THIS STUC Congress, our focus has been on the need to win in Scottish workplaces instead of expecting people to do it for us — organising, building power, challenging bad employers.

I’d like to consider that strategy in the context of trades councils, trade unions building power of local communities. What would that look like?

We are often reminded by the Scottish government that Scotland leads the way on progressive and fair politics, but what takes place at a local level often doesn’t reflect the good intentions of frameworks or charters from the Scottish Parliament.

Scottish workers can often be found struggling under the shadow of those documents, trapped in low-paid precarious work and living in local communities where economies seem to be devoid of effective government intervention on fair pay and fair work.

A living wage or the right to trade union representation has still to be won for many in Scotland’s towns and cities.  

Fair work is not evident in the external budgets of local councils or integrated health boards. They largely rely on privately provided workforces for care in our communities though contracting and grants.  

This money often goes to employers who rarely exemplify the principles of the Scottish government’s fair work convention or benefit from collective bargaining. Care homes are the perfect example of that. 

Or in our further education colleges in Glasgow, where outsourced services like catering, security and cleaning result in wages being cuts within weeks of contracts being handed over despite the invaluable services they offer to staff and students.

Scottish austerity is currently delivered in our communities by cash-strapped local councils that see management of cuts as the best politics can deliver.

The current SNP-led administration at West Dunbartonshire perfectly illustrates that. Proposals to deliver austerity by cutting access to trade union representation remain in place, although they have been roundly condemned even by SNP party leader Nicola Sturgeon.

In Glasgow, our trades council has tried to work with communities throughout our city by hosting public hearings at which a variety of local community groups can raise the consequences of austerity budgets in front of the local politicians.  

We have built real and meaningful relationships with local communities who have led our May Day march, spoken on our platforms and whose causes we have championed. However fighting back shouldn’t be all we do.

The vision of local people collectively owning and running community-based public services seems distant and intangible.
Scottish trades councils are the local collective voice of our movement and they could provide a vision of what our communities could be.  

The radical agenda of maximising local taxation and the value of public spending in our local communities has caught attention of our movement.  

Edinburgh TUC in particular has led the way in calling for Edinburgh Council to demand that the Scottish Parliament unfreeze the council tax and give local authorities the power to implement a visitor levy, a car parking levy and a supermarket levy.

Edinburgh has shown the way that trades councils could play a pivotal role in pioneering work around a new vision of “municipal socialism” influenced by municipalism or the “fearless cities” movement internationally.

It’s often via trades council motions to STUC Congress that significant progress is made in our movement. Our own trades council supported the development of precarious workers campaigns in recent years, supporting the establishment and development of Better Than Zero. 

I was reminded this year during our own fight for pay equality in Glasgow that, in 1969, at an STUC special conference on equal pay, Agnes McLean, as a delegate from Glasgow Trades Council and not her own union of the AEU — even though she was convener at the Rolls-Royce site in Hillington — moved the composite motion on equal pay.  

McLean led Scotland’s fight for pay equality in engineering and other factories Dagenham-style, but she chose the trades council as her vehicle to do that in the STUC. 

It’s time for local politics to become a focus of radical progressive ideas in Scotland and trades councils could be central to that. The radical agenda of maximising local taxation and the value of public spending in our local communities has caught the attention of our movement.  

If the STUC focus is to win in workplaces and not expect people to do it for us, Scottish trades councils are the local collective voice of our movement and they could be instrumental in providing a vision of what change a powerful communities could command.

Jennifer McCarey is chair of Glasgow Trades Council.