Parts of Labour’s programme will help unions to grow, but only hard work will build the class unity that can defeat the far right, writes STUC General Secretary Roz Foyer.
As the Scottish trade union movement gathers once again in Dundee, we are meeting at a time when falling living standards, creaking public services and an absence of ambition and action from successive governments are creating a vacuum in our communities that right-wing forces like Reform are eagerly filling.
Make no mistake, the centre-left politicians of our isles are in the last chance saloon of public opinion. If they don’t deliver for working class voters, it’s becoming clear that voters will seek answers elsewhere. The far-right are making gains, because they are tapping into how many people feel: exploited, undervalued, and with their trust in our traditional parties and institutions broken by years of unkept promises. The Scottish Government and UK Government need to break that cycle, and deliver fast on improving living standards across Scotland’s working-class communities.
Because tackling right-wing populism and the far-right is not just about countering their messaging. It’s about removing the very conditions that allow them to thrive. It’s about ensuring that every worker has a decent job and an affordable home, that our public services are properly funded and that our communities are not abandoned by those in power.
Improving worker’s rights, investing in public services, taxing the rich, controlling rents, taking back control of our energy system – these policies are hugely popular. A relentless focus on these issues also exposes the real culprits driving misery in our communities, not migrants arriving in small boats, but bosses flying in on private jets, landlords hiking our rent, multinational energy companies increasing our bills, and hedge funds monopolising our assets.
It is incumbent on the trade union movement to hold our politicians to account to take on these vested interests. Unfortunately, the Labour Party seem to be going in the wrong direction. The Chancellor’s recent choice to cut support for disabled people, as well as the winter fuel payment and international aid, are disgraceful. Austerity at the behest of the markets due to self-imposed fiscal rules and highly uncertain five-year forecasts is not the ‘change’ people voted for.
While we will never shy away from criticising a Labour Government when they’ve got it wrong – we must also offer support when they are trying to do the right thing. The Employment Rights Bill represents the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in a generation. It includes an end to zero-hour-contracts, day one employment rights, sick pay for all workers from the first day of absence, the right for unions to access workplaces to speak to workers, the establishment of sectoral collective bargaining in social care and the establishment of a state Fair Work Agency to bring together existing bodies to better enforce the law.
Of course, there are areas we would like the Bill to go further – on collective bargaining agreements across the economy, not just in social care, for example. We would also like to see employment law devolved to Scotland – a position supported not only by the STUC and the TUC, but also by the SNP and the Scottish Labour Party. But the Employment Rights Bill, opposed by Nigel Farage and the populist right, provides a basis on which our movement can build. That is why the theme of our Congress this year was Building on the New Deal for Workers.
Why Care is Critical
We need to increase worker power if we are to have any hope of defeating the far right. While trade union membership in Scotland grew last year, less than a third of workers are in a trade union. In the private sector just over one in ten workers are in a trade union. Gaining access to workplaces is a crucial first step, but we need a coherent strategy across the trade union movement to increase union membership across the economy. Where should we focus? How can we work together? How might we organise at a community level as well as a sectoral level?
Thankfully, there is no shortage of good work underway. Unite Hospitality have shown that it is possible to organise thousands of young workers in a relatively transient sector of the economy. Our creative industries unions have increased trade union membership while successfully campaigning for tens of millions of pounds of additional public investment into their sector. UNISON, GMB and Unite, have been working together, via the STUC, to develop strategies to support Scotland’s 200,000-strong social care workforce.
STUC research shows that over the last five years, that female dominated workforce have seen their pay being outstripped by inflation, the minimum wage, average earnings, and care worker pay in the UK. In 2020, care home workers in Scotland were paid 20% more than the UK minimum wage. By 2024, this had fallen to 12%. The Employment Rights Bill can help reverse this. It empowers Scottish Ministers to establish a Social Care Negotiating Body. That means that sectoral collective bargaining in Scotland will be underpinned by legally enforceable rights. Care workers across Scotland – whether in the private, public or voluntary sector – will be able to join a union, vote on their terms and conditions, and strike if they don’t get what they want.
But these rights are unlikely to be in place until summer of 2026 at the earliest. In the meantime, thousands of migrant care workers in Scotland are being exploited through tied work visas requiring sponsorship from an employer. UNISON and Trade Councils from Dumfries to Edinburgh have documented how workers are often recruited on false promises and charged illegal recruitment fees. Wages are then withheld and employers are able to perpetuate a culture of bullying, harassment and discrimination under the threat of deportation. If this was in Qatar, we would rightly call this out as modern-day slavery. That it is happening here, under a system presided over by the Home Office, is a stain on the UK. While the system is designed and enforced at Westminster, it is funded and administered by Scottish public bodies, through our outsourced care sector.Similar conditions exist in agriculture with precarious migrant workers earning low wages, paying high recruitment and transfer fees, and suffering from inappropriate salary deductions and a lack of information on employment rights.
The Failure of Liberalism
Just as the trade union movement organised precarious workers in the nineteenth century, we must do so again if we are to grow in the twenty-first century. The New Deal provides a basis on which we can build, but it will be down to us as a movement to put in the hard graft.
Because we know where this ends if we don’t. It ends with the working-class divided and the far right emboldened. Much has been made of Elon Musk’s journey to the far right. But viewed through the prism of self-interest, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Musk is notoriously anti-union. He’s smelt which way the wind is blowing and knows that liberalism is becoming incapable of defending his interests whilst living standards fall. That failure of liberalism is what explained the alliance between the far right and the ruling class in the 1930s and it is what explains it now. The ruling class is attacking women, black, LGBT and disabled workers, migrants and Muslims because they need a scapegoat.
Of course, we need to oppose those attacks with every bone in our body. But we also need to get better at having conversations with those people that are sympathetic to right-wing populist ideas – not dismissing them, but understanding what is driving them and persuading them that there is an alternative. Reform might still be dominated by traditional Tories and older homeowners, but their growth is among young men and sections of the working class who have lost income and status in recent decades.
Our job then, as ever, is to educate, agitate and organise the entirety of the working class in all its beautiful diversity. Because a united working class, demanding change from those in power and ready to act if they don’t get it, is the only way we can prevent the rise of the far right.
Roz Foyer is the General Secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress.