‘Everyone has a duty to have that vaccine’: Outgoing Unison boss discusses pandemic, politics and public sector pay rises

You know, those people doing the most badly paid jobs in our society, the cleaner, the porter, the crematorium worker. They deserve as much respect as the entrepreneur, and the leaders of business.”

In feisty form, Dave Prentis, the outgoing boss of Unison, could easily have added “and the pandemic demonstrates that”.

But he leaves the thought unspoken, partly because it hardly needs saying, partly because he’d clearly argue that they’ve always deserved it and it shouldn’t have taken a deadly pandemic, in which they’ve been squarely in the firing line, to make the point.

“We need to respect people who give so much for our society. With Covid-19 it’s not just the doctors and nurses,” Mr Prentis, professing himself “proud of our union and the people we stand up for”, says.

“Hundreds of our members have given their lives, people who have been going in to protect people, to protect us.

“The way in which they have performed has been incredible. They go to work every day, fearing for their families. We have a president and a vice president. One is working full time as a nurse. Another is a low-paid worker in a care home doing nights. They moved away from their family to keep them safe. The most common work issue our members face is that they’re just exhausted.

“They deserve recognition and it’s not just about clapping on a Thursday. That’s good to improve morale but we need to ensure they are well paid and that everything they’ve done will not be forgotten,” he says.

And yet beyond those claps, the rewards he speaks of haven’t been forthcoming.

“What has been said is there will be a pay increase in health but we’ve no idea what it is and there are millions of public service workers not in the health service that need one too.

“The way in which care has been treated, for example, has been a disaster. Most workers have seen clients dying and they are on the lowest pay scale it’s possible to imagine.”

Mr Prentis speaks in a fairly measured way, but his words are fierce.

A case in point comes when I mention the call by the Centre for Policy Studies for a public sector pay freeze that the government took up, at least partially.

“It is disgusting that people who are fairly well protected, who can work from home, feel that they say this to the people who have been protecting them,” he replies. “Our members are tired. They live in fear. It seems immoral that they can be kicked in the teeth by people who should know better.”

Mr Prentis says it isn’t just his workers that deserve recognition, either: “Though we don’t represent them, we would have been lost without shop workers, the members of USDAW. These are low-paid workers too. We have to recognise what they have done for us.”

Stumping for Unison’s members will, however, soon be the job of his successor. The union will on Monday announce the identity of its first new general secretary in 20 years.

Mr Prentis cites the union’s creation from the merger of Nupe, Nalgo and Cohse as one of his foremost achievements. Another proud moment was the 2011 march against austerity when half a million people walked through a London festooned with Unison’s purple and green, “the colours of the suffragette movement” he stresses, as well he might given that a large majority of his membership are women.

If he has a regret it is “never being able to stop Labour under Tony Blair from moving towards privatisation as the way forward”.

“Multinationals should not be making money out of vulnerable people and I think we are now paying the price for that failure to stop that. You just have to look at what’s happened in Scotland to Labour MPs who voted in favour of privatisation of public services in England. They should reflect on what’s happened, which has lost us Labour in Scotland. And we need it to win.”

What Mr Prentis says he does not regret is Unison being the first union to nominate Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader – “he gave us a different type of politics and I think that we needed renewal” – despite the thumping defeat Mr Corbyn led Labour to in the last general election.

Unison was, however, also the first to nominate his successor Sir Keir Starmer, and Mr Prentis has a clear message to the latter’s fractious critics: pipe down.

“We had to look at how we could get Labour back into power for our members. For me the only way forward was to have a person the people of this country could respect and vote for. We didn’t need the bouncing ball of a Boris Johnson. We needed someone serious, from a working class background, who has taken on the sort of cases we espouse. It seemed without question that Keir wold be the leader people would vote for and that’s been borne out in the way his standing has risen.

“Labour has moved ahead in the polls. Things are looking better. You have seen what happens when you get a Tory government. They wind down public services. They don’t build hospitals, they don’t build schools. They reduce the burden on the Treasury, which is the wrong approach for our society.

“We must support the leadership to enable us to win. All of this backbiting from the fringes gets you nowhere. We need to forget these open letters to the leader and things like that. We don’t need to be washing our dirty linen in public.  We need to attack our enemy: the Tory government.”

He believes Labour needs to reconnect with supporters in its former heartlands in the north and elsewhere.

“The people there are not gong to vote for people distant from them. I do go around knocking on doors, canvassing. When you go around… there’s one election I remember in 2010. I visited a housing estate off the North Circular that was in really decrepit condition. Poverty is not just in the north, it’s in the south too. The people there had never seen anyone from Labour in 10 years.

"That’s just as true in the north. We have got to be part of people’s lives. Labour’s got a lot of heart searching to do. But it will turn. I’m optimistic about that.”

He’s coy about his future plans, mentioning only an interest in a role with the Labour Party, of which he’s been a member all his life. But he pledges that his final days in office will be spent campaigning for people to take up the offer of vaccination.

“We always talk about giants of the past. We have seen giants among the public service workers of the present. They have taken our society through the most dangerous times any of us can remember. That’s why I will be an advocate for people being vaccinated and against things like the stupid demonstrations outside St Thomas’s Hospital. How do they think our members feel when they see Covid deniers outside? In terms of hope, it has to rest with the vaccine working and protecting people.

“I will be at the forefront of the work to encourage all of our 1.4 million members to take the vaccine and make sure their families do too. We have a reach into five million homes. We have pioneered the use of new media to communicate with our members in a way that other unions haven’t done yet. And we’re growing.

“We will be using that to say this vaccine has to be used by everybody who has the opportunity to have it. People have a duty to have that vaccine. Not just for themselves, but for other people too, for the the whole of society. The problem with lockdowns is that they merely delay the inevitable.

“Everyone has a duty to have that vaccine.”