Unions must reach out to the communities

I am writing this from a house near Oakland, California, where in the early hours of New Year's Day in 2009 a Transit system police officer Johannes Mehserie killed unarmed young African-American Oscar Grant by shooting him in the back.

A number of bystanders captured the incident on digital and mobile phone cameras.

At his trial in June 2010 the jury found Mehserie guilty of involuntary manslaughter. This led to protests and serious incidents of looting, arson and rioting.

By the end of the year Mehserie had been sentenced to two years in prison after the federal government intervened with a civil rights prosecution.

Last week I woke to the news that back home, on a road I used to live on in Tottenham, young black man Mark Duggan had been shot and killed by a police officer.

The same scenario that emerged in Oakland - community protests and then more serious disturbances - was played out on the streets of north London.

Unlike the uprisings of the 1980s, these wider disturbances appear to be far more multiracial but they do share the commonality of taking place under a right-wing Tory government.

The wise words of the great Martin Luther King spring to mind.

"When you cut facilities, slash jobs, abuse power, discriminate, drive people into deeper poverty and shoot people dead while refusing to provide answers or justice, the people will rise up and express their anger and frustration if you refuse to hear their cries. A riot is the language of the unheard."

While violence cannot be condoned, it can't be wrong to understand why people might seize the opportunity to break a few windows or steal some goods just because they can.

Ministers showed how out of touch they were by initially refusing to return from their holidays and take personal charge of the crisis.

They seemed to think it was a mark of strength to stay away rather than another example of the incredible indifference that is the hallmark of this government.

The subsequent parliamentary debate saw predictable, sanctimonious claptrap emerging from many privileged mouths.

The left surely must respond by rising above the infantile jockeying for position and leadership that sadly often follows these sorts of incidents.

For those of us involved in progressive politics, including trade unionists, our task must be to identify a way out of the violence and disorder that will bring about meaningful and lasting change.

An important political opportunity is upon us. Explanations and solutions need to be presented to all these disaffected people who are rising up in the streets.

And the trade union movement must play a central role in bringing together progressive political forces with our allies in the community.

This is a chance to bring to life all those things that many of us have been saying for years about a new kind of trade unionism which represents our members not only at work but in every aspect of workers' lives.

In truth, this is not a new kind of trade unionism at all. It's a social justice trade unionism that we seemingly all but abandoned in the 1980s.

Social justice trade unionism means that we have to sit with our partners in the community who believe and are fighting for many of the same things that we are, check our "isms" at the door and talk about how we can work together in ways that will actually make a positive difference to communities in a way that neither civil disturbances in the street or self-righteous debates in Parliament will.

To make this happen, unions, as Unison certainly has, have to prioritise organising. Yes, we have to prioritise recruitment to our ranks because without this we can't help to deliver the power our members need in the workplace.

But we must also prioritise recruitment and organising within the workplace coupled with organising outside in the community.

As the battles to maintain public services and the jobs of those workers who deliver them continues to hot up, we must remember that the fight will not be won without the support of the communities we serve.

After all, our members are mothers, fathers, daughters and sons in their communities as well as workers in their workplaces.

When Martin Luther King lost his life supporting the Memphis sanitation workers' strike in 1968 it was about much more than a labour dispute. King was part of a social movement for economic and social justice. That's where the British trade union movement needs to be today.

(Written in a personal capacity and first published in the Morning Star - online on 15 August 2011)