Britain’s Tory Party Has Suffered Its Worst-Ever Defeat

AN INTERVIEW WITHPHIL BURTON-CARTLEDGE

The big story of this month’s UK election was a Conservative meltdown, while support for Labour barely rose at all. Along with disastrous missteps by Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak, long-term structural factors mean the Tories are in decline.

Outgoing British prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party Rishi Sunak delivers a statement after losing the general election, outside 10 Downing Street in London on July 5, 2024. (Henry Nicholls / AFP via Getty Images)

JACOBIN
07.15.2024
INTERVIEW BYDANIEL FINN

At first glance, the result of the British general election seems like a massive popular mandate for Keir Starmer and the Labour Party. Labour ended up with 411 seats in the House of Commons, while the Conservative Party had just 121. But we have to reckon with the British electoral system, which can give parties a large majority of seats without even a small majority of votes.

Labour will form a government with less than 34 percent of the overall vote. That’s barely 2 percent more than the party achieved with Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2019, on a much lower turnout. The real story of the election was a Tory collapse. The Conservative vote share dropped by 20 percent, and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK divided the right-wing bloc with its anti-immigrant platform.

Phil Burton-Cartledge is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Derby, and the author of a book about the long-term crisis of the Conservative Party, The Party’s Over. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin Radio’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the interview here.

DANIEL FINN

To begin with, can you give us a sense of how bad this defeat was for the Conservative Party, and how it compares to John Major’s loss back in 1997?

PHIL BURTON-CARTLEDGE

In 2019, when Boris Johnson took the Conservative Party to victory, it won a majority of eighty seats. It won 365 seats overall with a vote of nearly 14 million. This year, the Conservatives lost 251 seats, and their vote more than halved to 6.8 million. Effectively, they’ve been handed the worst election performance in Conservative Party history. You’d have to go back to 1922 for them to have won fewer votes in absolute terms than this, and they actually won that election in 1922.

This is a worse defeat than 1997. Back then, John Major was still able to poll nine and a half million votes and get 30 percent of the overall vote. They had 165 seats in 1997, and that was regarded as a very bad defeat by Conservative Party standards.

This is much, much worse. When you consider that it took thirteen years for the Conservatives to clamber back from that defeat in 1997 and form a government, albeit in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, if they were to recover at the same rate this time around, you’re talking about another twenty years before the Conservatives can get back into power.Defeat suddenly flushes out all of the problems that Conservatives already knew they had but sat on before the election.

But things are even worse than that. Defeat suddenly flushes out all of the problems that Conservatives already knew they had but sat on before the election. There was some recognition among Conservatives that they need to have an offer they can make to younger working-age people, particularly around getting people on the housing ladder. You’ve had Conservatives opining about how constituency associations — the membership of the party — have been allowed to wither on the vine. You’ve had people complaining that in their safe seats, there hasn’t been door knocking taking place for well over twenty years.

There is that feeling of disconnect between themselves and their mass Conservative base. It could be papered over by the air war that Boris Johnson was able to launch in 2019, making the election all about Brexit and riling up the base without having to do the hard work or put down deep, authentic roots in those communities. But this is the election where that has really come home to roost.

Former prime minister Liz Truss, who will go down in Conservative Party lore for all the wrong reasons, had one of the safest seats in the country. Labour turned over her majority and was able to dump Truss out of the House of Commons. If that isn’t a measure of how bad the Conservative defeat is, I don’t know what is.
DANIEL FINN

In terms of explaining the reasons for this defeat, there was an argument that you made in your book, according to which the Conservative Party is facing a long-term decline because of a number of important structural and sociological factors. That was very much going against the grain of conventional wisdom when the first edition of your book came out — people were talking about Johnson bestriding the political scene like a colossus, ruling for another ten years, setting the agenda, yet you were arguing that the 2019 election victory hadn’t changed that picture of long-term decline.

Now since December 2019, there have also been a number of contingent scandals — although perhaps they reflect something deeper — from the demise of Boris Johnson’s leadership, plagued by a series of scandals that were known as “partygate,” to the short-lived fiasco of Liz Truss in Downing Street and the economic damage that resulted from it, and then the distinctly underwhelming leadership of Rishi Sunak, culminating in this snap election that appears to have been called almost on a whim. How do you think the balance can be struck between those long-term structural factors and what the Tories have gotten so badly wrong in the last three or four years?
PHIL BURTON-CARTLEDGE

When I wrote the book, I was very clear about the long-term problems of the Conservatives, but you could not have foreseen the short-term issues — the kind of things that Boris Johnson would get up to in office. I offered a bit of a forecast that if everything went okay for Johnson, the long-term decline of the Tories would only start to nibble at their heels over the course of the 2020s. They would still be competitive in this election, and it would be in the late 2020s and throughout the 2030s that things would start getting difficult if they did not address the long-term issues.

But then we saw “partygate,” with the revelation that senior Conservatives and Downing Street staff were having parties when everyone else had to abide by lockdowns. You had the scandal around that and the fact that Boris Johnson lied repeatedly, claiming he did not know anything about these parties when he attended them himself and emails went out in his name inviting people for drinks. This was followed by the Truss fiasco and Sunak’s management of decline. All of that sped up the process of long-term decline, which was already in train.

But something I didn’t talk about in the book a great deal — in hindsight I should have — was the effect of the competition the Conservative Party was facing from the right. You’ve had the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the Brexit Party, and now Reform UK. In 2019, Johnson was able to win because he effectively out-Brexited the Brexit Party, making that election all about Brexit.In 2019, Johnson was able to win because he effectively out-Brexited the Brexit Party, making that election all about Brexit.

The lump of the electorate that is overwhelmingly right-leaning and that found UKIP and the Brexit Party quite beguiling amounts to roughly 14 or 16 percent of the vote, depending on the day. In the last election, they all lined up behind Boris Johnson because of his promise to deliver Brexit. Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit Party, also said that he was only going to run Brexit Party campaigns in Labour-held seats. That undoubtedly helped the Conservatives as well, because Farage was able to cream off a layer of Labour Party voters who voted Leave in the 2016 referendum but still would not countenance voting Conservative.

This time, Reform stood nearly everywhere. The difference that counted in favor of the Conservatives back in 2019 counted against them this time. There were somewhere in the region of 170 seats where the margin of victory for Labour or the Liberal Democrats over the Conservatives was smaller than the numbers of votes that went to Reform. That was another contingent factor as well.

If you take things in the round, lumping together the Conservative vote with the Reform vote — which you couldn’t really do in an actual election — it comes in lower than what Boris Johnson was able to achieve in 2019. But it’s still a substantial block of votes, and greater than what Labour achieved this time as well. UKIP, the Brexit Party, and now Reform have all had a similar voting base: overwhelmingly composed of older people or retired people, overwhelmingly propertied, and more likely to find authoritarian, nostalgic politics quite attractive, because of the social positions that they occupy.

The right-wing voting block is in long-term decline: they’re not replacing themselves, and as a result, the block can only get smaller as time goes by. It was already smaller in 2024 than it was in 2019. But again, if Boris Johnson had not presided over “partygate,” or if there hadn’t been the kind of foolishness that we’ve seen from the Conservatives over the last four or five years, the bulk of Reform voters might well have stayed with the Conservatives, and the margin of victory for Labour would have been a lot narrower than it has been.
DANIEL FINN

As you say, there was a real difference between the desire of Farage and his allies to damage the Conservative Party this time around compared with 2019, so it’s worth asking why that was the case. Second, if you compare this election with two previous high points for Farage’s political vehicles: back in 2015, UKIP got about 12 percent of the vote, and then in 2019, the Brexit Party got 30 percent of the vote in the snap European election and topped the poll.

In both of those cases, you could say that Farage and his supporters were representing a point of view that didn’t otherwise have representation in British politics. Back in 2015, they were calling for Britain to leave the European Union and to scrap free movement of workers from EU member states, which neither Labour nor the Conservative Party was willing to advocate at that point.

Four years later, it was three years after the Brexit referendum, and everything was in flux in British politics. For many of the people who had voted Leave, there was a sense that their vote had not been implemented or honored, and they were worried that there was going to be some sort of scheme cooked up by the political class to prevent it from happening at all. Farage represented that point of view, and his success motivated the Tories to select Johnson as their leader and commit to Brexit at all costs by the end of the year.

Five years on from that European election, we’re in a situation where Britain has left the EU on terms that were considered particularly hard. There have been all kinds of new restrictions put in place on immigration, and both of the two major parties are committed to that — not just the Tory Party, but also Labour. In the last days of the election campaign, Keir Starmer said that he couldn’t envisage Britain rejoining the EU, or even rejoining the customs union or the single market, in his lifetime.

On the face of it, it might seem like there was no longer a need for a political formation like Reform, and yet it has done very well and got a higher vote share than UKIP got back in 2015. Why do you think that constituency is still there, and what potential do you think there is for that party and that political perspective in the period that’s opening up now?

PHIL BURTON-CARTLEDGE

I think it comes down to the words “Brexit betrayal.” Whatever you might say about the debates within the Conservative Party and why there was a significant section of those within it who were anti-EU, the way they were able to mobilize large numbers of votes in the referendum was precisely because of the anti-immigration pitch that Vote Leave and the various unofficial anti-EU campaigns put forward. Yet in practice, while Boris Johnson may have adopted very tough rhetoric, over the course of the last four or five years, we’ve actually seen record levels of immigration, albeit not from the EU this time.

A lot of people voted for Brexit because they identify immigration with all kinds of different things — uncertainty, discomfort with the way the world works, and a sense that Britain is being taken away from them, as well as the idea that these people are stealing jobs from their children and grandchildren or exacerbating the housing crisis. Those people cannot understand why they voted to end mass immigration and yet mass immigration is still happening. The Tory press has been going hard on this issue too.

In the early stages of his premiership, Rishi Sunak addressed the nation and said that he had five priorities, one of which was stopping the boats in the English Channel. You have refugee camps in northern France from which people have come over on dinghies to enter the country “illegally” — I use that term advisedly. This has been talked up as a problem by the media, and BBC reporters have even gone out in dinghies to try and interview people as they’ve been coming across on these small boats and ask them why they’re doing it.In the early stages of his premiership, Rishi Sunak said that he had five priorities, one of which was stopping the boats in the English Channel.

Sunak embraced the ridiculous Rwanda scheme, whereby people who arrived here “illegally” would be sent to Rwanda for processing. If they were eventually granted asylum, it was unlikely that they would ever end up in Britain anyway — they would have to make their homes in Rwanda. That scheme has spectacularly failed. It was very expensive, which of course was something that Keir Starmer was able to alight upon. The Conservatives haven’t been able to fulfill the promises they made around immigration, so Farage has capitalized on that.

Second, Boris Johnson linked Brexit very clearly to what he called “leveling up.” This was the idea that somehow the EU was holding Britain back and that any money Britain handed over to the EU could then be reinvested in the relatively neglected regions and nations of the UK. London and the Southeast are extremely dynamic economies, but the rest of the country has effectively been left to go to seed and now exists as the repository for a reserve army of labor that will go into the capital and the economically dynamic regions. Johnson said that he wanted to do something about that.

However, for a variety of reasons — not least because of clashes with Sunak and the Treasury — those schemes were derailed or wound down. They ultimately became ways of funneling public money from the center to Conservative-held constituencies — not just the formerly Labour-supporting areas they were able to win in 2019, but quite wealthy Conservative areas as well. For example, Robert Jenrick, the former Conservative immigration minister who is sadly one of the survivors from this election, was able to divert money to his local high street in a fairly affluent area.

You have a perception of pork-barrel politics where things hadn’t changed at all for the poorer regions. Jonathan Gullis was a relatively prominent, so-called Red Wall Tory who won Stoke-on-Trent North in 2019, which historically had been a Labour seat. I went to visit his constituency, where I used to live locally, about eighteen months ago. There were a lot more boarded-up shops than I remembered from my previous visit, but the only new thing on the high street was his constituency office. There is a sense that the Conservatives have taken everything for granted, and as a result, people have turned against them in droves.There is a sense that the Conservatives have taken everything for granted, and as a result, people have turned against them in droves.

There was a debate in the Conservative Party in the early months of 2020 about what they were going to do with all of these working-class seats. James Frayne, a senior Conservative strategist who has worked for the Centre for Policy Studies and a number of other think tanks, wrote an article for Conservative Home, which is effectively the online brain for Conservative activists. He argued that the party didn’t really need to do anything — all that it had to do was go hard on immigration and cut people’s benefits, and working-class voters in those seats would thank them for it. That is exactly what the Conservative Party has done, and nothing has changed; so people who would never vote Labour but were angry at this turn of events voted for Reform.

When it comes to Farage’s own motivations, he helped Boris Johnson win that huge majority in 2019 by specifically targeting Labour seats, but he has received no thanks for it at all. The Conservative Party still wants to keep him at arm’s length. There are a few figures in the party who think that a lash-up between the Conservatives and Reform would be wonderful, but they’re very much in a minority. Farage understands that he is an outsider and has been treated as a pariah. For his pains, he decided that a bit of revenge was necessary.

We should also note another reason why Farage decided to return to British politics and lead Reform into this election. Reform is a limited company, owned by Farage as the majority shareholder, rather than a proper political party. He can appoint himself managing director and leader if he wants. He was due to spend this summer in the United States campaigning for Donald Trump. He only changed his mind after Trump was sent down for felony charges in relation to the Stormy Daniels case.

It seems to me that Farage has decided that associating himself with Trump would perhaps not be the best thing for his long-term future in British politics. He returned to Britain and targeted the Conservatives on their vulnerabilities.

He also mobilized an explicitly racist vote by coming out with a number of dog whistles during the election, such as when he said that Rishi Sunak, who is from Indian heritage, doesn’t understand our culture. That message was picked up loud and clear by racist voters who would normally have stayed at home during this election, and that unquestionably boosted Reform’s showing at the polls too.
DANIEL FINN

If we think about the future of the Conservative Party over the years to come, what direction do you think they’re likely to embark on from this point? Is there going to be an attempt to move back toward the center or further radicalization toward the right? Which remaining Tory politicians are likely to be the key figures, and is there a potential path for them toward recovery over the next decade or so?
PHIL BURTON-CARTLEDGE

If you’d asked me a few weeks ago, I’d have thought it was obvious that they were going to turn to the right because of the gravitational pull of Reform. Reform was able this time to break through the first-past-the-post system and win five seats in Parliament. The party won 4.1 million votes, which is more than were cast for the Liberal Democrats, who won seventy-two seats. Some Conservatives will say, “It’s obvious that we need to go hard on immigration and tax cuts” — tax cuts were another component of the Reform platform — “and then votes will flow to us.”

There is a degree of sense in that, from a rational-choice point of view. As happened in 1997, the Conservatives have suffered a devastating defeat. From the standpoint of recovery, they need to sort out their core vote and establish a foundation before they can build (or rebuild) the rest of the building.

Turning right — because of course, the Conservative grassroots are quite right-wing — makes sense in that context as well. You’d be able to build the core and start recovering on that basis, which is exactly what William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, and Michael Howard did between 1997 and 2005. It was only after 2005, once they had cohered their core vote, that they were able to start going after the center ground.

You do have a number of right-wingers jockeying for position who could do this. You have Kemi Badenoch, who was previously the minister for equality. You have Suella Braverman, the former Home Secretary, who is renowned for spouting conspiracy theories about “cultural Marxism” and various other right-wing touchstones. You also have Priti Patel, who came up with the Rwanda scheme in the first place.

On the other hand, we should consider the observation of Paul Goodman, onetime editor of Conservative Home and a former Conservative MP. He pointed out that the way that the devastation has rippled through the Conservative parliamentary group means that it is no longer as right-wing as it was before the general election.

There are more — again, I use these terms advisedly — centrist or center-left figures in the spectrum of the Conservative Party. Bear in mind that these “centrist” or “One Nation” Tories were quite happy to go along with the Rwanda scheme and all the other horrors that the Conservative Party has come out with over the last five years, so everything is relative.The more centrist elements of the Conservative Party will want to make sure there are two centrist candidates that go to the membership.

Their favorite son is a guy called Tom Tugendhat who stood in the 2022 Conservative leadership election. He didn’t come close to winning that time, but this could be one of those occasions where he might be in a better position. He’s relatively centrist by Conservative Party standards. He has that aspect of the army major — not in a bawling sergeant-major sense, but in that quiet, reserved officer mold. He’s probably the nearest figure that the Conservative Party currently have to Keir Starmer, who is cut from very similar cloth.

It depends on who the Conservative MPs decide should go forward to the membership. The way the contest works is that everyone who wants to stand for the leadership needs a proposer and a seconder, but it gets whittled down to two candidates by the parliamentary party, who are then put to the membership. The more centrist elements of the Conservative Party will want to make sure there are two centrist candidates that go to the membership, because if it’s a contest between Tom Tugendhat and Kemi Badenoch, for example, Badenoch will walk it, because the membership are incredibly right-wing.

While Badenoch might be able to consolidate the Conservative base to some extent over the course of the next four or five years if she becomes leader, it means they can kiss the 2029 election goodbye. On the other hand, Tom Tugendhat might have a harder task consolidating the base, but the reasoning will go that he could have more of a chance of winning back some of those liberal or centrist Tories who were attracted to Starmer’s changed Labour party and to the Liberal Democrats this time.

Either way, I can’t see them coming back any time soon. This is because of the nature of the electoral system, because of the pummeling that the Conservatives have just received, and because even though they have suffered a devastating defeat, the process of decline is still ongoing. They need to have a proper reinvention if they want to be electorally competitive again.

I can’t see either potential course cutting it for 2029: a more centrist Tory Party competing directly for votes while they still have Reform menacing them to the right, or a right turn to embrace some of the Reform voters while leaving more centrist voters in the bosom of the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. I can’t see it happening unless something catastrophic happens — unless somehow Reform and the Conservative Party are able to unite, which is very unlikely, and the Labour vote declines.
DANIEL FINN

Looking at this performance from Labour, there’s something quite odd about it, because there has never been such a discrepancy between vote share and seat share. Labour has come back with a commanding majority of seats comparable to Tony Blair’s landslide back in 1997. But that time, the party got around 43 percent of the vote, whereas this year, it was slightly under 34 percent of the vote. It was only a couple percent higher in relative terms than the Labour vote share in 2019, and because of the lower turnout, it was actually lower in absolute terms — more people voted for Labour in 2019 than in 2024.

This doesn’t seem to have been something that anyone expected to happen, certainly going by the polls. From the start of this year until Sunak called the election, even at the lower end of the scale, Labour’s vote share didn’t go below 40 percent, apart from a single poll where they were on 39.5 percent. Yet they ended up with 33.7 percent.

Does that mean that the polls were wrong, or is it a case of Labour having lost support over the course of the election campaign? If it did lose support, why was that, and is it going to be a problem for Labour?
PHIL BURTON-CARTLEDGE

That trend in Labour’s polling became pronounced more or less at the time when Farage announced his decision to stand. Part of that shift wasn’t a question of Labour-supporting people transferring to Reform — rather, Reform was flushing out people who had previously intended not to vote, so Labour’s vote share went down proportionately in the polls. But you’re right: no one predicted that it would be this low.We’ve seen a big fall in Labour’s vote in its safe areas because all the resources have gone to the swing seats.

If you look at safe Labour seats — like Keir Starmer’s seat, for example — he had a ridiculous majority in 2019 of nearly 28,000 votes. His majority is now about 11,500, and turnout in his seat was down by more than 10 percent as well. It seems to have been a deliberate strategy. All of a sudden, now the election is over, Labour is saying it was their mastermind Morgan McSweeney who decided that they needed to go after seats rather than votes and game the system.

There’s a certain logic to that, which has meant that safe Labour seats were robbed of all resources. There was no campaigning in those seats, and everything went to what they identified as the key marginals. As a result, Starmer’s majority collapsed; Wes Streeting, the new Health Secretary, came within five hundred votes of losing his seat to a left-wing independent, Leanne Mohamad; and Jonathan Ashworth, who was a key strategist and member of the shadow cabinet before the election, actually did lose his seat in Leicester to an independent candidate.

We’ve seen a big fall in Labour’s vote in its safe areas because all the resources have gone to the swing seats. But we shouldn’t say that this is entirely down to the genius of Morgan McSweeney, because as I said earlier, there were about 170 seats where Reform made the difference between a Conservative win and a Labour or Liberal Democrat win. It was a gamble for the Labour Party to go for width rather than depth.

Will this cause some problems? It is certainly niggling at the new powers that be. Since Starmer has taken office, he’s been asked about this, and every time he keeps saying, “We’ve got a strong mandate,” as if repeating the words makes it true. But the problem he has is that it’s not just irritating left-wingers on social media who are saying, “You haven’t got a mandate, your numbers are rubbish, you got fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn managed.” People on the right know about this as well and have been playing it up.

Nadhim Zahawi, who was a senior figure in previous Conservative cabinets, said that even though it was a bad night for the Conservatives, it wasn’t a fantastic night for Labour; because of the shallowness of Labour’s vote, he argued, there is an opportunity for the Conservatives to come back quickly. According to Zahawi, all they need to do is go hard on tax cutting and so on. So he’s clearly learned nothing about what has happened, but he’s aware of this point.

Nigel Farage is aware of it as well, and he’s been talking about it since the election. Although I think it’s a mistake and a sign of hubris on his part, Farage has been saying that his party is going after Labour votes and seats at the next election. He is going to start targeting Labour more because he knows the majorities are very, very slim.

This is obviously a problem for Labour when it comes to doing anything controversial in government. We on the left know that Labour is weak despite its majority and despite what Starmer says about having a mandate. Democratically, its legitimacy is very low. That weakness gives added impetus to any street movements or strike activity to make political headway. It’s very much possible for us to lean on Labour MPs.If Starmer thinks that he’s going to have a fairly stable government, I think he’s got another thing coming.

It’s also worth noting that in over forty seats, the Greens are now in second place to Labour, having stood on an explicitly left-wing platform. They have also demonstrated an ability to take Labour seats, having won Bristol Central from another shadow cabinet minister, Thangam Debbonaire, so Labour is going to have to be thinking about the Left as well.

But knowing the Labour Party and its instincts as we do, it’ll notice that while there are forty-odd seats where the Greens are in second place to them, there are ninety-odd seats where Reform are the runners-up. There is going to be a temptation to go hard on immigration and other right-wing issues.

For Starmer and company, while they will try to plow on regardless and ignore democratic pressures, you’re going to have pressures from left and right in this parliament on Labour MPs who would quite like to remain Labour MPs, thank you very much. There is real potential here for the Left to make breakthroughs and lean on Labour MPs, and also potential for parliamentary rebellions as well. If Starmer thinks that he’s going to have a fairly stable government — and of course stability was one of the themes that Starmer ran on — I think he’s got another thing coming.
DANIEL FINN

Behind so many of these overlapping political crises that we’ve seen over the last decade, from Brexit and the Leave campaign to the Scottish Independence movement to the rise and fall of Corbynism, we can talk about the problems with the British economic model that have really come home to roost. Of course, Britain was one of the pioneers of neoliberal policy-making and went further and faster down that road than countries like France and Germany. For a long time there was a good deal of smugness about that on the part of British politicians, who saw themselves as the way and the light for other European countries. Now you get regular reports in publications like the Financial Times saying in effect that the whole setup is creaking and in danger of falling apart.

There’s a spectacular dearth of investment, and infrastructure is crumbling. There’s been a period of wage stagnation of a kind that hasn’t been seen for a couple of centuries since the early days of the Industrial Revolution, which is anticipated to carry on for the rest of this decade. You have regional inequalities within England that are wider than those between western and eastern Germany or between northern and southern Italy. Against that backdrop, is there any prospect of stabilization, and are there policies that any feasible government is likely to enact that can address those problems with the British model of capitalism?
PHIL BURTON-CARTLEDGE

When you read the Labour Party manifesto, there is a recognition that these problems exist, but the solutions fall short or leave a lot to wishful thinking. When Rachel Reeves made her first speech as the new chancellor, her message was no different to what she’s been saying for the last couple of years.

She believes that the way to make things better doesn’t involve redistributing the ill-gotten gains of the rich or anything like that, because that’s far too radical. You need economic growth, which is going to lift all boats. That’s what she’s putting her emphasis on.Rachel Reeves is very much a model technocrat, far more so than Starmer. She’s fixated on the numbers, on deliverables, on trackers and spreadsheets.

I think what we will see, at least in the policy language coming out of the new government, is similar to what we saw under George Osborne when he was chancellor — in other words, a focus on GDP figures as a measure of growth to the exclusion of all else. Reeves is very much a model technocrat, far more so than Starmer. She’s fixated on the numbers, on deliverables, on trackers and spreadsheets.

In that spirit, Reeves will be looking for quick wins. I expect that when the renegotiation for the European free-trade agreement comes up next year, governing the relationship between the UK and the EU, Starmer’s government will be looking to lower trade barriers that have been put up over the course of Brexit in order to facilitate economic growth.

Reeves is also committed to a much more industrially active state, so there is going to be an abandonment of neoliberalism, at least when it comes to industrial policy — it’s not going to be left to the market anymore. But she’s pursuing this goal through initiatives like Great British Energy, which are in effect investment vehicles or public-private partnerships that are designed to take the risk out of infrastructure investment for private business.

I think we’ll see large numbers of companies starting to invest in British infrastructure because ultimately the profits from doing so are going to be underwritten by the Treasury — it’s a guaranteed return. Of course, that will boost the GDP figures as well. Reeves and her allies will hope for various spin-off effects from this such as more employment and an upward push on wages.

But looking at various parts of the Labour manifesto, where the party identifies problems and crises, you find gestures to the effect that something has to be done rather than actual policies. By not promising anything concrete, this gives Labour a great deal of leeway to do whatever it wants to do.By not promising anything concrete, this gives Labour a great deal of leeway to do whatever it wants to do.

With higher education, for instance, the manifesto recognizes that there is a funding crisis and that levels of student debt are unsustainable. It doesn’t say what it’s going to do in response, but it promises to look into it. Of course, looking into it will be a job-creation scheme for civil servants and researchers.

We’ve got a quiet commitment to expand the state, although no spending figures are attached to it. Starmer has also put a lot of emphasis on giving metropolitan mayors and local authorities across England, Wales, and Scotland more powers. We haven’t seen yet what the nature of these powers are going to be.

There were some proposals authored by Gordon Brown in late 2022, where it seemed that Labour was aiming to create a sort of German model. Local government in Germany has a lot more freedom to raise its own finances and pursue its own economic strategies. It seems to me that Starmer is going to go down a similar route, with each local authority area responsible for developing a growth plan.

When those growth plans come through, I think Starmer will be minded to give local authorities enough powers to follow through on the plans, which again means more civil-service jobs and more jobs for wonkish researcher types and academics like me. The hope is that this will have an effect of unlocking further investment and entrepreneurial talents in the regions.

That’s pretty much what we can expect from a Starmer government when it comes to addressing the crisis of British capitalism. You’re going to have a push from the center saying, “We want to go in this direction,” but devolution will mean that local authorities are going to be able to do what they want within limits in terms of pursuing economic growth. Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves will be making sure to create as benign and risk-free an environment as possible for British and foreign capital to invest in infrastructure.

CONTRIBUTORS

Phil Burton-Cartledge is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Derby and the author of The Party's Over: The Rise and Fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak.

Daniel Finn is the features editor at Jacobin. He is the author of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.

To Rebuild Britain, Labour Needs to Tax the Rich

The Labour Party isn’t going to usher in a “decade of national renewal” with more austerity. The only way to solve Britain’s rising poverty and severe crises in public health, education, and housing is to tax the wealthy.

New British prime minister Keir Starmer holds a press conference at Downing Street on July 6, 2024, in London, England. (Claudia Greco-WPA / Getty Images)

BY ELLIOTT JOHNSON HOWARD REED MATTHEW JOHNSON

JACOBIN
07.11.2024

“You name it, Labour will tax it,” tweeted Rishi Sunak, just two days before leading the Conservatives to a monumental trouncing. It was a frequent attack line from his party. The problem, however, isn’t that Labour’s tax and spend plans are too extreme — it’s that they don’t go anywhere near far enough.

Britain desperately needs the “decade of national renewal” Keir Starmer has promised, but the biggest obstacle to that is what Labour is promising not to do: comprehensively reform the tax system to fund a whole-of-government program to secure and rebuild Britain.

We have public health, crime, and housing crises that can be attributed squarely to the unprecedented increase in poverty and inequality since the global financial crisis. School ceilings are literally crumbling, our transport system is both expensive and unreliable, private water companies are de facto bankrupt, and the vast majority of councils will need bailing out over the next parliament. Fundamentally, the failure to invest imposes enormous costs on services and the country as a whole.

And in order to invest, the government desperately needs to raise more revenue.

Delivering Change

Labour’s rejection of tax and spend appears to be motivated by age-old attacks on Labour for historically supporting ever-so-slightly-higher rates of income tax than the Tories. However, Britain is now totally different than the country it was in 1992 and, indeed, in 2019. The need to raise taxes and tax those who can afford it is now popular in ways that are important.

It is important that Labour lost around half a million votes from 2019 and only gained 1.8 percent of the vote share in 2024. Next time, they need a generation of supporters who see real value from voting Labour in order to resist right-wing parties that will surely not permit a split vote again. They have five years in which to demonstrate that they can raise revenue to support the vast majority of Britons in desperate need of investment.

The attempt by private schools and private school parents to use the Conservatives and an increasingly desperate Conservative-supporting press to advocate against the removal of charitable status has been soundly rejected, with 57 percent of the population supporting the policy and only 16 percent opposed. In the past, voters could imagine having sufficient resources at some point in a hypothetical future to pay for their children to go to private school. But now, it just looks like voters are paying for an ever-smaller group of people to gain unfair advantage over their own kids.

This has been the first election since baby boomers reached adulthood, in which a clear majority of them have not seen their preferred party in government. For those under fifty, a statement like “Labour will take us back to the 1970s” sounds like a good thing. Frankly, things are much worse now than they were then in a number of ways, and raising tax in order to fund the very things we have lost over the past four decades — nationalized infrastructure and functioning health, welfare and industrial sectors — is attractive. As well as manufacturing, we need production, including green energy, and services, including social care.

The reality is that voters increasingly see taxes as being a central means of improving our lives. Fifty-seven percent of the population think the government should prioritize funding public services compared to just 27 percent who favored giving people a tax cut. Years of reducing tax rates on business have failed to deal with regional inequality and poor productivity. Instead, we need a new economy that directs investment to where it is needed most.

In historical terms, income tax in the UK is a relative aberration, with permanent introduction only taking place in 1842 and application only to the very highest earners until the early to middle part of the twentieth century. We should no longer believe that revision to marginal income tax rates associated with paid employment is the key means of funding reform. It isn’t, and it can’t be, because the relative value of pay from work has been reduced so significantly in recent decades. Significant net increases in all but the highest marginal rates are unpopular and politically unfeasible as a consequence.

The key changes we need are those that focus on wealth. Unequal distribution of illiquid assets is of far greater importance than dealing with employment income inequality — important as that is — and lies at the heart of many aspects of the cost-of-living crisis. Those who own homes outright are protected from rapidly rising mortgage costs due to skyrocketing interest rates. In Act Now: A Vision for a Better Future and New Social Contract, the Common Sense Policy Group set out a plan to address this.

Raising Revenue

First, we need to close the fairness gap and equalize tax rates for income from dividends and other passive forms of activity with those from employment. Together, the abolition of employee National Insurance Contributions and replacement with income tax and the equalization of income tax rates for income from dividends would raise £58.1 billion in additional revenue per year.

Second, we need a proportional and progressive annual tax on household wealth levels above £2 million, with marginal rates of 2 percent up to £5 million and rising from there. Allowing for avoidance, we estimate that this would raise around £43 billion per year. The £2 million threshold sits above any possible context in which someone depends upon that level of wealth simply to live. To deal with the possibility of capital flight and the offshoring of wealth, which has had a distortionary and damaging impact on our economy, we recommend the imposition of a tax on large financial transactions at the same rates.

Third, we follow the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment’s recommendation that we tax carbon and fossil fuel production at around £55 to 60 per ton in 2024, rising to £75 per ton in 2030. This should raise around £6 billion per year in current prices. We also recommend a permanent excess tax on fossil fuel companies and a redirection of current subsidies to fossil fuel producers, as set out in recent research by Oxfam. These would raise just under £7 billion per year. That money increases tax yield and creates incentives to reduce carbon emissions, aiding the climate crisis in the process.

Finally, perhaps the easiest reform is removing forty of the largest unnecessary or badly targeted tax reliefs and allowances that enable the wealthy to avoid paying tax through avoidance schemes. One such example is agricultural relief, which is essentially an inheritance tax loophole. These tax reliefs mean that the country loses hundreds of billions each year that should be spent on rebuilding Britain. According to HMRC statistics, abolishing just forty reliefs and allowances that serve no good purpose other than tax avoidance would result in a gain of just under £74 billion.

Overall, the reforms we set out would result in increased tax revenues of just under £340 billion — which is more than enough to fund a genuine decade of national renewal.

In our survey for the report, we found an average level of support for the new economy of 69.2 percent in the Red Wall, with 60.2 percent among Conservative and 80.5 percent among 2019 Labour voters. Nationally, approval was 72.6 percent, with 48.6 percent among those intended to vote Conservative, 76 percent among those intended to vote Labour, and 66 percent among undecided voters.

In effect, the new economy would simply reflect the rhetoric of politicians across the spectrum: rewarding hard work, investing in the nation as one would a business and removing a great deal of the bureaucracy and red tape currently involved in the tax system.

The Labour government can achieve a decade of renewal, but only if it commits to the kinds of changes we propose above. It must act now.

CONTRIBUTORS

Elliott Johnson is a senior research fellow in public policy at Northumbria University.

Howard Reed is director of Landman Economics.

Matthew Johnson is a professor of public policy at Northumbria University.

Anabaptism Was the Revolutionary Face of Reformation Europe

The challenge to the Catholic Church in Europe’s Reformation also stirred up a wave of social revolt by peasants and the urban poor. The Anabaptist movement became a channel for this revolt before it was savagely repressed by a fearful ruling class.

Copper engraving of Anabaptist leader Jan van Leiden of Münster, Germany, beheading a nonbeliever at a banquet, 1534. (Ullstein bild via Getty Images)

BYMARTIN EMPSON

JACOBIN
07.12.2024

In 1525, the revolt historians refer to as the German Peasants’ War was defeated. Hundreds of thousands of peasants and other members of the “common people” had risen up against German princes and bishops. Inspired, in part, by the Reformation that had begun a few years earlier, these rebels moved far beyond this starting point, demanding the democratization of their communities, an end to oppression and unjust taxes, and a restoration of common lands and property.

Some figures, like Thomas Müntzer, went further than simply posing demands to reform society and the church by raising ideas about how society could be remade in a truly radical way. They preached an end to the corrupt and exploitative rule of the princes and nobles, arguing that people could live communally, sharing resources and wealth among the commons.

The peasant uprising threw the members of the German ruling class onto the back foot, but they quickly recovered. Fearing revolution from below, they drowned the rising in blood. Tens of thousands of peasants were massacred. In the aftermath, anyone who had taken part in the rebellion — or had even shown sympathy for it — was at risk of imprisonment, torture, and execution.

The scale of this repression ended the revolt. But it could not stop the underlying discontent. After all, the conditions that had provoked rebellion remained unchanged. Nor did the repression put an end to the radical ideas that had developed within Reformation thinking.

The Radical Reformation

While figures like Martin Luther had unleashed the Reformation against a corrupt Church, the outbreak of the rising forced Luther and his fellow thinkers to side with the established order. However, there were other dissenters who, having been initially inspired by Luther’s ideas, took a different stand. Those radicals who survived the Peasants’ War began to look for other avenues to express their discontent.Those radicals who survived the German Peasants’ War began to look for other avenues to express their discontent.

This was the context for the final act of the “Radical Reformation” in Europe: the rise and fall of the Anabaptist movement. Today, we mostly know the Anabaptists as small religious groups such as the Mennonites, the Amish, or the Hutterites. Their origins lie in the religious turmoil of the early Reformation era, and their ideas were shaped through a radical reading of the Bible.

In particular, two passages of the New Testament were important because they pointed to a different way of Christian living. The fifth book of the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles, describes the founding of the Christian church and the lives of Jesus’s earliest followers. These Christians were supposed to have lived communally, selling their possessions and sharing the wealth with the poor and needy, and among the Christian community itself.

Poor and radical thinkers were further inspired by the words of Acts 4:32-35:


Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. . . . There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

For those living under heavy taxation, forced to hand over money in rent, taxes, and tithes to their lord and the church, these were inspirational words that spoke of a different way of living. Indeed, during the Peasants’ War, the establishment of “Godly Law” was a key demand for the rebels. In the aftermath of the rebellion, small groups of Christians continued to hold these principles dear.

One of the groups that began to emerge in the years after 1525 were the Anabaptists. There was no single Anabaptist interpretation of the Bible. Historians of the movement have identified five or six different strands of Anabaptism at various places in Germany and Switzerland. They had shared commitments to ideas such as “community of goods” as well as a rejection of infant baptism.

The idea of rebaptism, or baptism as an adult, became crucial to the Anabaptists because they thought that individuals had to come to the Church through their own belief. You could not be forced to join the Church as a child, simply by being baptized. This was shocking to the Catholic Church, which had long held that rebaptism was blasphemous, and punishable by death. At the same time, however, the Protestant movement also rejected the Anabaptists whose radical beliefs, they felt, would lead to further rebellion and bloodshed.Heavy repression forced the Anabaptists to organize clandestinely, spreading their message by traveling preachers, often secretly and predominately among the poor and oppressed.

The ideas of the Anabaptists thus placed them in direct confrontation with the two major strands of Christianity in Germany. Heavy repression forced the Anabaptists to organize clandestinely, spreading their message by traveling preachers, often secretly and predominately among the poor and oppressed. As one historian of early Anabaptism, Werner O. Packull, has said: “The same social and economic impulses that inspired local peasant unrest fuelled the religious dissent of the early Anabaptists.”

Melchior Hoffman

The fear of Anabaptist radicalism on the part of the authorities had a real basis. Many of the movement’s leaders had been key figures in the Peasants’ War. Persecution of the Anabaptists drove thousands into exile, where these refugees spread their message and their belief that they were the elect — the one true group of Christians. In particular, they secured a foothold in the northwest of Europe.

Anabaptism threw up many fascinating characters, whose radical Christian ideas became a source of inspiration to tens of thousands of people. One of the most significant was Melchior Hoffman, who became closely associated with a form of radical millenarianism in the city of Strasbourg during the early 1530s. It was in the northwest of Germany that Anabaptism began to take on its most radical character.

Authorities in this Imperial City seem to have been more lenient in their handling of the Anabaptists, allowing the first preachers who arrived to carry on with relatively little restriction. But it was Hoffman who was able to turn Anabaptism into a radical force.Anabaptism threw up many fascinating characters, whose radical Christian ideas became a source of inspiration to tens of thousands of people.

He was a traveling artisan, a skinner, who had taught himself the Bible. He arrived in Strasbourg in 1529 and joined the Anabaptists, quickly becoming regarded as a prophet. Hoffman then traveled into the Netherlands where he helped spread Anabaptism, but eventually returned to Strasbourg.

Hoffman broke with the prevailing Anabaptist doctrines of nonviolence. He began to preach that the elect should take up the “two-edged sword” and use it against unbelievers. Hoffman’s influence was significant, albeit localized to Strasbourg, the Netherlands, and (significantly) Münster.

He told his followers that Strasbourg would become the New Jerusalem and would soon see the coming of the Lord who would introduce the “reign of the saints.” In the face of this wildly popular millenarianism, the Strasbourg authorities arrested him.

When it became clear that the saints were not coming to Strasbourg, attention shifted among Hoffman’s followers to the town of Münster, which had also seen a growth in the radical Reformation movement. Strasbourg, they felt, had failed God. Perhaps Münster would be different.

City of God

In the 1530s, Münster was part of the Prince-Bishopric of Münster, one of three run by Bishop Franz von Waldeck. In 1533, however, the city won significant reforms and privileges that gave substantial power to its elected council. In 1534, Anabaptist followers of Hoffman were able to use this setup to get control of the town, whose population was swelled by the arrival of thousands of Anabaptists, preparing for the “rule of the saints” that they believed would begin in Münster.

When the Anabaptists arrived in Münster, they joined existing religious radicals who had been inspired by a local priest called Bernhard Rothmann. Rothmann had long been a troublesome advocate of radical reform. He was quickly joined by Anabaptists inspired by Hoffman. Two of the most important were Jan van Leiden and Jan Matthys, who were to become leading figures in the Münster rebellion.When the Anabaptists arrived in Münster, they joined existing religious radicals who had been inspired by a local priest called Bernhard Rothmann.

While Anabaptism in Münster was very much the religion of the poorest communities, it also had its wealthier supporters who felt that the Lutheran Reformation had not gone far enough. Among these was the powerful figure Bernhard Knipperdolling, the head of the town’s guilds. Knipperdolling had been powerful enough a few years before to lead a challenge to the bishop, and he was clearly not afraid of challenging authority over religious issues.

Anabaptists soon outnumbered non-Anabaptists in Münster. Under the influence of people like Jan van Leiden and Matthys, the movement rapidly moved away from pacifism and nonviolence. Having taken control of the council, Jan van Leiden and Matthys set about constructing a theocratic state.

Left to his own devices, Matthys would have executed all non-Anabaptists, Catholic and Protestant alike. But at the urging of less extreme figures, they were expelled instead. The expulsion was akin to a pogrom. Thousands of people — old and young, healthy and unwell — were expelled in a snowstorm. They left behind their wealth and possessions, while those that stayed were rebaptized in a three-day ceremony.

These events precipitated the authorities into action. The bishop raised an army and placed Münster under siege.

A Siege Economy

The rule of the Anabaptist leaders was highly repressive, but it rested on the support of the thousands of Anabaptists, whose participation in mass religious events and communal action helped legitimize and strengthen the leadership. As the siege developed, the town instituted a war economy. Everyone, male and female, young and old, was given a role in the town’s defense.The Anabaptists instituted a communal order that redistributed the possessions and food that had been left behind.

The Anabaptists instituted a communal order that redistributed the possessions and food that had been left behind and central stores were created where the poor and needy could apply for the things they needed, from bedding to clothing. Communal dining areas were created where people ate together while listening to readings from the Bible. It is worth quoting eyewitness Heinrich Gresbeck’s account:


So the prophets and preachers, along with the whole council, took counsel and wished to have all property in common. They first issued a proclamation that all those who had copper money should bring it up to the council hall. A different kind of money would be given to them in return. . . . Next, they came to an agreement and decreed that all property should be common, that everyone should bring up his money, silver and gold, just as each had done the last time.

After the prophets and preachers reached this agreement with the council, they had it announced in the preaching that all property should be common and that one person should have as much as the next. Whether they’d been rich or poor, they should all be equally rich, the one having as much as the next. So they said in the preaching, “Dear brothers and sisters, now that we’re a single folk, brothers and sisters, it’s absolutely God’s will that we should bring together our money, silver and gold. The one person is to have as much as the next. So everyone should bring his money up to the registry next to the council hall. The council will sit there and receive the money.”

The preacher [Rothmann] continued, “It’s not appropriate for a Christian to have any money. Be it silver or gold, it’s unclean for a Christian. Everything that the Christian brothers and sisters have belongs to one person as much as to the next. You shall lack nothing, be it food or clothing, house and hearth. What you need you shall get, God will not let you lack anything. One thing should be just as common as the next, it belongs to us all. It’s mine as much as yours, and yours as much as mine.”

This is how they convinced the people, so that they (some of them) brought their money, silver and gold, and all that they had. But in the city of Münster, the idea that the one person was to have as much as the next turned out unfairly.

There is no doubt that these policies were highly popular among the poor. One contemporary scholar from Antwerp wrote to the Dutch theologian and humanist Erasmus bemoaning this sentiment:


We in these parts are living in wretched anxiety because of the way the revolt of the Anabaptists has flared up. For it really did spring up like fire. There is, I think, scarcely a village or town where the torch is not glowing in secret. They preach community of goods, with the result that all those who have nothing come flocking.

Outside Münster, the repression that the Anabaptists had experienced in their earliest days was repeated on a massive scale, with authorities trying to prevent people getting to Münster to support the besieged town.

Reform and Repression

The commitment of the Münster Anabaptists to the “community of goods” should not blind us to the repressive measures of the theocratic state. Books other than the Bible were banned and burned in a fire that Gresbeck says lasted for eight days, along with charters and documents from the authorities. Churches and monasteries were desecrated and destroyed. Five or six schools were opened, but they only taught religious subjects.

The siege was long and violent. A turning point took place in April 1534 when Matthys had a vision that he would defeat the enemy with just twelve followers. He bravely rode out of Münster with his followers but was immediately killed. This left Jan van Leiden as the most powerful figure in the town. He set about concentrating even more wealth and power in his own hands, declaring himself king and deepening the theological state.The commitment of the Münster Anabaptists to the ‘community of goods’ should not blind us to the repressive measures of the theocratic state.

One endlessly discussed aspect of the siege of Münster is the question of polygamy. Originally, the Anabaptists had only allowed marriage between two Anabaptists. Marriage between an Anabaptist and a nonbeliever, as well as adultery, were punishable by death. Jan van Leiden, however, instituted “polygamy.”

In his account of these events, Gresbeck writes:

Jan van Leiden with his bishop, preachers, and the twelve elders proclaimed the matrimony, saying that it was God’s will that they should increase the world, that everyone should have three or four wives, as many of them as he wanted, but they were to live with the wives in a godly way, as you’ll eventually hear. This pleased the one and not the other. There were men and women opposed to this, so that they wouldn’t uphold the matrimony, and for this reason many a person would eventually have to die.

Jan van Leiden’s justification for instituting polygamy rested on the Old Testament wherein figures such as Noah had more than one wife, combined with the biblical incitement to “go forth and multiply.” He himself took fifteen or sixteen wives.

After the siege, enemies of the Anabaptists used the issue of polygamy to attack them, arguing that it demonstrated the lack of morals among the community. This was surely the grossest hypocrisy, coming from people who cheered on the suppression, torture, and mass slaughter of the Anabaptists. But we should not see Münster’s practice of polygamy as being about sexual liberation in any form.

Some historians have noted that there was a significant imbalance between the number of women and men in the city. While this is true, attempts to justify Jan van Leiden’s polygamy as being intended to assist the protection of women miss the mark. The arrangement in question was not really polygamy, a term which suggests that women could take multiple husbands, but rather polygyny, in which men alone enjoyed the privilege of multiple partners. This point is underlined by the declaration of the Münster Anabaptist authorities:

All womenfolk, virgins, maidens, and widows, all those who are marriageable, whether they be noble or non-noble, spiritual or secular, they should all take husbands, and the wives who have husbands outside the city who’ve fled from us should also take other husbands, since their husbands are godless and have fled from the Word of God and aren’t our brothers. Dear brothers and sisters, for so long did you live in heathendom in your marriage, and it was not a real marriage.

Women were forced into marriage under these circumstances. While it seems that some got married willingly, most did not. This caused great discontent, even leading to a small uprising that was quickly crushed.

Gresbeck suggests that at least one woman may have committed suicide rather than submit. Others who refused or opposed the practice of forced marriage were executed. The discontent seems to have been large enough that the leadership retreated. According to Gresbeck, they declared “marriage should be voluntary,” but the move came too late.

New Israel

As the siege drew on and life became increasingly desperate, power and wealth were centralized in the hands of Jan van Leiden, who declared himself “king over New Israel and the whole world,” second only to God in his power: “In the whole world, there would be no king or lord but Jan van Leiden, and in the whole world there would be no government but Jan van Leiden.”

Food was so scarce that inhabitants ate cats, dogs, and rats. At the same time, Jan van Leiden surrounded himself with vast wealth, living a life of luxury in requisitioned mansions with his multiple wives, a huge retinue, and special guards. The new “king” took on all the trappings of medieval monarchy, sitting in judgement on a special throne in the marketplace. More and more goods were confiscated to fund this lavish lifestyle while the population increasingly suffered.

Outside the town, opposition to the Anabaptists was growing. The bishop had raised enough money from other rulers to hire a bigger army. Preachers heading out from Münster were still able to inspire people to try and join, and there was at least one attempt by a thousand Anabaptists from the Netherlands to relieve Münster. However, this effort was violently crushed before they could arrive.As the siege drew on and life became increasingly desperate, power and wealth were centralized in the hands of Jan van Leiden.

In May, Jan van Leiden responded to the desperation by allowing many people to leave the town. Tragically, the younger men were promptly killed by the besiegers who refused to allow the others to go beyond the outskirts of the city. The women, elderly people, and children were left to suffer, trapped between the town walls and the besieging armies. For five weeks, hundreds of them starved and died, eating grass and unable to escape. Eventually, the bishop relented. Those considered Anabaptists were executed, while the remainder were banished.

Münster eventually fell after Gresbeck and another man escaped, providing the besiegers with enough information to allow them to get inside. The bishop’s forces then set about massacring those who remained. Hundreds were killed in the fighting or tortured and executed afterward. In January 1536, Jan van Leiden, Knipperdolling, and another leading Anabaptist, Bernhard Krechting, were tortured to death publicly in the center of Münster. Their bodies were caged and hung from the tower of St Lambert’s Church in cages whose replicas still remain there today.

The storming of Anabaptist Münster, and the mass murder and execution of those who remained inside, was the end of the mass, radical Reformation. Anabaptism never regained its strength. After 1535, there were no more attempts to construct a “community of goods” within existing society through movements from below.
Sighs of the Oppressed

By destroying the peasant revolution in 1525, the German authorities had left only one outlet for discontent: religion. Their bloody destruction of Münster Anabaptism was an attempt to shut that avenue down as well. The Reformation in Europe lost its mass nature and became in many places a top-down process driven by kings and nobles.

Some accounts of Münster — notably that of the leftist Belfort Bax, whose history of the events was published in 1903 — have tried to establish close parallels with later working-class revolutions. The historian Norman Cohn also drew a comparison between Jan van Leiden’s followers and twentieth-century revolutionary movements in his book The Pursuit of the Millennium, although his intention in doing so was to discredit modern-day communism.

The fact that the Anabaptist leaders tried to implement the “community of goods” as the authorities responded with siege and massacre suggests an obvious parallel with the Paris Commune of 1871. However, while we should be sympathetic to those in Münster who genuinely sought to create an equal society, we cannot give the events too much of a radical coloring by reading later episodes of revolutionary history into this period.The storming of Anabaptist Münster, and the mass murder and execution of those who remained inside, was the end of the mass, radical Reformation.

It is true that many Anabaptists, coming from the mass of the poor in northwest Germany and the Netherlands, had high expectations that a millennial moment was coming, and hoped to benefit from the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. But the way in which this vision was temporarily realized was very different from the experience of later movements that redistributed wealth through mass movements from below. The Paris Commune was distinguished by the practice of mass, participatory democracy, yet no such democracy or accountability existed in Münster.

Having said that, the destruction of Anabaptist Münster should remind us, above all, that ruling classes have always feared rebellion from below. One of the great demands of the radical Reformation was that ordinary women and men should be allowed to practice their religion as they wanted to, not filtered through the words of a priest chosen by the local lord.

In reading the Bible, they found words that were “the sigh of the oppressed creature,” in the words of Karl Marx’s (often misunderstood) analysis of religion. Thousands of them gave their lives trying to build a world where ordinary people could live life free and comfortably. This was too much for their rulers, who crushed them without scruple.

CONTRIBUTOR
Martin Empson is the author of several books including “Kill all the Gentlemen”: Class Struggle and Change in the English Countryside. He is currently working on a book about the German Peasant War of 1525.

U$A

eBay Workers Are Playing the Union Card

BY ALEX N. PRESS

07.11.2024

JACOBIN

Workers at eBay subsidiary TCGplayer, an online trading card marketplace, picketed the company yesterday to protest alleged pregnancy discrimination against one of their own. More than a year after unionizing, they still don’t have a contract.

TCGplayer and eBay have fought workers' union effort from the start.

 (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)



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The workers gathered outside an office building in downtown Syracuse, New York, on Wednesday were not happy. Sporting red union T-shirts and holding signs reading “You can’t punish us for being pregnant” and “When we fight, we win,” they were rallying to support a colleague. The building is home to TCGplayer, an eBay subsidiary that is the largest online marketplace for card games, comics, and collectible trading cards (think Pokémon or Magic: The Gathering), and the picket’s attendees were some of its employees, the roughly 250 people whose job is to authenticate, sort, and ship the collectibles.


The workers were gathered to protest what they say is a pattern of pregnancy discrimination against one of their own. According to the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees–Communications Workers of America (CODE-CWA), which represents the workers, Megan Wheeler, a TCGplayer receiving generalist, has been penalized by management for issues related to her pregnancy. Despite supplying a note from her doctor, Wheeler was denied a request for accommodations, including intermittent leave to manage her morning sickness. The union says she instead received warnings for tardiness and was placed on final notice after missing work to seek emergency medical attention for symptoms of a miscarriage. CODE-CWA filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) charge with the NLRB this week over management’s treatment of Wheeler.

“I felt like I was alone with this until I shared my story with members of the union, and it’s really inspiring that workers can have each other’s back when management fails us,” Wheeler said in a statement.

Now, when one thinks of major tech companies, eBay isn’t the first to come to mind. The bidding site is somewhat of a dinosaur, born during an earlier generation of the internet and not nearly as prominent as Alphabet (the parent company of Google), social media companies like Meta or Twitter, or e-commerce giants like Amazon. Yet eBay is still in operation, and it has around ten thousand employees, minuscule compared to Alphabet’s nearly two-hundred-thousand-person workforce — the majority of whom are denied employee status and instead classified as temporary vendor contractors, or TVCs in Alphabet’s nomenclature — but sizable by any other standard.

Employees picket the TCGplayer office in Syracuse, New York. (CODE-CWA)

And of those employees, the ones at TCGplayer represent an extreme rarity: unionized tech workers. eBay acquired the Syracuse-based company in 2022 for nearly $300 million, and the workers responded with a union blitz to secure stability under the new owner. They had been organizing since 2020, and their original organizing drive was with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), but employer misinformation and the onset of the pandemic led them to pull their petition for an NLRB election. After the sale to eBay, the workers regrouped, this time with CODE-CWA, which also represents Alphabet Workers United, the minority union at Google as well as unionized video-game workers at Sega, Microsoft subsidiary ZeniMax, and Tender Claws. They filed for an NLRB election in early 2023, and when the ballots were counted in March, a majority of the 282 workers had voted to unionize. The final count was 137 in favor and 82 against.

eBay and TCGplayer fought the effort from the start. TCGplayer had retained premier anti-union law firm Littler Mendelson in 2020, and they continued using the firm after the sale to eBay. As workers told the Prospect, the company waged an “extremely intense” union-busting campaign, with anti-union messaging pervasive at the office. When those efforts failed to stymy workers’ union vote, eBay switched to filing objections to the election and appeals to NLRB decisions; the board found no merit in the employer’s protestations.

Rather than finally agreeing to bargain a first contract with its workers, eBay and TCGplayer continued to violate their rights, according to the union. CODE-CWA filed multiple ULP charges with the NLRB over the actions of both companies’ managements, who workers say refused to acknowledge the union and behaved in a way designed to obstruct their ability to negotiate a contract.

Workers additionally alleged that the bosses implemented unilateral changes to terms and conditions of employment while refusing to negotiate with the union regarding those changes, a violation of status quo rules, and denied workers union representation during disciplinary procedures (known as Weingarten rights). eBay also removed language from its corporate human rights policy that had affirmed its support for workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively, a move that elicited criticism not only from eBay’s workers but from the New York City and State Comptrollers on behalf of shareholders too. In December 2023, Region 3 of the NLRB found merit in the ULPs, affirming that eBay and TCGplayer broke the law in their response to worker organizing.

“We have experienced eBay’s refusal to respect our legally-protected rights first-hand. We applaud this ruling and hope that the reality of legal consequences will motivate the company to come to the table and bargain with us in good faith,” Ethan Salerius, receiving generalist at TCG Player and a bargaining committee member, said in a statement at the time.

Having exhausted means of stalling, eBay and TCGplayer began bargaining with the workers last fall, but progress has been slow, and the two sides have yet to finalize a first contract. (Billionaire Pierre Omidyar, eBay’s founder — who, while best known as of late as the initial money behind the Intercept, has also been dispensing grants to journalists, including labor journalists — is the emeritus director of eBay’s board, meaning the union-busting has unfolded under his watch.)

“The CWA-TCGunion stands in solidarity with Megan and is advocating for a union contract that will ensure gender equity, fair accommodations, and reasonable paid time off,” said CODE-CWA in a statement concerning Wheeler’s alleged mistreatment. “These measures aim to prevent unjust disciplinary actions and promote a fair and supportive working environment for all employees.”

CONTRIBUTORS
Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin who covers labor organizing.

UK Immigrant Workers May Win Europe’s First Amazon Union

BYLUIS FELIZ LEON

07.16.2024

JACOBIN

In Coventry, England, 3,000 Amazon workers — most of them immigrants — just voted on whether to unionize. If the workers vote yes, they would be the first Amazon warehouse workers in Europe to win a union.

The GMB trade union holding a rally outside Amazon HQ in support of Amazon workers in Coventry on July 8, 2024. (Kristian Buus / In Pictures via Getty Images)


Three thousand Amazon workers at a warehouse in the United Kingdom are poised to become the first recognized Amazon union in Europe.


Workers at fulfillment center BHX4 in Coventry, central England, cast votes July 8–13 for the GMB union to negotiate over pay, hours, and working conditions with the Amazon bosses. The results are expected July 17.

The watershed vote comes after a long, bruising battle; Amazon tried US-style stalling and union-busting tactics. Meanwhile the workers have taken thirty-seven days of strike action in two years. They’ve grown their union to fourteen hundred members, established a stewards network, and built multiethnic solidarity. In the UK, workers can become dues-paying members before union recognition is attained.

Last year, the GMB withdrew a previous application to the Central Arbitration Committee, the government agency that regulates collective bargaining, over Amazon’s “dirty tricks.” The company had brought in thirteen hundred new workers to dilute the pro-union workforce of seventeen hundred. The GMB estimates this cost Amazon $389,530 (£300,000) per week.

At the state level, the winds may now be blowing in the GMB’s favor after Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won control of the government on a platform of a “new deal for working people,” including making it easier for unions to organize.

But the stakes reach beyond Britain. The UK is Amazon’s largest market in Europe after Germany, where the service-sector union Ver. di has been striking and fighting for a decade to win collective bargaining rights.

A union victory here in Coventry, a city about a hundred miles northwest of London, would reverberate across Amazon’s vast global logistics network and boost international coordination among logistics workers.

“Then the dominoes will start falling,” said Darren Westwood, who has been at Amazon since 2018, after previous union jobs in retail, rail, and auto. “I think there’s a lot of people watching us, hoping that we do it, but also scared to get into the fight at the moment. Once we’ve got this in the bag, I think the rest will start coming.”

To win the recognition election, the union needs a majority of voters and at least 40 percent of all eligible workers to vote yes.
Born in a Sit-Down Strike

The GMB, one of the largest unions in the UK with six hundred thousand members, began organizing at Amazon over a decade ago. Amazon is one of the UK’s top ten private sector employers.

But the organizing only gained momentum after a series of wildcat strikes around the country in August 2022. Workers were angry over a measly pay hike of 50 pence (56 cents). They organized through Facebook and Telegram chats. Workers in the port town of Tilbury kicked off the strike wave, saying Amazon was treating them “like slaves.”

At BHX4, workers staged a sit-down strike and walkout.

“We had been waiting for a pay raise,” said Ceferina Floresca, a sixty-eight-year-old worker of Filipino and Spanish descent. During the worst two years of the pandemic, she had to show the police paperwork exempting her from lockdowns so she could report to the fulfillment center to pack orders.

Amazon had also stopped giving workers shares of the company stock after 2019. “We’ve all seen the shares go up,” said Westwood. “Managers were telling us during the start-up meetings how much money the company had made that day. They were so proud that they’ve got shares. And I said, ‘Now you tell us we’re going to get 50 pence; it’s a smack in the face.’”

“That’s why we decided to sit down and have a talk with the general manager,” said Floresca.

Three hundred workers sat down in the cafeteria, refusing to work. The general manager tried to negotiate to get them back to work. Floresca said he told them in a “snobbish” tone to write down ten questions for him to answer, and choose among their coworkers someone to represent them. “And I stood up and said, “What are you doing? You have to answer for the pay raise.”

The workers tapped Westwood and four others to speak with management. But Westwood insisted, “No one’s coming upstairs.”

“He looked at me and said, ‘What do you mean?’” Westwood remembered. “I said, ‘Look, for us to decide on five people, we all have to agree and elect people to come upstairs and talk with management. That’s the union, and Amazon doesn’t recognize unions.”

He told his coworkers, “As soon as you put a foot on that staircase, we lose.” Workers erupted in cheers, and the manager went upstairs with the tail between his legs. The sit-down continued.

At 2 p.m., workers saw on their phone apps that Amazon management had started clocking them out. Some people went back to work, but most stayed in the cafeteria to wait for the night shift. By late afternoon, they realized that other Amazon workers across the UK had also engaged in wildcat strikes and protests. Videos began to circulate. The news that they weren’t alone steeled their resolve, and they agreed to walk out again the following day.

The next morning, as workers gathered to protest outside the fulfillment center, a GMB organizer approached and asked if the union could talk to workers. “I was like, ‘Please, I don’t know what I’m doing!” Westwood said.
Formal Strike Votes

Britain has seen a larger strike wave in the past two years, in which hundreds of thousands of nurses, ambulance drivers, railway workers, teachers, and postal workers in the public sector participated.

While some of the Amazon organizing eventually dissipated, in Coventry it kept intensifying. Garfield Hylton, a worker of Jamaican descent, said the strikes and protest drove the union’s growth.

In the UK, if workers walk off the job, employers can simply fire them. To strike with legal protection, a union has to mail ballots to workers’ homes and persuade a majority to vote for a strike. Stuart Richards, senior organizer of the GMB Midlands, said the union wanted to provide that protection, so Amazon couldn’t fire the key leaders.

Hylton said the workers used their strikes to talk at the gates with coworkers, who were generally bolted down to their workstations in order to meet their productivity rates. But to reach a majority of the workforce, the workers also had to persuade the GMB to hold consecutive days of strikes.

“The view that we put to the GMB was that, if we can’t have more than the stated strike days, we weren’t going to come out and strike, because most strikers in the UK, they did one or two days a week, and we felt that with the size of Amazon that would be of no impact whatsoever,” said Hylton.

Institutionalizing the spontaneous momentum of the wildcats was a learning experience. Westwood said the GMB failed to meet the threshold for its first attempt at a formal strike because workers received white envelopes in the mail and ignored them, assuming they were from bill collectors at the height of the cost-of-living crisis. After that they made the envelopes orange, the union’s color.

Another lesson was to translate materials better. At first a sloppy translation into Romanian, “sindicat,” made the union sound as if it was part of an organized crime ring.
Alone No More

The GMB supported workers in establishing a shop stewards network. Hylton is one of fifteen stewards trained up to accompany their coworkers into meetings with management. Another thirty activists form a communication network across the warehouse.

The need for stewards is acute because the conditions are punishing. Amazon uses its Associate Development and Performance Tracker (ADAPT) to monitor the pace and activity of employees over the course of their ten-hour shifts.

Workers were initially allowed six minutes of idle time; then it was reduced to three. So if you’re idle for longer than three minutes — say, to go to the bathroom — you receive a productivity warning. Workers get two thirty-minute breaks, one of which is unpaid.

Sometimes packages tumbling down the conveyor belt get caught or jammed, forcing workers to strain to dislodge them. Two years ago, Floresca suffered a heart attack while trying to move a heavy box off the conveyor.

“We have boxes that weigh [seventy pounds],” she said. “So I was trying to pull the boxes, and they were compressed tightly, and I just had that pain in my chest.”

She was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, and the doctor told her to rest for four weeks. But when she got back she faced disciplinary action for the time she had taken off.

The notice was called a “letter of concern,” a term Floresca hadn’t heard before. “Oh, I was even touched,” she said. “They’re concerned about me because I just had a heart attack here.”

But managers told her that she had “triggered” a disciplinary meeting by being absent for more than eighty hours. As a result, she couldn’t change her shift or department, lower her hours, or apply for a higher position.

Floresca was shocked. “I asked him, ‘Why are you penalizing me for being sick? And how can you say that for the next six months I cannot be sick because you will give me a warning letter?’” She refused to sign the letter. It took another ambulance rush to the hospital for Amazon to agree to provide her accommodations.

Today she’s a steward, and no longer alone; workers take collective action when problems arise. During a recent heat wave, when managers were refusing ten-minute breaks to workers laboring in sweltering trailers, Hylton said the workers checked with GMB reps to confirm their right to safety breaks, “and then they were confronting the managers in the building. Instead of having one person go to a manager, you have twenty people complaining.”

The new union has become a real force in the warehouse. Workers won two pay raises last year, and Amazon even offered union members an incentive of $2,500 (£2,000) to transfer to other facilities in central England. This backfired: the organizing actually spread to new facilities, including Amazon’s flagship site in Birmingham, UK, where hundreds of workers struck in March.

After the first formal strike, the union had 750 members. Then Amazon flooded the warehouse with workers on five-year student visas. The union has responded by bringing these workers into the organizing campaign.
Many Languages

Most workers in the warehouse are immigrants. The GMB has recruited leaders who speak Arabic, Tamil, Telugu, Romanian, Tigrinya, Punjabi, French, Amharic, Hindi, and Polish.

Before the influx of workers on student visas, around 70 percent of the workers were African, mostly from East Africa; 20 percent were Eastern European, and the remaining 10 percent were a mix of South Asian, English, Anglophone Caribbean, and Brazilian workers.

The new workers are mostly South Asian; many aren’t familiar with unions. “Amazon brought a lot of Indian managers to walk around and talk to the Indians [and Pakistanis] in their native languages of Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi,” said Muhammad Nur, a worker from Ethiopia.

After workers complained that Amazon had never hired any managers from an African country, it brought Eritrean managers from London to lead captive-audience meetings.

Many African workers come to the UK with advanced degrees from their home countries. But they say Amazon passes them over for promotions, in a mix of favoritism and racism.

Nur holds a degree in accounting in Ethiopia and is studying for an MBA in the UK, where he has resided for fifteen years. He originally applied for a job in Amazon’s finance department in 2019. Amazon brought him on for a trial period, but after a year and a half, it restructured the department and demoted him to an associate in the warehouse with no explanation; a white worker with no accounting experience kept his job.

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” Nur said.
Hollow Threat of Closure

Louveza Iqbal works at BHX4 as a universal receiver, lifting boxes off the conveyor belt and scanning them in. She grew up in the UK; her parents hail from Pakistan.

“I have a slight doubt in my mind where we might lose because of the misinformation that’s gone around,” she said. “It might tilt the results in Amazon’s favor.”

She said immigrant workers live hand to mouth; after covering their basic needs, they send the rest of their earnings back home to support their families. Amazon finds ways to exploit this desperation.

“They work for ten hours on an empty stomach because they can’t afford to buy food from the canteen,” she said. “On strike days, when we walked out, Amazon would incentivize workers with food vouchers, so that they come into work.”

In the preelection period, rumors about visas were swirling. And of all the threats, none has had more impact than that Amazon might close down the facility.

Amazon operates forty-two fulfillment centers in the UK, plus ninety-one smaller warehouses including sort centers and delivery stations, according to MWPVL International. It closed three fulfillment centers in the UK last year.

But Amazon has shifted globally to a regional fulfillment center model to increase delivery speeds and cut down on costs — so if it is to remain in central England, it can’t close all its facilities down in the Midlands.

BHX4 is an inbound cross-dock facility that’s clustered around other warehouses of similar type and has strategic value. Cross-dock facilities receive products from vendors and quickly send them across to an outbound dock to be shipped to other surrounding fulfillment centers, where workers sort boxes of stuff to put into trailers to send to yet other fulfillment centers.

“The UK is an island with only a handful of major ports,” said Katy Fox-Hodess, senior lecturer in employment relations at the University of Sheffield. “The country isn’t big enough to locate new facilities at large distances from where they are already located, so the possibility of Amazon closing facilities to avoid unionization is less of a risk.”
“Sent to Coventry”

As it happens, this warehouse in Coventry was once an auto manufacturing powerhouse dubbed “Motor City.” It was home to Daimler, the UK’s first carmaker, and later made the iconic Jaguar. In the postwar period Coventry became the world’s second-largest car producer (after Detroit) and leading car exporter.

The level of labor militancy was high. “A story that goes around from [Trade Union Council] Trade Union Council people is that when they had a management dispute on the floor in the paint shop, it only took eleven individuals to bring the whole company to its knees on that site, because the paint shop was crucial,” Hylton said.

In 2004 the Jaguar plant closed, hemorrhaging two thousand jobs, part of the era of deindustrialization. Amazon took over the site in 2008, replacing assembly lines with conveyor belts spread across a space as big as twenty-four (American) football fields.

“It’s also historically significant because “sent to Coventry” meant you were sent here to die and suffer,” Hylton said. “In the 13th century, if you didn’t get inside the city walls, you were left to virtually suffer on the outside. So historically, there’s this air of militancy in this city — the whole raft of engineering, from aircraft manufacturing to auto. It always had workers that got together to stand up to management to campaign for better treatment and wages.

“I don’t think Amazon realized, when they picked the site, the historical significance. They just picked it for the motorway network for the lorries [semitrucks] to come in and out.”

Republished from Labor Notes.

CONTRIBUTORS
Luis Feliz Leon is a staff writer and organizer with Labor Notes.

British Workers Are on the Cusp of Winning a Union at Amazon

Thousands of workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Coventry, England, are on the verge of winning union recognition. After facing 18 months of harsh resistance, they are taking the first steps toward holding the $2 trillion company to account in the UK.

Amazon workers hold a picket line during a strike over pay at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry, UK, on Tuesday, February 28, 2023. 

(Darren Staples / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

BYMATTHEW COLE
07.15.2024
JACOBIN

Over the weekend, workers at Britain’s GMB union, which has 560,000 members working everywhere from the retail sector to social care and logistics, began voting for union recognition at Amazon’s site in Coventry, the West Midlands city where it employs over three thousand people. Results for the ballot are likely to arrive in the coming days, but for eighteen months, the company, valued at $2 trillion, has bitterly resisted attempts at unionization, plastering the walls of its Coventry warehouse with QR codes that produce emails addressed to GMB cancelling union membership.

Amazon’s sprawling behemoth warehouse, BHX4, located at the former Jaguar motor facility of Browns Lane in Coventry, is ground zero for the union movement in logistics. The company has expended huge resources and used aggressive anti-union tactics to fight over 1,400 GMB-unionized “warehouse associates” who want formal recognition at the company. By refusing voluntary recognition, Amazon has forced the struggle for democratic representation to be decided by the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC) — the government body responsible for regulating collective bargaining. The vote, which closed on Saturday, will decide the fate of every worker at the warehouse.

An Amazon spokesperson claims they “take on feedback, make continuous improvements, and invest heavily to offer great pay, benefits and skills development,” yet such rhetoric is not reflected in the grueling sixty-hour weeks and below-inflation pay raises commonplace amongst the companies’ employees. The implementation of artificial intelligence, which under a more democratic management structure might have eased the load of workers, has only served to increase the intensity and amount of work required of the companies’ employees. The Associate Development and Performance Tracker, or ADAPT, and the Supply Chain Optimization Technology, or SCOT, have become a widely used tools in Amazon’s workplaces. The former meticulously tracks the pace and activity of employees over sometimes ten-hour shifts and the latter is partially responsible for making decisions about what the warehouse should buy, where items ought to be stored, and what the best means are for delivering goods to customers.

It is possible to imagine a world in which these technologies, combined with job security and adequate paid training, are used to make work more efficient and to transfer workers to positions where they can be most effective. In reality, these systems are a block box for workers, who are provided with no transparency about how their work is organized, what data is being collected about them, or what to expect from future machine decisions. Their effect is to create a culture of constant anxiety and uncertainty in an already precarious industry.

For trade unionists, the tactics Amazon deploys to undermine efforts at collective action are well-known. The company has hired private investigators to spy on labor organizers and organized anti-union captive audience meetings, at which trade union officials are targeted by management. In Coventry, the company launched a charm offensive ahead of the vote for union recognition. While in the past Amazon had made little effort to translate contracts for its staff, many of whom are foreign born, the company has in the lead up to the vote printed out anti-union messaging in multiple languages and hired management of the same ethnicity as some of the staff to undermine solidarity.

Ferdousara, a GMB organizer who has been on the picket line from 5:00 a.m. every day for the duration of the organizing drive, told Jacobin that Amazon has attempted to present the union “as an external organization, saying GMB will make all the decisions, which is a complete lie.” The company has also posted anti-union propaganda throughout the warehouse, including “QR codes that when scanned, automatically create an email to GMB cancelling membership.”

She added that the company has also been holding mandatory meetings with anti-union propaganda. These “voluntary” sessions, which every worker is obliged to attend, last the better part of two hours. Amazon’s tactics extend further than what Ferdousara described as “brainwashing.” The company has also sought to undermine the process of gaining legal recognition for the union in other ways:


They [Amazon] have also flooded the warehouse with new hires on temporary contracts to subvert the democratic process. The first time we put in an application for recognition was around this time last year, when there were about 1,800 workers. Now, we estimate there are over three thousand people. We’ve been told Amazon have been hiring ten to fifteen workers a week.

These tactics have meant that longtime employees at the warehouse have been unable to find enough work or have had to take on other jobs for which they have not been trained, which can be dangerous. Staff are often moved to jobs that require lifting heavy weights or traveling long distances when their regular work is unavailable.

There are currently forty workers leading the unionization fight with GMB who have become organic leaders of the unionization drive, but their efforts have helped to get the union to where it is now, on the cusp of recognition.

While being far from socialist, the new Labour government led by Keir Starmer will create a political climate that will be much more union-friendly than one led by the Conservatives. Starmer has in fact pledged support the GMB workers and implied that he might repeal anti-union legislation, including mandates of minimum service levels at schools and on railways during strikes. However, Starmer’s recruitment of former Conservative MP Natalie Elphicke, an ardent supporter of minimum service laws, to the party in May in the lead-up to the general election is a worrying sign that a U-turn on this policy may be a possibility. But if Starmer is serious about bolstering workers’ rights in the wake of a fourteen-year assault on living standards by the Tories, he will have to keep his promises.

Labour has also committed to repeal regressive anti-strike laws that prevent electronic balloting, and will lower the current threshold for statutory recognition from the current mandate of 40 percent of the total bargaining unit and over 50 percent turnout. Furthermore, Starmer has pledged to scrap the two-year qualifying period to receive full employment rights, a move that organizers like Ferdousara believe will help their efforts.

The labor of warehousing and logistics is part of the cloud empire that amazon has built. The UK’s digital infrastructure essentially runs on Amazon Web Services, which has had no competition or public accountability despite the critical importance of this infrastructure. Victory in this sector could be the start of a wider trend for democratic accountability over these crucial features of the architecture of modern life.

CONTRIBUTOR
Matthew Cole is a lecturer in technology, work, and employment at the University of Sussex. He is currently writing a study of wage theft and technological change for Verso Books.

Amazon Workers in Coventry, England, May Soon Be Union

A year and a half ago, workers at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry, England, launched the first-ever formal strike against the retail giant in British history. Today the workers finish voting on whether to unionize.

By Stuart Richards

July 14, 2024

Source: Jacobin





It has been a year and a half since workers at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry shook the retail giant with the company’s first-ever formal strike in British history. From that time, they have become used to seeing the company’s anti-union material displayed in the workplace.

But all of this only foreshadowed the scale of the union busting brought in by management as workers prepared to vote in a ballot for statutory union recognition.

Union recognition would mean Amazon would be forced to sit down with the GMB Union to negotiate on matters relating to pay, worker safety, and terms and conditions. A victory here would empower Amazon workers everywhere.

From the moment workers enter the workplace, they are faced with huge posters telling them why they shouldn’t vote for union recognition. As they go through the walkway into the main building, they walk past four display screens pumping out anti-union messaging. Once they enter the main building, they find even more pop-up displays, posters, display screens, and notices on the back of toilet doors.

All of the workers have been told to attend up to six management meetings to be regaled with tales of how Amazon really does listen and how managers will be making changes for the better. Managers have been brought in from other sites to help spread the company’s anti-union propaganda through one-on-one conversations with workers. The messaging is constant and unrelenting.

Amazon is throwing huge amounts of time, money, and resources into trying to stop workers from voting for union recognition. This is a company that is panicking.

Amazon’s management is heavily investing in discouraging unionization. It is evident that they fear transparency and the prospect of revealing their financial records through legal processes stemming from union recognition. This could expose practices they would rather keep hidden, hence their extensive efforts to influence voting against union recognition.

Ceferina Floresca is one of the instigators of Amazon’s agitation. She is one of the forty workplace leaders who have led workers through thirty-seven days of strike action and built a union of around 1,400 members inside the warehouse.

She is clever, articulate, and a force of nature. One of the many mistakes Amazon bosses have made is underestimating her and her union colleagues.

They are the reason for the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC) — the government body responsible for regulating collective bargaining — determining that it is likely that the majority of workers are in favor of union recognition. They are the reason for a ballot for union recognition at Coventry being forced on Amazon.

In a sea of union busting, Ceferina’s face is one of those appearing on the three display screens given over to the union during the ballot period. The one union notice board echoes her words and those of her colleagues.

It was Ceferina and her colleagues who led the union meetings held inside the warehouse, with around 2,500 workers being able to listen to the reasons for union recognition and ask questions about the wild rumors being spread by management.

“Being a GMB member enables me to represent my colleagues and be their advocate for fair treatment and better working conditions. After spending five years at BHX4 [Coventry warehouse], we have forged bonds. We spent nearly ten hours together each day navigating the same challenges, fostering a sense of camaraderie and understanding.”

Ceferina and the other workplace leaders have the same lived experience as the other Amazon workers. They have experienced the grueling ten-hour shifts and had to work up to sixty hours a week just to make ends meet. They have seen colleagues taken to the hospital taxis after bosses told first-aiders not to call ambulances. They know what it’s like to work at Amazon. They are trusted.

When Ceferina tells workers the rumors of the site closing as a result of union recognition are nonsense, they believe her. When she says union recognition doesn’t mean losing benefits — it means fighting for better and saying no to losing even more benefits — they believe her.

“I believe I can be a voice for the countless individuals who work alongside me at BHX4. It is about standing shoulder to shoulder with my colleagues, amplifying their voices, and fighting for a future where every worker is paid a decent wage and treated with dignity and respect.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Amazon’s union busting hasn’t had an impact. When speaking to Amazon workers, you can see that many are frightened by the company’s threats and rumors. Managers have told workers there will be no pay award this year if workers vote for union recognition. They have told workers there will be no pay award this year and they will lose benefits if there is union recognition. For workers who are already struggling with the cost of living and who have already had years of benefits taken from them, this is no small threat.

But Ceferina remains confident. “Looking ahead to the ballot, I’m optimistic. Recent political shifts and a growing sentiment for improved labor conditions suggest a positive outcome is achievable. Many are eager for change both nationally and within Amazon. Our goal as a union is to advocate for fair treatment and better conditions, echoing the broader desire for improvement.”

Going forward, Ceferina has a clear message for bosses: “To Amazon management, I urge you to embrace transparency and fairness. Instead of resisting unionization, view it as an opportunity to strengthen your relationship with your workforce. Workers are not just resources. They’re essential partners in the company’s success.”

The ballot for recognition closes inside the warehouse today, and the outcome will be released when the final votes are counted on Monday, July 15.

Whatever the result, Amazon in the UK faces huge changes as workers continue to organize in warehouses throughout the country.

“Joining the union is my response to a convergence of deeply felt concerns and unmet expectations. It represents my commitment to demand better compensation in the face of the escalating cost of living crisis.”

Ceferina’s reasons for joining GMB and organizing her workplace are shared by many Amazon workers. It is clear that the fire lit by Ceferina and her colleagues in Coventry has sent sparks right across Amazon UK warehouses.

Stuart Richards is a senior organizer for the GMB Union.