The Trades Union Congress (TUC), the body bringing together all the UK's trades unions has issued a call for the political power of the working classes to be rebuilt.
The TUC was founded more than a century ago to 'advance the general interests of the working classes', a mission it still adheres to today.
These are difficult times for the union movement in the UK, figures published by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in 2017 show that membership has risen slightly with 6.2 million workers being union members, a huge fall from a peak of 13million in 1979.
Union membership is ageing too with members over the age of first outnumbering younger members. Once a bastion of blue-collar solidarity there are now more union members in professional jobs (37.9%) than those described as 'routine ' (20.8%).
This fall in membership among members of what were in simpler times called the 'working class’ comes at a time when more UK workers are defining themselves by class. Research published in 2015 showed 60% of UK workers defining as working class, including 47% engaged in job roles classed as being managerial.
For the lowest paid workers, those in most need of unionization these are difficult times. Data produced by the Social Metrics Commission in 2017 show that 22% of the UK population were living on relative low incomes, meaning their income is below the national average. Increasingly people in this situation are in full time work, giving a hollow ring to government claims that it can end inequality just by getting more people into work.
Work itself is becoming harder for those in 'routine ' occupations, mostly in the retail and service sectors. These jobs are frequently done by women and members of the BME community, hours are usually long and unsociable with little compensation in terms of pay.
To the existing discrimination around race and gender the TUC argue that discrimination on the grounds of class should also be considered and is calling on the government to act.
Among the recommendations made in the report the TUC wants new powers for workers to negotiate better pay and conditions through collective bargaining. They also call for the rebuilding of public services that have been decimated by a decade of austerity.
The most interesting and potentially challenging recommendation is that employers should be required to publish data on class related pay gaps. This would be paired with the introduction of legislation to tackle class discrimination.
There is no disputing the fact that since 2010 the coalition and then Conservative led governments have got more people into work; the evidence for their claim to have made work pay is much harder to find. In fact, their policies have contributed to the return of a growing cohort of the 'working poor ' for the first time in decades.
Calling for action to address the inequalities that are causing so much harm to the most vulnerable members of society is something that accords with the traditional role of the TUC. As is attempting to revive political activity in workplaces and marginalized communities.
Aspirations and achievements, however noble, are quite different things; the latter must climb the steep hill of real-life conditions and for reviving working class political power the omens are not propitious.
Working life is more frantic and fragmented than it was even a decade ago, people in short term insecure jobs don't put down roots long enough to learn the names of their co-workers, never mind develop a collective political consciousness. Unions, despite their best efforts to claim otherwise cast a much smaller shadow than they did in 1979, with many members seeing them more as an insurance policy than a political organization.
The biggest barrier though to rebuilding working class political consciousness is the all-pervasive grip of our consumer society. Even those who have the least capacity to do so are enlisted into a wild hunt after the brass ring of affluence.
The TUC deserve credit for trying to turn the tide of apathy and for seeking to place class discrimination alongside the other forms we have rightly learnt to abhor. They can't do so alone though; they need to operate within a political system that looks outwards to a society in which participants want to do good; not inwards to their own personal rivalries.
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