THROUGHOUT the pandemic key workers have been absolutely essential in keeping our country running – treating the sick, keeping the shops stocked and open, the streets clean, the buses and trains moving, our internet connected and making deliveries. 

And trade unions have made a decisive difference in protecting workers, fighting to ensure safety advice and social distancing guidelines are applied, intervening at government level to win programmes like the job retention scheme that, while flawed, have protected millions of households’ incomes. 

There has never been a better moment for our movement to harness our collective strength and deploy it to secure further-reaching, longer-lasting change. 

There’s now an unarguable case for a national care service. For greater investment in the National Health Service. For regenerating the high street. For upgrading our broadband infrastructure and ensuring universal access to it. And for paying essential workers more and treating them better. 

On all these questions we have to make the argument that this is not just a public health crisis. Many of the issues the country has faced in recent months are the result of a broken economic model. 

There is a growing consensus that essential workers have been underpaid, that trade unions have been crucial to ensuring workplaces are safe, that our work-life balance has been wrong, that the basic safety net of statutory sick pay and universal credit is inadequate and that an unequal society is one that is vulnerable to crises. 

The key battleground here is going to be between unions and employers, and that’s why the trade union movement needs to come forward with its own distinct narrative, irrespective of what is being said by Labour or other political parties. 

That narrative should be rooted in three principles. 

Equality. The Black Lives Matter movement has exposed the pervasive influence of racism and we all need to work together to eradicate this and defeat the structures that underpin it. Trade unions need to take this struggle into the workplace. An organised workforce that fights for the rights of everyone as workers is the most powerful weapon against racism, sexism and other forms of oppression. 

Collectivism. We’ve seen the groups mushrooming across the country during the pandemic as communities come together to support each other. Unions can’t be divorced from these groups. We have to work with and help develop new forms of collective power that give workers and communities a say in what happens where. 

And universalism. The pandemic has increased appreciation of the value of a universal health service. We can make this argument in many other sectors. We need universal access to high-quality care. Universal access to full-fibre broadband. Universal access to the services ordinary people rely on. 

To me that just reinforces the case for a publicly owned national postal bank. It can play a key role in the regeneration of the high street, at the heart of the local community, lending to local businesses, helping the economic recovery. This is part of the infrastructure of the country that the government should be investing in. 

We’ve started a conversation with government about that, but we can’t just focus on government at Westminster level, we need to be putting pressure on councils, on local and national employers. 

There’s a joblessness crisis hitting people right now and I don’t see any of these other issues as separate from the fight for jobs. The fight for a better recovery is the fight for jobs and trade unions need to make sure that recovery is based on a new deal for workers, as unions such as Usdaw have been making clear with their 10 demands for shopworkers. 

We’ve made progress in talks with Royal Mail since former CEO Rico Back was shown the door. They’ve walked away from the idea of hiving off a separate parcels delivery company, and we’re talking on the question of an expanded role for postal workers in their communities. 

When it comes to telecoms, you have lots of competing companies and when subcontractors are considered a bewildering range of pay, terms and conditions. The trade union movement, and in this sector a union like the CWU especially, has to take forward the fight for sectoral terms and conditions. 

If we want to deliver universal broadband of a high standard to everyone as a right, then the chaos of current competition between smaller companies, owned by private equity and hedge funds, cherry-picking the most profitable areas and undercutting each other on employment standards, is an obstacle to that. 

The logic of universalism of course leads towards public ownership, but the first step is to use our collective strength to stop employers dividing and ruling the workforce and driving everyone’s pay and conditions down in the process. 

Employers are doing that now, and that’s why unions have to put forward our programme now. It’s no good saying, as Keir Starmer seems to be doing, that we can wait four years and then we’ll tell you what our policies are. Labour will be left behind. 

An ultra-cautious approach would be totally out of step with the spirit of the times. The public mood that Britain needs to change hasn’t disappeared with the pandemic. It has got stronger. Polls show just 6 per cent of people think we can go back to “the old normal,” and that a majority of even Tory voters want higher taxes on the rich. Labour seems to be at risk of misunderstanding what is happening in British politics. 

Our answer to that has to be to assert our own agenda as a trade union movement for the transformation of the workplace and the economy. The public appetite for it is huge. Our job is to make pressure for it so strong that employers and government ministers have to accept it too.