – was at the helm as the union developed and grew Return to Learn, a programme designed to support low paid members back into education. It took up a lot of resources (both time and money), but in the end delivered to over 10,000 workers. Pete Caldwell of the WEA, who was one of the key individuals in Return to Learn’s development, told me about Bick’s perspective,

‘He wasn’t an educator, but he could see the members as human beings with aspirations, and the ability to change and develop, with a wider sense of the world of what they wanted to do and offer, rather than as simply someone who could just help the union.’

‘Skills’, however, provoke a very different reaction to ‘lifelong learning’. It immediately positions itself at the heart of trade union activity, obvious in its impact on members and the work they do. Skills are seen as necessary for businesses to develop and be successful, thereby providing secure work and ensuring higher wages. Trade unions have been raising skills as an issue since the nineteenth century, and it is fascinating to view this as a campaign to support capitalism which is at odds with capitalism’s short-term priorities – what Wolfgang Streeck described as a very ‘rational’ act of dragging its feet on funding skills in favour of profit in the short-term. Paradoxically, governments of all stripes have been inured to the occasional lobbying by unions for legislation that would mean employers provide time off to learn and in turn support the UK economy. This is despite the UK government signing-up to the ILO Convention to provide paid educational leave, way back in 1975.

Skills, in this definition, are about the learning needed for work – not just for now but the future too. My book originally intended to look at learning for the individual and their personal growth, rather than the learning that benefits the economy. However, it wasn’t really possible to divide the two so easily: the learning that supports our health and wellbeing and our desire for culture is inextricably linked to that learning that gains us promotion or makes us more productive. Trade unionists have always understood that. It is what Jack Jones of the TGWU called The Human Face of Labour in his Dimbleby Lecture in the 1970s. The very first TUC had a motion on ‘technical education’, but one delegate cautioned that those discussions were misguided for ‘starting at the top of the tree’.

In 1872, Robert Applegarth, leader of the Carpenters and Joiners Union gave evidence to the Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science where he called for scientific education to begin at primary school. He also outlined his union’s extraordinary programme of technical drawing for members which, he claimed, was the first example of a trade union offering such an education to its members. Other trade unions followed suit. The Association of Engineering and Shipbuilding Draughtsmen provided thousands of technical pamphlets, the Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees (AUCE) ran classes in ham boning, and NALGO created a qualification framework for Local Government workers. There are many, many more examples.

In response to de-industrialisation, the unions in the 1980s and into the 1990s began calling for legal rights to time off to train. The GMB and TGWU were at the forefront, twice producing materials that made the case for a minimum of five days training per year for workers. John Edmonds of the GMB told me that the privatised energy industry was a perfect example of Streeck’s ‘rational’ approach; businesses choosing not to train their workers in favour of immediate profit which led to a lack of skills being developed. This renewed focus led to Bargaining for Skills, the TUC’s ‘slightly anarchic’ project to engage employers on skills through project workers funded by Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs). Developed by Liz Smith and Dave Eva in the north-west, it quickly spread across the country, employing hundreds of project workers and training thousands of trade union stewards to bargain with employers over skills strategies. When Labour came to power in ’97, this was an area it was keen to work with the unions on, and the Union Learning Fund (ULF) and legal rights to time off for the Union Learning Reps (ULRs) were the consequence.

However, New Labour had little enthusiasm for any legislation to compel employers, something the TUC’s Bert Clough described as ‘all carrots and no sticks’. Despite the report by the Workplace Learning Working Group to the body established to inform Labour’s Lifelong Learning strategy, which called for legal rights to bargain with employers, this was never enacted. Everything was voluntary. As a result of the ULF and government initiatives, it was still a great success, with learning centres established in workplaces, learning agreements made, and thousands taking up learning as a result. The end of the ULF in 2020 came at a time of difficulty for both Further Education and the union movement, with the consequence that, in an incredibly short period, this all seemed forgotten.

The most heartening aspect of my research was that this was nothing new. Trade unions’ focus on learning and skills has always been cyclical, marked by a short-burst of activity only curtailed by crises such as the General Strike – but it always returns. In fact, it will always be occurring right somewhere right now (a town or employer), and usually the result of one or two dedicated trade unionists.

There is, however, a note of caution. Whilst unions have always called for scientific/technical/vocational skills, it must be within the context of the individual rather than solely what businesses rather disturbingly call ‘human capital’. In 1917, the WEA held a conference in Westminster Hall to consider education in the post-war world which was attended by 107 trade unionists. Vocational education was celebrated, but only in its right place. Mr Cuthbertson of the Metal Users and Tube Workers was just one of a number to voice concerns,

we need not plead for technical, manual educational instruction. We shall get enough of that. We want to avoid it to a large extent. We want to get rid of what we see creeping into our country. There has been a great effort to Germanise this country in the direction of education and if we are not careful we shall get a great deal more of it

Just a few years later, the Engineering and Shipbuilding Draftsmen, in their newspaper stated,

The era of vocational training is upon us. Each person will be regarded solely from the view-point of possessing some predestined economic function. Where the schools formerly trained men for the University, they will now train them for the workshop … The former produced an exotic cultural veneer; the latter is the very negation of culture … It is into the hands of successful business men that the control of education is passing, and no matter how estimable such men may be in their own sphere, attention to business management does not develop the qualities valuable in an educational administrator.

It was with these words running through my mind that I recently gave thought to opinion-pieces that we now give too much credence to university education at the expense of vocational skills – that too many are now attending. That may be the case, but it seems unlikely that middle-class parents will be the ones discouraging their children from university in favour of technical training.

Despite all these concerns, unions must fully engage in discussions with employers on skills for several reasons. Firstly, to overcome employers’ ‘rational’ act of scrimping on skills in the first place; and secondly, because the role of the trade union movement is to represent workers as people, not simply units, and therefore ensure that skills in their widest sense are considered. Streeck noted the importance not just of ‘skills’, but of the skills needed in order to learn new skills, which was exactly what Return to Learn was about. The early 2000s saw numerous programmes to address literacy and numeracy in the workplace, something rarely discussed today. These were known as ‘basic skills’ for a reason: they are the building blocks on which all learning is built on. ULRs regularly noted men and women in tears at what they had achieved, an emotion and a desire to learn which passed on to their families and communities.

Author and educationalist Tom Bewick recently noted that the statutory right to paid time off to train was 'the unfinished policy business of the 1990s'. It is an idea that unions have long campaigned for. Now that we have negotiated the milestone Employment Rights Act, our focus should once again return to skills, but we must ensure that this is understood in its widest sense. We must campaign for a legal right to paid time off to learn, and for unions to have the right to bargain with employers over education. There must be a renewed call for the return of the Union Learning Fund in England, funded for the long-term, so that learning reaches every corner of society. Research in 2020 by the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD noted that Britain lagged behind many industrial nations in building partnerships between unions, employers and government at both national and local levels. Workers are the human face of labour, and their ambitions and desires must not be lost in the machinery of policy.