That Starmer fella...

Feel free to pick just one thing to misrepresent

I don't see the Tories, the party of Brexit and Scottish Independence and austerity and dodgy contracts, being spectacularly good for normal businesses in the last 5 years. If you're friends with a minister, sure, but most people aren't.

I'm sure there's a pitch to business that Labour could make on the basis that a) a happier, healthier, more secure workforce is a more productive workforce and it's Tory policy that has given us a productivity problem and b) Brexit was about internal Tory politics, not what's good for the country and our economy, and as such they're more than willing to e.g. screw up finance to save fishing, and are physically incapable of achieving a good compromise deal with EU etc.

(Don't say "we're taking 10% ownership of your company", maybe say "employee ownership gives better results, here's an incentive to try it")

Just to say - I did read a lot of it and didn't feel particularly enlightened. Don't really want to write a longer response to it now, but the blog post/email that says "Don't worry transpeople, I'm perfectly nice to you in person! It's just the structural stuff I'm against." is illustrative. Quite a lot is responding to personal attacks or professional/academic issues, which makes it feel self-referential, but fair enough on a personal blog.

I realise I didn't respond to this. I think her take on it has, at least for me, clarified just how extensive and impactful some of the "structural stuff" is. Her contribution to this Guardian podcast (part 1 here) is interesting inasmuch as it lays out that legal recognition of gender reassignment is not the issue, but the subsequent emphasis on the primacy of (by-definition-personal and untestable) gender identity potentially restructures our concepts of categories and rights across the whole of society. That can't really be hand-waved away as some people do in this debate. She's also very forthright on what she thinks it means for the safeguarding of women. I, like many here, don't feel comfortable espousing or opposing any particular view on that aspect though. She's also just released a book that, predictably, is reviewed in all the wrong places, but here's an overview from the ES. I'll be looking out for a rebuttal (since I'm unlikely to bother to go and read the book itself).

Labour voters, what if we're the problem?

There are significant legal and cultural barriers to labour organising, especially for precarious, informal workforces that operate predominantly on the 0-hour model. Those barriers exist because unionising works, not the other way around.

I don't understand this. Unionising works and that's why it's not more popular?

I'll be looking out for a rebuttal (since I'm unlikely to bother to go and read the book itself).

I don't know much about Kathleen Stock though I do recognise that she's not one of the most rabid anti-trans people, and I'm pretty sure her views are honestly held.

However she does defend transphobes - or at least, she defends the right of transphobes to say things like 'trans women are men' - which means to me that she's a bit like what Jordan Peterson is to the far right, kind of a gateway drug.

I'm doing my very best on this to recognise my trans pals but also recognise that there are a lot of scared women out there who've been fed a pack of lies about how the GRA changes would mean blokes could just walk into your changing room and leer at you. Again I don't agree with Blair on much but I do agree that patient persuasion changes more minds than hurling insults.

I agree with this approach - there must be more mileage in Labour putting the case for a cooperative, more productive way forward.

The one thing that screams at me from this discussion seems to be that some people treat 'workers' as one group, entirely separate and distinct and with needs entirely opposed to 'employers'. I think this is massively harmful to labour's electoral chances - IMO, lots of people do draw a link between business doing well and their own prosperity.

Labour have to make a case for why making things better for employees benefits employers too, rather than make out business is some sort of evil thing that abuses workers

why does labour not just look at 2017 as its starting point and work from there instead of memoryholing it. and factor in an honest reckoning with the 2017-2019 period too

I guess hard to know how much of 2017 was voting 'for' labour's offering, Vs against May's Tories?

I'm not sure the labour leadership are memoryholing 2017 because the analysis is too hard

I don't understand this. Unionising works and that's why it's not more popular?

Unionising works for the members of the unions, which may be seen as bad to capitalist types who may be the rich and powerful ones who would be able to put up barriers to prevent unionism or curtail their powers by donating loads of money governments who are anti union.

Yeah I wondered if it was something like this. It's a massively adversarial view of the world, isn't it? And if in practice unionisation is being prevented because capitalist hate it so, then unions aren't working in the broader sense (i.e. getting all workers better conditions)

Maybe it's because 'try to redo 2017 but better' was the plan in 2019 and not successful?

Labour have to make a case for why making things better for employees benefits employers too

What if it doesn't though? It's not a zero sum game is it? Take an extreme example like amazon, they won't benefit from their drivers and warehouse staff being unionised will they?

I think the thing to bear in mind about 2017 is that Corbyn - despite doing much better than expected - won 262 seats. That's four more seats than Gordon Brown got in 2010 - a result rightly considered to be a bit of a trumping and one which led to his immediate resignation.

I know for Corbyn loyalists 2017 was a great result, and he definitely performed better than expected. But by the morbid calculus of the FPTP UK voting system, it's winner take all, and we lost.

Not in every case, but equally the UK has awful productivity despite long hours, indicating we're not using our workforce well. Disengaged, unmotivated workers are a part of that. More enlightened businesses do care about worker welfare for this reason, but to read this thread the only employer / worker relationship out there is basically Victorian era workhouses.

There has to be a narrative that sells better working conditions as a positive for everyone. It worked in the 20th C which is why we now have holiday rights, etc.

Edit: supposed to be a reply to @greentricky

You might like bullshit jobs by David graeber if you’ve not read it, it delves into this quite a bit and macro economic policy, also explores business react anything but logically and rationally.

It’s not a Marxist analysis either as one might expect, one might call it “sensible”

Thanks - will check it out

Good book

Adversarial?

The uk has some of the most heavy handed anti-union laws in Europe and looong history of rampant union-busting and (illegal) blacklisting practices across many different sectors – some worse than others (construction bad for the latter).

There was a whole decade of politics (arguably longer) partly defined by a government going to war with the unions because they deemed them too effective and a threat to their agenda.

So yes, there are significant legal and cultural barriers to labour organising because they work.

they deemed them too effective

Was that the reason? Or was it because the perception was that they couldn't provide major services?

Unions aren't working if most people aren't getting a benefit from them. Declining union membership means the system isn't working, even if you attribute that to unions themselves being too effective.

Unions aren't working if most people aren't getting a benefit from them.

What exactly do you mean by "not working"? Decline is broadly accepted as tied to deindustrialisation coupled with "defanging" legislation in the 80s, but falling membership is also often argued as part of a broader (intergenerational) cultural dissonance fostered in this era of anti-unionism being engrained in the public psyche, rather than the unions not being fit for purpose.

Recently – the pandemic proved that unions are just as relevant and important for protecting workers. On a macro scale they were integral to broadening the scope of the furlough scheme, and many unions had a pretty healthy upswing of members (I think almost 100k nationally).

A broader view on the importance of trade unions in relation to pay growth (from 2018):

Andrew Haldane (Chief Economist Bank of England)

Trade union membership has been found to result in a pay premium for workers. In the UK, this premium is typically found to lie in the range 10-15%, though it may have fallen over time. There is also evidence that falls in rates of unionisation and collective bargaining have resulted in wages becoming more dispersed and differentiated across occupations and locations.

We can quantify these effects in our wage equations. In Table 1, we include the unionisation rate and estimate over a longer sample period (1892to 2015) to reflect the lower-frequency movements in unionisation. This suggests unionisation is positive for pay growth and (statistically and economically) significant.

Over the sample, a 10 percentage point rise in the degree of unionisation raises wage growth by around 25b asis points per year. Over recent decades, unionisation rates have fallen by 30 percentage points. Using the long-run estimates, that will have lowered wage growth by around 0.75 percentage points per year over the past 30 years, asignificant effect. Consistent with it, the sharpest falls in unionisation came in the 1970s and 1980s, coinciding with falls in the UK labour share. Rolling regression ssuggest the effects of unionisation on pay were largest during this period.

Fuck it, I'm going to say it.

Ed Miliband for labour leader

Time to think outside the box. Farage.

Farage.

end thread