Rajeev Syal’s article (Analysis, 14 December) contains a number of typical misconceptions about unions. First of all, there is no one homogeneous block called “unions”. As I argued in my book Ramparts of Resistance, the organisational form contains both an institutional and a movement element. Second, and related, trade union/working-class action is unpredictable, as history has shown over and over; even the major upsurge of 1968-74 was not predicted by researchers, who indeed dismissed workers in, for example, the car industry, as happily “affluent”. The actuality of the much-vaunted trade union power is based in the workplace, not in expensive union offices and highly paid union leaders. The recent, admittedly minor, upsurge of industrial unrest among so-called gig employees is testament to this – as indeed your correspondent in one sense acknowledges. For some of us concerned with the increasing impoverisation of workers and intensification of labour in the workplace, a repeated assertion of trade union power from the grassroots upwards can’t come too soon.
Sheila Cohen
London
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