Mark Robinson of Unite in Grimwade Street, Ipswich

One group battling the effects of the economic downturn as well as businesses are trades unions such as Unite. Sarah Chambers spoke to Unite’s Suffolk-based regional organiser, Mark Robinson, about his approach to the problems which beset employees and employers in times like these

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AS the size of companies shrink, so too does union membership.

For Mark Robinson, regional organiser at Unite, who is based at the union’s offices in Grimwade Street, Ipswich, battling the effects of the economic crisis is just as challenging as for employers.

It means a tough fight across company boardroom tables to improve the pay and conditions of his members. But he also has to balance that with preserving jobs.

Across the country, Unite has 1.3 million members in a wide variety of roles and workplaces. In Suffolk, that equates to between 9,000 and 10,000 members and over the eastern region 60,000. They can be found everywhere from insurance giant Axa, Barclays bank or retailers Boots to food factories and manufacturing firms such as Birds Eye, Ransomes Jacobsen, Bosch and PPG.

“Our membership are realists,” says Mark. “Whilst they want to maintain and improve their conditions, they are aware of what’s going on in their organisation, whether that’s locally, regionally or nationally. Some of them are in extremely difficult markets,” he says.

“A pay review is great, but it has to be affordable to the company. It’s no good going into a pay dispute if six months down the line it’s going to result in redundancies.”

Like his members, Mark too is a realist, and while he believes that with union support, workers can achieve better pay and conditions than without it, he is not under any illusions about the difficulty of his task. With budgets tightening and jobs under threat, high inflation is often being awkwardly matched with meagre pay offers. But he is by no means “trigger happy” when it comes to strike action.

“We want to build relationships,” he says.

“I don’t like having to go an industrial action route. Whilst it’s good press and gets the organisation known, I want to be putting positive news stories into the paper. Instead of talking about strikes and industrial action and redundancies, I would rather be talking about investment and reasonable pay offers that have been accepted.”

Membership across the trade union movement has seen a gradual decline and Mark believes there are numerous reasons for this. One is members retiring and another is that as larger organisations have shrunk in size through redundancies, so has the number within the union. With the growth of the service sector, there has been a move away from collective bargaining, and many organisations now employ fewer than 50 people.

“People don’t see unions in those types of organisations as relevant as in larger organisations,” he says.

The union movement needs to be more pro-active, he believes, in showing employees “we are not a bunch of people who are out to take people out on strike every five minutes”, he says. Other social changes have affected attitudes to the union movement as well, and he admits there can be difficulties engaging with younger workers.

“I think generally over a period of time people are less politicised with a small ‘p’ and a big ‘p’. We have seen voting going down in general elections. It used to be 75%, now you are lucky to get 65%. There’s an element of how we get the younger generation engaged.

“Since the 80s, there has been a move away from collectivism and community towards the individual, to instead of saying: ‘How does this affect us?’ to: ‘How does this affect me?’,” he says.

“A lot of small businesses are extremely hostile towards unions. They see the national press and think we are all trying to agitate which is grossly unfair and grossly untrue. We are here to reflect the views of our members. We can’t be a top-down organisation. Our members tell us what they want.”

However, he says, collective bargaining is still “very much alive and well”.

“The problem is in the larger organisations, they are not as common as they were 20 years ago,” he says.

As well as bargaining on pay and conditions for his members, Mark will also take up individual cases where members believe they are being treated unfairly at work.

Often problems arise because firms fail to stick to their own internal procedures, he says. Some companies are willing to listen and put things right, but others take things to the wire and this can be expensive for them. He cites the example of a worker in a food factory who suffered an industrial accident. The firm decided he was at fault and dismissed him. Unite believed the firm’s reasoning was unsound and took the case to tribunal. The tribunal agreed with the union and a payout of £50,000 followed.

“It’s getting employers of the individual staff to fully honour and respect 
what their internal procedures are,” he says.

HR professionals may not point employers in the most sensible direction, he believes.

“They are not going to tell you the common sense way of dealing with this. We have to sometimes tell these people that what they are doing is not within the realms of the law or: ‘Have you thought of dealing with a pay situation or a work situation differently?’”

What employers sometimes fail to recognise are the common interests between unions and themselves, he says.

“It’s in our interests that the business succeeds. For a business to succeed, it’s got to have a well trained, dedicated, loyal workforce. What you can’t do is treat your employees with no respect because they are, in quotes, lucky to have a job,” he says.

“What you’ll find is you are having to put ads in the paper for when people leave. It’s treating your employees with respect and dignity and making sure your remuneration package is a good.”

Mark says he and his colleagues have good working relationships with the overwhelming majority of the employers where Unite has collective representation, although every organisation will have its quirks.

While he predicts serious unrest in the public sector as budget cuts bite, locally at least, “business-wise things are generally good”.

Mark mainly covers small and medium-sized firms in the east Suffolk area.

He works from what was the TGWU building in Ipswich, which opened in 1939. Upstairs is a hall still used for meetings and rallies. A lot of members still walk in off the street as the office is fairly central. There are plans which have been in the pipeline for some years to regenerate the area where the building sits, and there are hopes they will eventually get more up-to-date premises.

His own working life began at the age of 16 when he joined the Co-operative Insurance Society in Manchester. He took a course in business studies on day release and became involved in the union. He quickly rose through the ranks and became responsible for looking after the interests of the 3,500 strong Manufacturing, Science and Finance union (MSF) members within the company. In the mid-1990s, he negotiated a new job evaluation scheme which made systems within the organisation more transparent.

The Co-operative Insurance Society had an office in Bury St Edmunds which he visited on a number of occasions. In 2000, he moved to Suffolk as full-time MSF officer. Since then, he has continued through two union mergers. In 2004, MSF merged with the Amalgamated Electrical Engineering Union (AEEU) to become Amicus. Then in 2009, Amicus merged with TGWU to form Unite.

“I was always interested in improving people’s conditions, working with employers to see if we could work on working methods that would benefit the employees as well as benefiting the employers,” he says.