STUC chief Roz Foyer on strikes, collective power and taxing the rich

Yet, she is puzzled by Labour’s position. “My view,” she says, “is that by not respecting the right of the Scottish Parliament to decide on a referendum – or even the democratic mandate for it – they risk alienating former Labour voters.

“The STUC debated this intensely and it’s been our policy for a couple of years.

All the polls and elections have shown there is a democratic mandate. It’s pretty hard to argue this isn’t the case.”

We are meeting in the Glasgow offices of Unite, where she had once been a national organiser. It was one of many senior posts this eloquent and forceful Glaswegian has held in the trade union movement before becoming the first woman to be appointed General Secretary of the STUC in 2020.

Foyer’s is one of a handful of compelling voices in a movement that has been on the ascendant across the UK following the end of Covid restrictions. Along with leaders such as Mick Lynch of the RMT; Sharon Graham, head of Unite; and Gary Smith, President of the GMB she has overseen a resurgence in the fortunes of UK trade unionism. Membership rates are rising and workers in non-union shops are reaching out to the movement for advice on how to get organised.

“Collective power is a basic and fundamental right,” she says. “Freedom of association and the right to join a trade union and withdraw your labour is a basic human right underlined by ILO (International Labour Organisation) conventions. Union power works.

“It results in increases and better terms and conditions. We have put hundreds of millions of pounds in workers’ pockets that they wouldn’t otherwise have obtained if they hadn’t fought back or stood together. We’ve also seen some very sensible deals reached in the private sector, signalling an end to many years of wage suppression. This is simply a fair reflection of the profits some of these companies have been making.”

She is in no doubt the experience of many during the Covid-19 lockdown has contributed to a greater appreciation of trade unions. Over the course of the last two years it became apparent the UK can’t function properly without transport workers; supermarket assistants; refuse collectors; nurses.

Along with manual workers in the construction industry and in the countryside they maintain the country’s social dignity: cleanliness; safety, food and shelter.

The inessential workers are corporate lobbyists; business consultants and political advisers. Yet among this ethereal and parasitical sector were several braying voices deriding low-paid workers for having wage expectations above their true status.

“During Covid, I think something snapped in people’s heads,” Foyer points out. “Frontline and public sector employees, whose rates of pay are not high, felt they were being exploited and patronised with the doorstep claps – and then being told afterwards that they were not considered worthy of a cost-of-living pay rise.

“We’ve reached a situation where people can’t afford to pay their bills or feed their children. And we’re talking about in-work poverty. It began to dawn on people that we don’t have an economy that works for working people. Most people are no longer in receipt of a workplace pension, yet this is one of many of those post-war benefits we fought for and on which we built our society. We have gradually had many of those gains taken away from us.

“This is real for people. Look at our carers: their death rates are twice as high as in other sectors. These are people who were worried about bringing the virus home to their families, yet they went out to work every single day. You can’t under-estimate the level of anger that’s out there.

“This has given us the platform to start making those arguments and to outline the facts of how money works in modern Britain and how it’s skewed in favour of the super-rich. It’s not Ukraine or the pandemic that’s caused the economic disaster we’re facing; it’s actually decades of the rich and powerful stealing wealth from our class; sucking profits from our economy and offshoring them.”

Yet, she is unsparing too of the SNP in its efforts to mitigate the iniquities of Westminster’s Conservative administration. The day after our interview, Anton Muscatelli, £300,000-per-annum Principal of Glasgow University and one of the Scottish Government’s pet economic advisers tweeted about the economic chaos at the heart of Downing Street: “I keep hoping that there is a silver lining to this sorry tale: that it might re-educate all political leaders (from the left as much as the right) about the importance of respecting markets, orthodox economics and sound money.”

The markets, eh? Such casual and incoherent economic assumptions based on a sense of entitlement help maintain patterns of inequality. Yet, to be fair to this anointed academic, it was a decent approximation of the SNP’s own economic blueprint. Foyer wants the Scottish Government to do much better with what it already has before it starts talking about what life in an independent Scotland might look like.

“I think that if the SNP is serious about taking its project forward then it has some huge decisions to make. The Scottish Government is the last line of defence for working-class people in Scotland while we are stuck with a hard-right Tory government with bonkers economic policies.

“The Scottish Government must use every power at its disposal to support people; to tax the rich and tax wealth; to be creative about how it taxes profitable businesses in order to re-distribute money in Scotland. If it wants people to trust them I think it’s essential it does that in the period ahead. This is why we’ve been pushing our People’s Plan for Action because we think we need radical, emergency measures.

“The STUC absolutely supports the right of the Scottish Parliament to determine the timing of a future referendum, but the jury is out on whether we would support independence as a concept. Because, first of all, we want to see a prospectus. Obviously, the status quo under the Tories isn’t acceptable, but nor is the last SNP vision that was offered to us (The Growth Commission) which was just as neo-liberal in some ways as what we are currently facing under the UK Tories. We need to see radical solutions; not just taking. We’ve not seen enough on the ground that makes a real difference to people’s lives.”

After last weekend’s SNP conference, Foyer expressed cautious approval of the SNP’s stated economic preferences, but it came with several qualifications. Speaker after speaker at the conference poured vitriol on the Tories’ economic incontinence and their attacks on the weakest members of society. But Foyer wants to see firm action following the honeyed words.

“The extreme nature of the Truss/Johnson governments has made it easy for the SNP to look good by simply doing nothing. But that simply isn’t good enough.

“It needs to go further and needs to go faster. It needs to be bolder and bring in protections for people now. This may mean taking political risks, but if it does not even attempt it people will begin to see through it.”. I think there’s an absolute duty on any government which describes itself as left-of-centre to start introducing radical emergency policies to protect its people at a time like this. And I don’t see the SNP government doing that yet.”

She scorns those influential figures in the SNP who accused Glasgow’s refuse workers last year of fascist behaviour as they went on strike during COP26.

“That was infantile, but it happens far too often,” she says.

“Workers never take strike action lightly and it’s extremely regrettable that there are some who would choose to accuse them of having underlying motives.

“It’s our members who instruct us and a large percentage of them are SNP voters. They are the reason it keeps winning elections. We don’t have some political chessboard with a party agenda.”