Andrea Egan, backed by the organised left of UNISON, has become the next General Secretary in the election. This is a massive win for working people and class-struggle trade union activists, and the first time a left-backed candidate has won this position in Britain’s biggest trade union. She beat the incumbent Christine McAnea convincingly with 58,579 (59.82%) compared to McAnea’s 39,353 (40.18%)

McAnea was a close ally of Starmer. Huffington Post reported the upset at Labour HQ; a senior Labour source said the result was an “absolute fucking disaster – a massive loss for Keir”. Another party insider said: “It’s terrible. The biggest trade union in the country has gone to the hard left for the first time ever.”

Since its inception in 1993, UNISON has positioned itself as a ‘service model’ union, attracting members by offering benefits such as cheaper insurance or dental discounts, whilst full-time unelected officials essentially run the union behind the scenes.

UNISON makes a lot of noise about being member-led and having lay representatives at most levels of the union, which is true, but the real power lies elsewhere. In Labour, UNISON has generally tacked to the right, and its representatives in senior positions played a destructive, undermining role during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Senior officials are even being embroiled in the racist comments that were highlighted in the leaks from WhatsApp groups and emails.

UNISON was also the first to buckle in 2014, calling off its involvement in the last great strike wave during the anti-austerity pay fightback. Since then, it has failed to secure meaningful strike action on most national issues, and in key sectors like health (where it has nearly 500,000 members in the NHS), it has fallen behind the BMA doctors’ union and even Unite in organising industrial action, despite being the largest union!

Its failure to really mobilise members to vote for strike action has resulted in local government workers losing around 30% of their pay in real terms since 2010 – everyone is effectively working more than a day for free at the Councils.

And on key issues where there is a crying need for change, like a national elderly care service to provide for us in old age instead of US-backed private equity funds running horrible ‘granny farms’ for profit, UNISON has been unable to make any progress lobbying the government. 

Time for change

UNISON has been moving to the left in the last few years. The broad left Time For Real Change won two sets of NEC elections in recent years, though it lost its majority at the last one. There is no room for complacency. The platform of Time For Real Change (TFRC) is simple – we need to turn UNISON into a fighting union that can deliver for its members. It was no surprise when the internal rules for the General Secretary election effectively proscribed TFRC campaigning!

Egan’s campaign stood out with that simple message, and her commitment to only taking an average worker’s wage was popular in workplaces. 

This election win came a day after the Employment Rights Bill was finally passed in Parliament. This scraps the 50% threshold for turnout in strike ballots and the Minimum Service Levels law, though it isn’t clear when this will be enacted (consultations are ongoing!). However, this gives us a chance to get industrial action back on the agenda, as we struggled to do over the last 10 years. Strikes are critical to workers because withdrawing our labour is the most powerful tool we have to win concessions from the bosses. 

There is a chance for the unions and workers’ movement to get back on their feet and start fighting back against the erosion of the public sector and the massive wealth gap. In 2023/4, 11% of UK households (7.5 million people) suffered from food poverty, including 18% of children, but there are now 156 billionaires in Britain, compared to only 15 in 1990. 

If the current left-wing movement in UNISON can be sustained and deepened, it will eventually affect the Labour Party as well. UNISON was one of the first, through its Labour Link, to back Starmer without any consultation. The capitalist press has said that Egan’s win might pave the way for a soft-left candidate like Andy Burnham to replace Starmer if the May 2026 elections are poor.

Perhaps, though, the GS has limited powers over Labour Link, which is still dominated by the right.  Nevertheless, Egan took a strong anti-Starmer stance and even raised the question of whether UNISON would continue to back Labour given its appalling moves to the right. This resonated with members compared to the incumbent’s lack of criticism of the Labour government. 

On another level, some of the people running UNISON are the same people who crushed the Labour left and got Corbyn expelled. A serious movement from below is needed to back all the left in senior positions because there is a past form for isolating people who win elections that the bureaucracy does not support.

Support and pressure from below will be crucial to advancing a democratic, class-struggle agenda in the union. The turnout for the election was very low – of the 1,3 million members, only around 7.5% voted. The lack of engagement from members in their union and interest in who runs it is something that needs to be overcome. We need an active and critically engaged membership if we are going to turn this ship around. 

From that perspective, it is absolutely crucial to use this success as a springboard to rejuvenate branches across the country, many of which have mainly become inactive and lack activists. A real push is needed to build a national network of stewards and activists, with training and a message of radicalism, to bring new people to a fighting outlook. Money should be diverted from funding a large bureaucracy to building up strike funds and providing more training courses, resources and local branch funds.

The left also needs to build better political education. Political education has almost disappeared in the union movement, and the left can use this opportunity, via a national network of stewards and Time for Real Change, to reintroduce political education at branch, regional and national levels. Ultimately, trade unionism alone can’t win the struggles ahead; there needs to be political representation and workforces that take on the ideas of socialism and are prepared to fight the whole system, not just their employer.

And as mentioned above, building on that, there will need to be political discussions among members about whether to overhaul the Labour Link or to decide to fund and link up with a new left-wing party such as Your Party. The stifling bureaucracy of Labour might well make a new socialist party far more appealing to most members.

With Reform and the far right looming large on the horizon, UNISON is also in a good position to push back on their bigoted agenda. UNISON has a majority female membership and represents workplaces with a lot of black and LGBT+ workers.

The current leadership was already buckling on backing trans rights and trans members, and a new leadership should be at the forefront in pushing back on the racist, sexist, disablist and transphobic agenda of Reform, including in the councils Reform currently controls. The self-organised groups in UNISON obviously play a key role in this.

We are clear as ecosocialists that wins like this are not the last word; each win only opens up another stage of struggle until we finally get rid of the capitalists and their rotten system of exploitation and misery.

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