Sharon Graham: 'I worry the Treasury has a hand in stopping some of the vision'

“The new deal for working people has got some good things in it. There is no doubt about it,” Sharon Graham says. But it is clear she does have doubts about Labour’s flagship policy, now rebranded by the party as its “plan to make work pay”.

The general secretary of Unite the Union, Labour’s biggest affiliate, meets The House on a stormy day in Brighton during the Trades Union Congress annual conference. That morning Keir Starmer has delivered his speech, which warns Britain’s trade unions that the pay of their members will “inevitably be shaped” by the “tough decisions on the horizon”.

“I worry that the Treasury, particularly, has got a hand in stopping some of the vision, and certainly stopping some of the investment”

Apparently unconvinced by the Prime Minister’s insistence that being “pro-business and pro-worker” will lead to higher growth and higher wages, Graham is suspicious of how the government is ‘partnering’ with business on its package of workers’ rights.

“What I feel is now, with the business lobby, the consultation is almost becoming consultation and revision. And that’s a problem. 

“For me, a zero-hours contracts ban should be a ban on zero-hours contracts. Exploitative zero-hours contracts – that is now going to be contested. What’s exploitative, in whose opinion? You can’t ask a worker to say that, because that worker won’t have a job,” she says.

“The other bit that worries me is fire and rehire… What’s been said is there’s a caveat – if an employer has ‘no other option’. Well, that’s what they’ll say: they’ll have ‘no other option’. Who determines whether they’ve got no other option?”

Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister who entered politics through the union movement and has spearheaded the plan for workers, and Jonathan Reynolds, the Business Secretary considered to be on Rayner’s right within Labour, are leading on the policy.

“To be fair to Angela Rayner and Jonny Reynolds, I believe that they want this to be good. I genuinely believe that. But I do think that they will have pressure from those that are speaking to the business lobby to make some changes,” Graham says.

The Unite leader suggests this pressure is coming from the Treasury. In other words, she believes the problem is Chancellor Rachel Reeves.

“You want a Labour government to come in and not just manage better. You want them to come in and be visionary,” Graham says.

“I worry that the Treasury, particularly, has got a hand in stopping some of the vision, and certainly stopping some of the investment. That’s what you’d have to conclude from what I’m seeing.”

She adds: “Fiscal rules aren’t real. They’re self-imposed. You can change the fiscal rules if you want to. I say this to Keir, I’ve said it in many meetings, that in 1945 we had double the debt-to-GDP, more than double we’ve got now, and we built the NHS and the welfare state. We went on to be prosperous.”

Her attitude towards fiscal rules seems unlikely to gain traction in Downing Street. Graham is not shy about expressing her disappointment that the winter fuel allowance has become means-tested, a move she calls “picking the pockets of pensioners”. But Starmer and Reeves have pushed on regardless – and the pair warn of further pain coming down the line. 

“My relationship with Labour is one of: I’m professional with them; I expect them to be professional with me. I’m talking on behalf of a million members. I get a hearing in that. But there’s a difference between the trade union being in the room and being listened to,” Graham acknowledges.

Labour may not be listening to her right now, but she says the union is “doing brilliantly”: “I’ve had over 1,000 disputes, lots of our members have won double-digit pay rises, we’ve had 200,000 workers out on strike and paid £42m in strike pay, and our membership’s going up.”

Graham says her day starts at 4.30am, and by 5.30 she is going through emails. Does she have interests outside of work?

“It’s funny, Angela Rayner said to me last night, ‘Do you ever do anything but work?’” she laughs. “I take my work really seriously, but I don’t see it as work. I’m doing something that I was doing for free before, as a steward.” 

The real answer is family, particularly being present for her teenage son. “GCSEs this year. He’s very lazy, actually, so I’ll have to try and deal with that!”

London-born Graham was one of four raised by a 5ft 2in Irish mother (“very small but very impactful”) and a Geordie father. “I had a very Celtic upbringing. I went to Ireland every summer,” she recalls. Her family were not political, exactly, but talked a lot, about everything: “Nobody can get a word in edgeways.”

She is still close with her parents, now aged 86 and 89. Graham, 55, along with her husband Jack and 15-year-old son Tom, today lives just five roads away from their home, which she describes as the “nucleus” of the family. “People meet there. Sometimes I’ll go around, I’ve just popped in, and seven hours later on a Sunday I’ll still be sitting there talking to them. I’m really lucky that they’re still with me.”

Graham grew up being told the story of how her great uncle James, a miner, died in a rockfall and left behind three children under 10. When, as a silver service waitress aged 17, her employer brought in agency workers with a plan to pay them less, she sprang into action.

“I don’t know what gave me the balls to do it,” Graham says. “I devised this thing where I was doing the top table. Once the top table’s finished eating, you clear it and put your hand up, so everybody clears the room at the same time. And I said, ‘We just won’t clear. We’ll leave the plates where they are.’ The first course had been served. [The boss] was jumping up and down, going bananas, but he paid the money.”

“Frances O’Grady was telling us off: ‘Who do you think you are?’. I said, ‘We’re the general secretaries of the future!’”

Aged 27, Graham did a year at the TUC’s Organising Academy at the Education Centre in Crouch End, a kind of Hogwarts for union bosses. She was among the first intake of the leadership programme for trade unionists alongside Paul Novak, the current TUC general secretary, and Roz Foyer, the STUC general secretary. 

“We had many a long evening, where we used to go and raid the kitchen quite often,” she says. “There was a quite a funny moment where Frances [now Baroness] O’Grady was telling us off: ‘Who do you think you are?’. I said, ‘We’re the general secretaries of the future!’ because that’s what they kept telling us.”

She describes herself as “vocal” and “opinionated” even then, responding to the TUC lessons by telling them, “That not what’s happening when I’m going out!”. She went on to create an organising department in Unite, then T&G, where her approach was “very different from how the Organising Academy did it, in the sense that it was much more about collective bargaining across a number of workplaces, so you could really push up pay in a quite serious way”.

Graham prides herself on being an innovator. At Unite she has pioneered the use of leverage, which involves looking at companies as a whole rather than narrowly focusing on the subject of disputes. She seeks to frustrate their investments, for example. 

One tool is forensic accounting, used to properly understand where their money is. Another tactic she calls “strikes plus” – when a particularly hostile employer has already factored in and accepted strikes, she will find another way to disrupt them. The company is French-owned? She’ll send a team to demonstrate in France. Graham likes to get creative.

The Unite leader is especially pleased with her ‘combines’, which bring in sectoral collective bargaining by the back door. Labour has committed to enabling this type of negotiation – ie reaching agreements across whole sectors, rather than with individual firms – but only for adult social care. 

Graham is going ahead unilaterally, getting companies from the same sector together in one room to discuss a range of different disputes with them all. She believes linking industrial fights strengthens the hand of her members and allows the union to think more long-term.

“I’m not going to wait for the government to put in sectoral bargaining, because they won’t. They won’t be able to do it quick enough, to be fair, and that’s not necessarily down to them, if I’m being honest. But we have the ability to do it because we have 41 sectors in the union,” Graham explains.

“If you’re going to put in, for example, an AI agreement in banking, you’re not going to be doing that branch by branch. You’re not even going to do that company by company.”

She has also brought in the use of “trigger agreements”, whereby a number of employers are asked to agree to a change, which is not enacted until all are signed up to it. “What you’re left with are the real hostile ones,” she says, and this allows her to focus the union’s efforts.

Graham has used ‘combines’ to significant effect in the bus industry and will now turn to the docks. Specifically, she wants dockworkers to benefit from the opening of the first final salary pension scheme in Britain “in any sector in 30 years”. Their pension payments would once again be based on length of service and salary at the time of retirement.

“It used to be a normal thing to have a final salary pension scheme. Every time one goes, the rest become more vulnerable. There’s only 1,000 left in Britain,” she notes. “I’m looking for things we can do that are pace-setting.”

“I have had to elbow my way through the whole of my union experience”

To win the Unite general secretary election in 2021, Graham fought off two men considered frontrunners: Steve Turner, Len McCluskey’s favoured successor, and Gerard Coyne, a fierce McCluskey critic. “I was not the anointed son,” as she puts it.

Her pitch to Unite members was that she would turn away from “the machinations of Labour” in favour of conversations about jobs, terms and conditions. To almost everyone’s surprise, she was successful – but her fight against McCluskey supporters did not end there.

“I have had to elbow my way through the whole of my union experience. Right the way up to standing, where I was asked to stand down. I had a lot of intimidation. There was a lot of social media attacks.

“It’s happening for a different reason now, because I’m uncovering what I believe to be corruption in terms of the Birmingham inquiry… I’m wrestling it to the ground, and it’s coming out, literally, in the next couple of weeks. I’m a tough cookie, so it hasn’t put me off.”

Under Graham’s predecessor McCluskey, Unite embarked on the controversial construction of a hotel and office complex in Birmingham that it is thought was originally estimated to cost around £35m. That figure ballooned to almost £100m.

After taking over as general secretary, Graham commissioned two inquiries – into the project, and into the union’s ‘affiliated services’ (which offer financial and legal advice to members). She has handed over findings to the police.

“When I came in, I could see from the invoices, I could see from the amount of money that was being spent, you could see by looking at the hotel, quite frankly – I mean, it didn’t look like it was worth £98m to me.”

Unite has incurred an impairment loss of £60m, Graham tells The House. “There was, at best, a £30m overspend that cannot be accounted for. There was that, and what’s called the affiliated services, where I found financial irregularity.”

She believes some of the blame lies with Unite’s dominant faction, United Left. “There’s factional groupings in the union that allowed that to happen, in my opinion. Things could have been seen earlier, but the previous general secretary was their man,” she says.

When McCluskey led Unite, he reportedly told the executive council that costs exceeded expectations because the union was employing unionised workers and paying them well. In December 2021, after Graham replaced him, he tweeted that her inquiry was “sensible”. 

Graham says her decision to launch the probes has led to harassment. “Because I put checks and balances in, and I wouldn’t stop – I wouldn’t cease doing the inquiry, which I was asked to do – I have had people outside my door at home.”

She continues: “I’ll make sure it can never happen again. So that plank is important, but it has been the most ugly situation. I was the first woman general secretary – you can understand why women do not want to go into these roles, to be honest. But we are well able for them.”

So, despite the ugliness, will she be standing for a second term? “Yes, oh yes. Absolutely yes.” 

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