Organising for Popular Power

(This article was included in our submission to TWT 2025 alongside 5 practical proposals for party organising, focused on workers and trade unions, renters and tenant unions, social infrastructure & culture, anti-imperialism and party branches.)

Organising at work is a key aspect of overcoming the working class disorganisation which hampers efforts to articulate an independent working class position, to enforce our demands and agendas against capital and the state, and to win elections. We need to build power and organisation in our workplaces to enforce reforms, for workers to win democratic control over their work, and for revolution. Building workers’ capacity to take collective action over a wide range of issues should be a priority for Your Party. We want to win Your Party as a whole to our approach and to organise through its structures, but recognise that a mass party will be uneven. Those seriously committed to the strategy set out here will also need to organise independently to progress the necessary work.

What is the situation?

Our unions are not fit for purpose. In 2024, just 22% of UK employees were union members, with the figures far lower for private sector workers, young workers and those with fewer qualifications. Even for the 40% of employees covered by a collective agreement, unions are often not very effective – with low membership density, too few reps, little member involvement, bargaining over a narrow range of issues and little influence over decisions. The idea of “partnership” – prioritising shared interests between workers and management or government – is widespread and is a barrier to effective campaigning. Most unions limit themselves to “economistic” politics, and we see few attempts to use what industrial leverage we do have to enforce political demands.

While most workers who took part in the recent strike wave won at least something, and there were a few strikes outside the heartlands of unionisation, there was no breakthrough that began to reverse the decline and stagnation of unionisation since 1979. Coordination of action was insufficient to force a radical change in government policy. Though there were large numbers of members in many of the disputes who supported greater militancy, they lacked the capacity to develop and implement alternative strategies. Many disputes ended in compromises that left members dissatisfied.

How do we understand the problems?

Unions in Britain suffered huge defeats in the 1980s. Mass unemployment and police violence, along with a lack of support from the Labour Party leadership and the failures of solidarity, all played crucial parts. While unions were weakened, there were major shifts in industrial and occupational composition, leaving unionisation largely confined to heartlands in the public sector, privatised public services and small but important parts of manufacturing and transport. Since the 1980s, unions have largely complied with draconian anti-union legislation designed to prevent solidarity or “political” strikes and render action less effective, making union recovery more difficult. The weakening of unions was not just an attack on workers in the workplace, but on the working class political education and social infrastructure, unions historically resourced and supported. 

Unions are sites of struggle between rank-and-file members and officials paid by unions, between sectional interests, and between left and right. Unions are mass organisations of workers which resist capital but also negotiate with and accommodate capital. They organise sections of the working class, so are prone to sectionalism – prioritising the short-term interests of parts of the class over the long-term interests of the class as a whole. They develop institutional interests which diverge from those of members and the wider working class.

The layer of union employees whose role centres on negotiating members’ terms of exploitation and oppression and who spend a lot of their time with employers and government are under most pressure to prioritise institutional interests and are sometimes referred to as the “union bureaucracy”. The layer of activists who have a lot of facility time are sometimes referred to as the “lay bureaucracy”. While members of the bureaucracy are often more committed and radical than most union members, workers in struggle often learn fast and experience the bureaucracy as a barrier. Anti-union legislation relies on the bureaucracy prioritising institutional interests and policing members to ensure their compliance. For many years, any defiance of anti-union laws has been “unofficial”, with the bureaucracy giving a secret nod and a wink at best.

At present, there is a lack of connection between much of the organised left and workers in many sectors (in organised and unorganised workplaces). This weakens both the organised left and the workers’ movement. For workers, taking action at work is much easier with backing and support from organised groups, and left wing activists can also bring useful knowledge about how power works and how to win. For socialists, a politics that’s detached from knowledge of current conditions is unappealing to many of those we want to win to our side. Socialists are often not aware of where important sections of the working class are at politically, and we lack access to key sites of structural power in society.

Despite these challenges, each year tens of thousands of workers do decide to form unions and take collective action at work. And there are significant untapped layers of workers who would like to do so but lack the confidence and relevant know-how. There’s a severe lack of infrastructure within and across trade unions for supporting this. There’s also a lack of infrastructure for linking up workers across workplaces and sectors. There are also hundreds of thousands of workers who have simply never encountered unions, and we lack the communicative infrastructure to engage them.

Another challenge is that workplace organising is hugely varied and is a relatively complex task that requires patience and stamina. It can be surprisingly intuitive, and many people can work it out for themselves. But when organising in the troublesome conditions outlined above, it is much more fruitful for new organisers to be guided and supported by comrades with experience. However, because of the disconnection between much of the organised left and the working class, we lack a big layer of experienced comrades ready and able to help with this work. This poses challenges for scaling up our movement quickly.

Given the challenges and barriers to political action in the workplace, we also lack many recent examples of action that go beyond the limited repertoire of post-Thatcherite trade unionism, whether that’s wildcat strikes or solidarity action. And we lack a widely communicated vision for the sort of workers’ movement we want to build.

A strategy

We will focus primarily on workers and their struggles rather than on unions, and pursue a ”rank-and-file strategy” and a “radical political trade unionism”. The rank and file strategy seeks to build workers’ collective power in relation to both employers and the union bureaucracy, working with paid officials to the extent that it is possible, while building workers’ capacity to act independently. Radical political trade unionism aspires towards greater class confidence and militant action in workplaces, which is aimed not only to improve workers’ own conditions but also to fight for broader class interests too.

Your Party members should organise at their own workplace, support others trying to do so, build relationships with workplace activists in their area, and support workers’ struggles. Organising in your own workplace or taking a job in a strategic workplace with the aim of building a union there (“salting”) are more valuable for socialists than taking jobs working for unions. Small employers and workplaces are generally the hardest to build lasting power. There are some industries where connections between building power at work and organising in communities and social movements are particularly clear. Examples include education, housing, health and social care, energy, transport, logistics and arms manufacturing. We should support members trying to organise at work, including those who want to salt particular strategic workplaces, employers or industries.

Rather than accepting the divisions sustained by capitalism and our unions, we should encourage the development of structures that involve all workers in a workplace across job grades and involve members of all unions in multi-union workplaces, as well as “combine” structures that involve representatives from all unions and workplaces in an employer or industry.

Solidarity has a key role to play in building working class power. At its height, solidarity has meant workers taking powerful action in support of other workers, like the engineers who struck for higher NHS pay in the 1980s or to support the miners in the 1970s, or to oppose repression and war, like those in Scotland who refused to repair aircraft for Pinochet’s dictatorship or the Italian workers taking action against Israeli genocide today. To get to these heights, we need to do what we can in the circumstances we face. We can play an important part in building traditions of solidarity, and should prioritise those that strengthen the givers as well as the receivers. Those giving solidarity can benefit by learning and gaining inspiration from other workers’ struggles, by acts of solidarity building collectivity, and by building their own networks of support. We need to also re-create the trade union itself as an organisation of solidarity – union members forming a union for one another, paying dues for one another.

In order to do this, we need to facilitate workers’ learning, including:

• The nuts and bolts of how to organise at work;
• The limits of the law and the need for militant collective action;
• Their common interests and potential conflicts with other groups of workers, and effective ways of dealing with them;
• How their jobs fit into capitalism and society, and what potential power that gives these workers;
• Broad class struggle politics;
• The landscape of industries, jobs, issues, activists, organisations and struggles in each area;
• The connections between immediate job-related issues and wider political issues and power structures;
• Rank and file strategy and radical political trade unionism.

Practical steps could include:

1. Your Party branches to create working groups to coordinate solidarity with disputes, to visit unionised workplaces to seek support for political campaigns, and to support attempts to unionise unorganised workplaces.
2. Your Party branches to map workplaces in their area, build relationships with activists, and carry out “workers inquiries”. This might take the form of a group of workers coming to a YP branch for advice, and being connected with other workers experienced in organising on a particular issue; or where appropriate, connecting with, contributing to, and seeking support from local organisations such as trades councils. 
3. Education for Your Party members to include the rank-and-file strategy, radical political trade unionism and practical skills for organising at work, ideally organised in collaboration with organisations that share these perspectives, such as Troublemakers at Work, Organise Now, Notes from Below, RLS, and/or GFTU.
4. Creation of local groups of workers trying to implement our strategy, to share experiences, discuss challenges and provide peer-to-peer support.
5. Encourage Your Party members to get 1-2-1 support to organise at work. This should be a key activity for YP members who are not yet organising in their workplace. The Your Party leadership have already paid lip service to the idea that members of the party should be organising at work. However, most people don’t have the support needed to be able to do this. If we want to foster and maintain an expectation that all Your Party members should be organising at work, we need to provide them with this support from the get-go, at branch level where possible. The local groups of workers mentioned in point 4 could be used to provide local coaching for those wanting support, and Organise Now can be used to start with or to fill any gaps. 
6. Creation of a Salting School to support Your Party members who want to salt strategic workplaces.
7. Establishing a national committee within Your Party, with a focus on supporting points 1-6 above, and with the ability to communicate to YP members at large from time to time and with access to financial resources. Perhaps in collaboration with Organise Now.
8. Establishing some sort of newsletter or forum for YP members nationally to share experiences and learning in relation to workplace organising. Perhaps in collaboration with Notes from Below.
9. Your Party leadership and elected politicians proactively speaking publicly in line with everything in this document as much as possible, articulating this as fundamental to the success of Your Party.
10. Creation of popular working class cultural and media content and events in support of struggles (example here) which can draw people towards workplace organising and build a broader cultural movement.
11. Bringing people together on a semi-regular basis nationally to build relationships and a sense of being part of a big project of workplace-orientated socialist politics.
12. Working within and beyond YP branches and members to establish Workers’ Centres, or Workers’ Advice and Organising sessions, as part of community centres (as described in the social infrastructure and branch proposals). 

We should also be organising in our unions to encourage support for Your Party. Practically speaking, this could include:

• Pushing for democratisation of union political funds to allow local support for a range of parties approved nationally.
• In unions without political funds, push for the establishment of these.

What are the immediate next steps?

1. Work on a motion for the founding conference which sets out a political vision that the party needs to see strengthening workplace organisation as one of its key tasks, and commits to some projects along the lines of the above.
2. Engage with local Your Party branches in our areas and propose points 1-5 above.
3. Set up an interim, unofficial national committee for workplace organising in Your Party (see point 7 above), operating on an open and democratic basis, and use this to support and coordinate local activity in branches.
4. Write some articles arguing for the importance of the motion and the work we are doing, and also explaining some of the foundational political ideas underpinning this work.
5. Run open programmes of political education, to develop perspectives like the above. The same groups in the points above could probably help provide capacity for this kind of thing.
6. Argue for Your Party structures to include organisation of members in the same unions and industries, with the ability to take democratic decisions as long as they are consistent with policy set by national conferences.