ON MONDAY Sheffield Needs a Pay Rise is holding one of the most important yet of the online meetings and webinars that are taking place as the left adapts to organising in lockdown.

The devastating impact of Covid-19 on Britain – the worst-hit country in Europe – and the mounting evidence that the virus is hurting working-class communities hardest highlight the need to change an economic system so unable to protect people or even prioritise their wellbeing. 

Yet the left entered the crisis shortly after heavy electoral defeat and the Tories are sitting on a comfortable lead over Labour in the polls. Our movement urgently needs to learn how to win support among millions of workers who currently see no point in it.

How Organised Labour is Rebuilding the Red Wall, which airs live at 7pm on Monday, will ask what lessons can be learned from Sheffield’s approach to city-wide organising. Sheffield Hallam’s new MP, Olivia Blake, will be joined by Wansbeck MP and former party chair Ian Lavery as well as ex-shadow chancellor John McDonnell.

Last year the Morning Star reported on Sheffield trades council’s joint initiative with the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union (BFAWU) to hire a city-wide organiser, “not tied to a particular trade union or specific company target,” to organise low-paid and precarious workers.

“We’d set out with the best intentions, putting out press releases condemning bad companies, showing up outside with a slogan and a banner but it wasn’t enough,” trades council secretary Martin Mayer tells me.

“On one of the McDonald’s campaigns we got our people to stand outside, calling for the boss to recognise the [BFAWU] union, but at the end of it we hadn’t really spoken to any staff. And [McStrike organiser] Gareth Lane pointed out we might even be alienating the workforce doing that. What we needed was an organiser.” 

The trades council didn’t feel capable of handling PAYE, national insurance and so on, so it entered a partnership with the BFAWU in which it agreed to pay a part-time organiser with the union managing the rest. Mayer was surprised at how quickly the trades council managed to raise the cash needed, with much coming from union branches.

The role was part-time at first but it was going so well that after the first organiser left for another movement job, the BFAWU agreed to go 50-50 with the trades council on hiring a full-time organiser. Rohan Kon, who has a background in Acorn and Labour community organising, started in January on a 12-month contract.

Mayer says this has “transformed the Sheffield Needs a Pay Rise campaign.” He praises Kon for “keeping in touch with a whole army of low-paid workers in the city centre,” building up a network of volunteers who make initial contact with low-paid workers – mostly in hospitality, though some in retail and some in call centres – get details and pass to Kon who follows up. “She has longer and longer conversations with them, encourages them to work collectively, tries to get them into a union consciousness of fighting back and they then start asking for membership forms.”

The city-wide model is inspired by similar organising campaigns in the United States and Kon was sent to learn about the technique when she first got the post, working with union organisers in Durham, North Carolina.

Olivia Blake thinks the model is important not just for unions, but for the Labour Party as well. “Labour has a lot to learn from the likes of Fight for $15 in the US,” she tells the Morning Star. “It successfully changed the national agenda around low pay, winning respect and dignity for low-wage workers. 

“Worker-led community organising has supported workers to strike to win a minimum wage rise to $15 an hour in state after state –raising wages for 22 million workers and keeping almost $70 billion in working-class communities rather than tax havens.”

Mayer thinks getting to know workers before you try to recruit them is key, and a challenge especially in workplaces where unions may be completely absent. “We used to say you need to be in a union, here’s a form, fill it in,” he says. “This is getting to know them, winning their confidence, getting them to talk about their problems, how they can act collectively to take on the boss.” When he met Kon for a drink to discuss progress, he was surprised to find a couple of bar workers approach her and ask for more membership forms.

It’s a method that Ian Lavery feels is crucial. “The community-organising model is the way the labour movement can reconnect with an ever more precarious workforce, who in many cases are unaware of what unions actually do.” Blake agrees: “This blend of workplace and community organising is vital to ensure workers feel supported and empowered to take on huge employers like McDonald’s. Entire families and communities are organised in support of workplace struggle.”

In the first few months of the year progress was swift. Sheffield Needs a Pay Rise meetings were attracting 80 to 90 people a time, “more than we’d had since we first founded the campaign years ago.”

While many of the workers being contacted work in sectors organised by the BFAWU, that’s far from universally the case and Mayer says that some have joined Bectu and Unite. He is keen to stress that the organising campaign is not aimed at recruiting people to any particular union, simply the most appropriate one in the circumstances, and it keeps in close contact with Yorkshire and Humber TUC regional secretary Bill Adams.

It also benefits from close co-ordination with community campaigns, most prominently in partnership with community union Acorn. Sheffield Needs A Pay Rise volunteers canvas workers in the workplace, and reach them door-to-door with Acorn too, finding links between workplace and community issues – such as low-wage workers’ reliance on a broken public-transport system.

A big challenge was the lockdown. Like trade unionists up and down the country Mayer was worried about the movement’s ability to keep organising. But in Sheffield it has had notable successes.

“In that first perilous week or two it was difficult – getting workers to get together and say to their boss, what are you going to do about our wages?”

“Before the Job Retention Scheme was announced we had quite a victory with one pub chain, Mitchell and Butlers. After workers organised across Sheffield branches of the chain, bosses gave in to demands for sick pay and a guarantee of no job losses.

“We linked up with the Wetherspoons campaign – that was national, but we had the numbers to play a big role. Company chairman Tim Martin had sent out a video saying staff would be laid off and might want to get other jobs. Our naming and shaming campaign, which mobilised huge political support and over 14,000 workers and members of the public to take action, saw Martin’s position turned around in a few days and he even apologised, ensuring workers would not suffer a gap in pay.”

Blake thinks the campaign could “totally transform” Sheffield. “As long as the people of Sheffield are living pay-cheque to pay-cheque in insecure employment, our economy cannot grow. Our communities cannot sustain themselves and our small businesses cannot thrive.

“Low-wage workers aren’t the ones hoarding profits. Huge corporations come into our communities to exploit us, drain the local economy and avoid paying tax by piling wealth in tax havens.

“Marginalised low-wage workers could be the future working-class leaders of our unions and in our party, but they do not owe us their votes. If we are to learn from our defeat in December we must look to, support and extend campaigns like Sheffield Needs A Pay Rise –not just to every Red Wall seat but to every corner of the country.

“As a party we must throw our weight behind campaigns that are truly worker-led.

“There is no doubt that our movement needs to rebuild from the grassroots in communities and workplaces if we ever want a chance of implementing socialism and improving the lives of the many. This is a long-term project that needs proper direction. 

“That’s why I have repeatedly mobilised local and national political support for workers active in Sheffield Needs A Pay Rise – and will continue to do so,” she declares.

Lavery points out that the Covid-19 crisis has “exposed inequalities that have been building for decades. At the same time support for Labour among working-class communities has been declining. Local Labour parties and trade unions [must] work together to win for the people we should represent, to rebuild support in our traditional community areas that have stopped trusting Labour to make positive changes in their lives.”

The 2019 defeat was “decades in the making,” the former Labour chair contends, with voters’ view that Labour was uninterested in their concerns “not wholly misplaced.” 

“To win again Labour needs to be rooted in the communities it seeks to represent.”

The next big battle is around the government’s efforts to end the lockdown, even while questions about how workers are to be kept safe remain unanswered. A poster has gone up round Sheffield featuring 10 points workers should be expecting answers from their employers on (below).

Sheffield TUC has set up a Covid-19 Council of Action which on Tuesday hosts a Zoom meeting on stopping schools reopening before it’s safe.

As Mayer says, “we have the highest death rate in Europe – and still rising. This is not the time for a massive easing of the lockdown.”

The fight is on, and it’s one that requires the labour movement to step up in defence of whole communities on a scale it has not had to in decades. Sheffield’s experience will be of incalculable value in doing so. Tune in on Monday to find out more at bit.ly/3bcPePB.