Diolch yn fawr, Ddirprwy Lywydd. It’s a pleasure to take part in this short debate and it’s a great thing, I think, that the last words we will speak on the floor of the Assembly before we go away on our summer break in this first year of the fifth Assembly will be about trade unionism and its importance here in Wales. I’m not going to compete with either Bethan or the Member for Merthyr in looking at the history of trade unionism, but I don’t think we understand the title of this short debate, that our need for trade unions is now greater than ever, unless we look at some of the things that have brought us to where we are. The very first meeting of the TUC, the Trades Union Congress, happened in 1868. On its agenda: wage inequalities, workers’ hours, technical education and threats to jobs and workers’ rights. So, it’s a long haul from 1868 to today, but the agendas in many ways stay remarkably the same, and the challenges for trade unionism throughout that period. I’ve no doubt, at all those points, people have said to themselves, and rightly, that they needed trade unions more than ever. Who today remembers Mabon’s Monday, when trade unionists in the mining industry refused to go to work on the first Monday of the month for six long years in order to limit production and so protect wages? We certainly remember the Taff Vale judgment of 1901, with its attacks on the right to strike, and the Osborne judgment of 1909, which ruled it unlawful for trade unions to contribute to political funds. The history of trade unionism and the history of Wales are absolutely intrinsically linked, aren’t they? Both of those judgments were overturned by concerted trade union action.

Now, Dirprwy Lywydd, the first general election that I took part in, in Cardiff, was in 1983. I was remarkably young and I was put in charge of postal votes. [Interruption.] I wasn’t quite that young. But here I was, I had not long come to Cardiff, and I was put in charge of postal votes for the Cardiff West constituency, no doubt because it was thought of as something so harmless that I was unlikely to make a complete mess of it. In those days, as some of us here will remember, getting a postal vote was much, much harder than it is today. You had to go to a very particular person to have the postal vote application signed, and, in Cardiff West Labour Party, there was only one person that I was allowed to go to, and his name was Stan Czekaj, and he was in his 80s, and I was in my 20s, and Stan’s great claim to fame was that he had ridden the motorbike from south Wales to London in the general strike of 1926, taking messages from the committee here to the Trades Union Congress committee there. In some ways, you know, did they not need trade unions more than ever in 1926? That thread of our history really is unbroken. In south Wales, in 1926, the general strike was largely led by A.J. Cook—‘an agitator of the worst type’, said the deputy chief constable of Glamorgan, writing to the Home Office at the time—whose blue plaque at the Rhondda Heritage Park I know the leader of the opposition spoke at when it was unveiled only a few weeks ago. We also have a long tradition of turning our agitators into our heroes many years later down the line.

So, there was A.J. Cook, of whom Arthur Horner, another great south Wales miners’ leader said, thinking of how he managed to rouse public meetings during that 1926 campaign—Arthur Horner would say how he would turn up and speak first, and he would make a lengthy and earnest speech that people would listen to calmly enough, and then A.J. Cook would follow him and make this fantastic rousing speech that would leave everybody on fire at the end of it. And Horner said, looking back, he realised that the difference between the two of them was that he, Arthur Horner, was speaking to the meeting, whereas Arthur Cook was always speaking for the meeting, and, by capturing people’s views at the time, he was able to reflect those back to them in a way that inspired them to take the action that they did. So, that’s Arthur Cook, who led the first hunger strike march from south Wales to London in the 1920s, where they were met by that great black artist of the twentieth century, Paul Robeson, who was playing Othello in the west end, and who came out to meet the south Wales miners as they walked into London—the start of his decades-long association with south Wales, speaking in 1938 to 7,000 people at Mountain Ash as he unveiled the memorial to the 33 men from south Wales who died in the international brigades in the Spanish civil war. And, on Saturday this week, we will mark the eightieth anniversary of those people’s contribution when we meet at the international brigades’ memorial in Cathays Park, here in Cardiff. They needed trade unions, didn’t they? And they needed them, I’m sure, in the words of this motion, they would think, more than ever before.

Now, Dirprwy Lywydd, there is a long history, and we don’t have time to go through it all. We wouldn’t want to leave it without mentioning the miners’ strike, that formative experience for many people who are in this Chamber. The trade union that I belonged to at the time, as did the leader of the opposition, the National Association of Probation Officers, had somehow wangled ourselves to be official observers, whatever that might mean, at the strike. So, I would get up at 4.30 in the morning and go with others to watch the struggle outside pits in south Wales as hundreds and hundreds of police officers were needed to allow lorries to make their way in and out of south Wales collieries. And those formative moments—I think, quite certainly, as we stood there, we knew that trade unions were needed more than ever.

It was the start of that story, that sad story that Bethan outlined when she pointed to the history of trade unionism—the attacks on it that have happened over those 30 years. So, why do we need them more than ever today? Well, here are three reasons, I think: first of all, the objective position of working people in the United Kingdom today is different even than it was in some of those earlier struggles. UK workers are suffering the longest and most severe decline in real earnings since records began in Victorian times. The share that labour takes of our national income is at a 50-year low, whereas the share taken by capital is at a 50-year high. And the effect of that is absolutely real. Here is Andrew Haldane, the chief economist of the Bank of England, speaking at the TUC annual conference last year, where he said that:

‘Had US real wages tracked productivity since 1970, the median worker today would be 40% better off. Had UK wages tracked productivity since 1990, the median worker today would be 20% better off. Unlike earlier phases of rapid technological change, labour has not shared equally in the fruits of recent great leaps forward’.

Part of the reason why labour has not shared in the fruits of that technological advance is because trade unions have been weaker and have been less able to represent their members here, in the United States, and across other parts of Europe at all. In an absolutely objective sense, trade unions are needed more than ever.

They’re needed more than ever—and my second reason, Dirprwy Lywydd—because of the direct attacks that still go on on trade unions at the UK level. Here in Wales, we are committed to the repeal of the Trade Union Act 2016, and I look forward very much to being the Minister who will bring that repeal legislation in front of this Assembly during this Assembly term, because weakening trade unions is not simply an act of vandalism in itself, but it actually undermines the ability of the social partnership to deliver the things that are good for us all.

My third reason is the result of the referendum on 23 June, because, very sadly, those people—and we’ve had a very useful discussion today of why people made the choices that they did—who rejected the European Union and who have needed its protections the most will find, I think, that the choice is not between a Europe that they disliked and a better future, but an Americanisation, an Atlanticist agenda, in which TTIP will be something that those people who persuaded people to vote in the way they did will embrace as fast as they are able to do it. In the aftermath of the leaving of the social protections afforded by the European Union, trade unions are needed more than ever. So, tomorrow I will attend the workforce partnership council here in Cardiff, as here in Wales we try—and it’s not easy and you don’t always agree and I’m quite certain that local authorities run by parties of many different political persuasions have had their moments with their trade union colleagues and the people who work for them—but we try to do the hard yards of sitting around the table together—the Government, the trade unions, the employers—in that social partnership model that we know provides our best chance of weathering the storm that we face, and where trade unions go on providing an absolutely essential service for their members in a time when they are indeed needed more than ever. Diolch yn fawr.