unspun
The view from INSIDE PR
From Acas all-nighters to Britain needs a pay rise
A
fter 20 years at the TUC, I’m hanging up my flat cap, letting my brasier go to rust, and swapping
beer and sandwiches for white wine and smoked salmon (except that I quite like beer). When I first took over the TUC’s PR,
the trick was to know all the industrial correspondents, and, better still, drink with them. While the glory days of the FT having five (correspondents that is, not pints) had long gone, they still had two – and every other paper had at least one. And on the whole, they came to us looking for stories. Now only the sainted Alan Jones of the Press Association remains as a traditional ‘industrial’. To some extent that reflects a diminished role for unions (except of course in the pages of the Daily Mail where we secretly run the country) as our membership has declined. In particular there are hardly any strikes, though that did not stop the Conservatives putting ballot law changes in their manifesto that would make legal strikes close to impossible. The camaraderie of pizza at ACAS
or Congress House as negotiations go into the night is now so unusual that neophyte hacks no longer know the etiquette and have to be told that the
18 | theJournalist
form is always that either ‘hopes rise’ or ‘hopes fall’ for a settlement even when nothing has happened other than a request for extra anchovies. One day I hope to visit the travel chaos looms in the weaving sheds erected in newsrooms for every potential rail dispute. Yet I am not nostalgic, as the role
has moved from the second more passive part of my responsibility for campaigns and communications, to the first. For what we do now is campaign. The hard power of industrial action remains in the union locker, but the soft power of influence and agenda setting has grown, and much of that comes from effective use of communication.
T
he TUC’s ‘Britain Needs a Pay Rise’ campaign and our work in exposing zero-hours contracts both
set up election issues. And with Labour unsure whether it was in favour of Keynesian growth or austerity-lite, the TUC was often the clearest national voice opposing cuts and arguing the deficit was a symptom of what is wrong in the economy, not its cause – the mainstream view among
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www.tuc.org. uk @TUCnews @ TUCeconomics
academic economists, though not the media.
Getting Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, to speak on a platform emblazoned with Britain Needs a Pay Rise logos was therefore an obvious highlight, capped only by David Cameron actually saying it, in a plea to employers for a little pre- election generosity.
B
ut combining the TUC’s authoritative research with effective communications and
behind the scenes public affairs predates the coalition. It won a minimum wage – still highly controversial when I started, rights for part-timers, union recognition laws, compulsory employer pension contributions, holiday rights and the rest of the social Europe package to list but a few. And while unions may still be the bogey men and women for the right, I am optimistic. The financial crisis is now widely recognised to have been driven by the imbalances caused by growing inequality as people denied pay rises borrowed instead. Across the world there is a growing recognition, even from the IMF, that one cause has been the decline of collective bargaining and effective trade unionism. But I have also had a lot of fun,
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even in the last few weeks. When the Conservatives announced that they were giving people the right to volunteer for three days a year, we issued a press release welcoming this boost for union activists – after all we are Britain’s biggest voluntary movement. Quickly the Tories clarified that it would only apply to charities. So we were able to issue a further release regretting the fact that parents would not be able to help at a schools sports day, unless their children attended a public school with charitable status. When asked on the BBC news channel if we were simply making mischief, my strict adherence to the NUJ code of conduct for PRs meant I could only answer in the affirmative.
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