USDAW worker

When you ask for a full time job on the checkouts in Tesco the answer is 'we don't give full time jobs on checkouts because it is too boring and we don't want you going braindead'. What they really mean to say is ' although we earned £2,2 billion in profits last year we don't give full time jobs because we don't want to pay National Insurance contributions for you'.

The fact is it's very hard to get full time work anywhere in retail as a part-time skint workforce is all the more compliant and flexible to the employers' needs. From major understaffing in Woolies to a nightmare sequence of split shift patterns in 24hour Spars or Tesco's 3%absence-and-you're-out sickness policy (SYA-Supporting Your Attendance, better known as Sacking Your Assistant)- every company has its slave driving tactics.
The question is what can motivate a young shopworker to feel we can change company policy and that there's more to work than dreaming of pay day? The only answer can be a fighting union and there is no doubt that more than in any sector (along with catering) there is more than enough to be angry about. The European decency threshold is based on 68% of the average adult earnings is £275.60 a week, yet sales and retail assistants' earnings are well below at £244.95 for men and £218.85 for women. Average earnings increases for retail are 1.6% while average earnings generally stand at 3.8%. And these figures don't even touch on the inequality faced by retail workers earning below the adult rate. All this during a major boom period for the shopping giants.

Low pay campaign

This of course makes the Socialist Party's low pay campaign the biggest issue and the best recruiting agent of young workers to unions. Out of 2,6 million retail workers at the moment only a tiny percentage are in trade unions (the biggest retail union USDAW has only 340,000), but with the right strategy large numbers of young workers in particular can be unionised which could in turn mark a drastic shift in youth consciousness.
In some stores where we have 80% staff turnover the reality is that the majority of young workers, making up a third of the workforce don't know what a trade union is. And this is hardly a surprise when their union has spent a large part of the last twenty years literally marketing itself as an insurance policy
. In the last five years the union tops, feeling the drop in numbers joining hit their pockets, have decided to adopt 'the organising model'. This means turing the union into a campaigning union and attracting new members on the basis not of the service you provide but by organising stores so that members play an active part and turn the union into their own. This idea ironically dubbed 'new unionism', in reference to the beginning of the formation of the union movement, is of course the only way a union can attract young people in particular who will not automatically join as in the past. In practice of course USDAW's national policies of class collaborationism and partnership with it's biggest wealth earner Tesco means that any organising model is strictly superficial as a union without teeth can't effectively campaign on anything. This is why it is so important for new blood to turn the union around.

Sunday trading sellout

USDAW's biggest campaign at the moment is on Sunday trading against the extension of opening hours. This is a very big issue as in the eyes of most workers it's linked to the deregulation of Sunday working altogether, in particular the erosion of hourly premium entitlements. Of course the union cynically uses the campaign as a recruitment tool knowing full well that the extension of hours has already been agreed in a meeting of John Hannet, USDAW secretary, Blair and Tesco's Terry Leahy.
However it is through recruiting young workers on the basis of this campaign that the untapped potential a fighting union can have becomes clear. Although small, there is a layer of active young reps genuinely building the campaign by collecting petitions and appealing to other young members to join the youth committes and fight for Sunday double time for all. Linking up the issues of low pay and union campaigns such as the Sundays one paves the way for a new generation of shopworkers to gain a voice and transform our unions into genuine mass forces for change.