AAlison Treacher

SSteve North

How did you get involved with CaSWO?

ACaSWO first started off the back of a Barnet UNISON branch meeting during the pandemic. I’d been working in care for 13 or 14 years at that point, slogging away as a Unite shop steward, fighting over peanuts, looking for some kind of catalyst to bring care workers together. As awful as it was, the pandemic certainly provided that. The branch meeting somehow ended up going round online and loads of people turned up, myself included, who weren’t even UNISON members. There was just so much fear at the time, people needed somewhere to turn. Loads of really basic health and safety concerns came flying in. Questions about unions. Bread and butter stuff. I knew we couldn’t let this opportunity go without building something out of it. So I spoke to the Barnet branch, got the contacts, and said let’s get going.

SI wasn’t at that first meeting, but I was a care worker - a mental health support worker - before being elected as a full-time branch officer, so I had a background in care. Once I got set up in my new role I saw that we had a lot of casework with people in private care companies, who once would have worked for the council but were now legacy members of the branch.¹ But we weren’t doing anything to organise them. We’d represent them when we could - maybe winning, maybe losing - but not getting much further than that. At the time the region’s attitude was that we should just focus on our core local authority. Our attitude was that actually they’re members and they deserve more, so we hired a dedicated local organiser as a branch to support them. I think that mattered to me on a personal level because of my background in care.

That meant that by the time the pandemic started we’d already racked up a lot of experience in the care sector in Salford. We’d originally set out to improve wages, but as we got to know more people we realised another big concern wasn’t even just how much they were getting paid, but whether they were actually getting their contractual pay. So we probably spent as much time, if not more, making sure people were paid right as making sure they got paid well. We built up a lot of experience through this, even if we were inundated with casework. And then CaSWO came along. Someone from our branch went to the first meeting and said it felt like an important opportunity, and also somewhere we might have something to contribute based on our experience. So that was the entry point for me.

How did the project develop from a Barnett UNISON branch meeting into a cross-union, rank-and-file, care workers’ organisation?

AWell, at the first meeting it was quite evident that, beyond the immediate existential crisis, there were deeper problems in the sector. We had a whole room full of people who’d been in the sector for quite a long time, recognising shared experiences, and we were able to draw out a list of fifteen demands around health and safety, around pay, around our vision for the sector.²

But we knew that we needed our own platform. There are 20,000 or more care workers in Unite but it’s incredibly hard for our voice to be heard in such a huge organisation. Every time care work was discussed, even on the left, we were just an add-on to “keep our NHS public.” There was never a platform where we could build up activists, where we could speak for ourselves, where we could highlight the differences. So we continued the meetings and began to hold them more frequently. We got a core group of people who really cared, not just about the profession and vocation, but about what social care looks like in the future. We also made unwavering solidarity with the disabled people’s movement and the people we support a central part of the group.

It was really important to keep going, because as women, as migrant workers, we’re often ignored on our own terrain, and a lot of the people involved at the beginning hadn’t really been involved in the left before. I remember doing lots of work with Steve at the beginning, like, oh god - do we need a constitution? A bank account? We were the swan’s feet - keeping the meetings going, setting up infrastructure, asking people how they were doing, what was going on at work, how we could intervene. As more seasoned leftists we were trying to make the process easier for the others. Looking back it wasn’t sustainable.

SEarly on CaSWO was meeting a need that wasn’t being met elsewhere. Going into the lockdown, UNISON was very focused on winning political support for a set of commissioning demands. Getting local authorities across the north west to sign up to an ethical care charter, for example. I was always skeptical of that approach as an end in itself, because unless you can enforce those commitments, they become meaningless. You can’t ignore it - because although these organisations should be employing people directly, if they’re not, they remain responsible for people’s working conditions and should be held accountable on that. It has to be backed up by organising in workplaces. But that’s fine, we were doing it, and successfully in Salford. But the individual conversations we were having at that stage were very, very distressing. Very difficult. You weren’t really able to get to the same organising space with people that was possible before the pandemic, because people were just so unbelievably frightened. Nearly every conversation would have someone in tears, absolutely terrified. A lot of our best activists just went into survival mode and focused everything on trying to get people and their families through without getting sick.

That’s where CaSWO came in. It was an opportunity to talk to frontline workers but in an organised, political environment. There was still a recognition, by virtue of who was involved, of how terrifying it was, but it created a space to talk about what we were actually going to do about it. If you needed to spend an hour and a half talking on the phone with a terrified care worker at 11pm you were going to do that - because it was necessary - but we needed a space where we could test things out, work out demands, how to organise, how to actually enforce whatever gains we could make.

Quite early on in Salford we won something called the Salford offer. It was a really groundbreaking deal where we essentially managed to get public money in place to protect any care worker who lost money due to covid - not just loss of wages but also costs associated with shielding. We won it really off the back of the work we’d done before the pandemic. Without that prior work, I don’t know if we’d have got it across the line, to be honest, because the pandemic was such a difficult environment to organise in.³

Millions of pounds were put into it, through Salford City Council and the Northern Care Alliance NHS Trust. But we found out that private companies weren’t implementing it, even though it wouldn’t cost them a penny, because if they implemented it in Salford they’d be expected to implement it in Bury - but Bury Council weren’t paying for it. Ultimately you can’t expect the council to solve that problem. You need to get talking to workers, but beyond that absolutely terrified space where they’re wondering whether their next shift will kill them. CaSWO provided a space for that. Sometimes with care workers from my branch, but also with care workers from all over the country. It provided a space for real grassroots organising that was really badly missing.

On that point, could you say a little more about how the organising side of CaSWO worked?

AIn terms of internal organisation, I was the secretary, we had a chair, there were two treasurers. So quite a traditional trade union branch structure looking back on it. We had both internal and external meetings, but a lot of the organising was trying to look outwards. To make use of the platform and the fact that people were actually listening to care workers in that moment. We put on public meetings to try and lift the veil on the actual practices within the workplace. We also - it’s lovely thinking back on it - put on well-being calls for each other. There was an amazing sister in Brighton who knew something was wrong with care, I’ve no idea if she was on the left, and knew that someone had to care for the care workers. So she put on online mindfulness sessions, and an art session and creative writing session. We tried to also show care for each other, and not just organise, organise, organise, which probably was part of my problem at the time.

But it was a challenge for CaSWO, because there just wasn’t time. It feels like a blur, looking back, because it was just issue after issue after issue. Mandatory vaccinations. Home care work. Key worker homes. Key worker parking. You might think that the parking campaign we ran in Leytonstone addressed just a tiny part of this massive problem that we faced, but it’s important to remember that the private care companies weren’t paying for parking, and if you parked at Asda or wherever and your care call overran, then one £60 fine could wipe out a day’s earnings. So we got twenty people on the streets of Leytonstone doorknocking and building political pressure. Even if something seemed small, we thought - is this winnable? We think this is winnable. Let’s go!

It was the same when we lobbied the Local Government Association in London to make sure care workers were on the key worker housing list. It may just be one word on a big document, but it sets a precedent: that private care workers are key workers. It changes the narrative, and lifts the veil on privatisation, etc. That was brought to us by a comrade in Islington, who was really worried they were going to lose their home and wouldn’t have been able to afford to stay in the city. Looking back at it, a lot of our actions were scattergun. We never had a 12-week campaign. Someone would just bring something, and we’d think, that sounds good, that sounds winnable, let’s go.

SIt didn’t take the form of a classic organising approach because we were reacting to something completely unprecedented. You couldn’t have mapped out what the issues were in advance. Mandatory vaccinations, for example, became a massive thing that you wouldn’t necessarily have anticipated. So rather than a classical organising project, it was an exercise in solidarity. That’s what it was at its heart for me. If you came to one of those meetings, and you had a concern or you had an issue, people would listen. If you had an idea of what you might be able to do about it, people would give you advice, and they might join in, and they might find ways to help.

We did organise around some issues, but there were so many issues that for a lot of them it was just - I say “just”, but I think just’s the wrong word, it was necessary - to form a platform to show solidarity with each other in a way that wasn’t encumbered by the usual union rules of demarcation. This is our union, that’s your union. This is the branch structure, this is that, this is the other. It was a way of communicating directly with each other to provide solidarity and really get through it. And in the process of getting through it and giving solidarity to each other, it also occasionally threw up really practical ideas for things that sometimes worked, and sometimes didn’t, but actually had quite a significant impact. Even if the action itself or the issue itself might not have seemed too big to begin with, it helped.

One place it certainly helped was in my organisation. I’m not going to say I organised through CaSWO. I provided solidarity, and I tried to help CaSWO to continue to provide that sort of space. But it absolutely informed my organising. I would come off CaSWO calls full of ideas that I would then speak to care workers in Salford and others in the North West about. It taught us about things happening elsewhere that we could try to replicate, or issues that were important to care workers beyond just the immediate fear. This was a space where we could move beyond the terror and funnel these experiences back into organising.

You’ve both mentioned that mandatory vaccinations were a really big issue. Could you say a bit more about that?

SI don’t mind starting by saying that this was an incredibly difficult issue. On the face of it UNISON’s approach was to say we support vaccination but we don’t think it should be mandated. But the reality is that a lot of union staff and activists had a really difficult time understanding why anyone wouldn’t accept it, and that bled into the conversations that were taking place. You could have quite well paid, male, union officers or staffers - people like me - talking with low paid, black women, in insecure employment, who had very real concerns about state mandated attitudes to their body. When you think about that for more than even a minute you can absolutely understand why, but in that environment there could often be an attitude of - you just need to get over it. So even if in principle our position was to oppose mandation, in private a lot of people thought the government was doing the right thing, and that came through.

We also knew at the same time that more nefarious forces were using people’s concerns about the vaccines to push an anti-vax and conspiratorial agenda, in some cases overtly far right. Those connections became obvious quite quickly and we tried to get in the middle. We tried to basically say, we’re trade unionists, we’re care workers or former care workers, and we do think vaccination is a good idea, we do think this is in your health interests, but we also genuinely don’t believe you should be forced into this, and we want to talk about that. We had a meeting with Emma Runswick, from the BMA, and she was fantastic, because as a doctor she could explain - in a very patient way - why she believed vaccination was necessary, but was at the same time really open to the concerns people were raising. And, you know, I’m not gonna lie, I think some people still left those meetings with the conspiracy theories, and you felt exasperated with others who took a high-handed view that the others just weren’t intelligent enough to understand, but I do also believe that others came away feeling like they’d come to a place where people trusted them to make their own decisions and were now more comfortable with the idea because their concerns hadn’t been dismissed. Was it perfect? No, but it was one of the most genuine efforts I came across to address the issue in the right way.

AOne of the unique aspects of CaSWO was that we created a new space where we - mostly women, and women of colour - could explore and discuss these issues that are at the heart of feminism. It’s my body, right? At the time 84% of that workforce were women, so there was a lot of discussion about the fact that this wasn’t happening in other sectors. It didn’t happen in the NHS because of the level of organisation, but probably also because of the demographic. So I want to frame my response in two ways: the activity of the rank-and-file and the inactivity of the unions.

On the first, both me and Steve do fight within our unions, but on this issue I don’t think Unite would have released a public statement if CaSWO hadn’t been driving it. Steve mentioned Emma having been at our public meeting on vaccination. It wasn’t an easy meeting. The politics were difficult. But as the rank-and-file we knew it was affecting our colleagues and we needed to talk about it. We weren’t afraid of the politics of that discussion because our overarching culture was one of solidarity, and that enabled us to reach quite a nuanced position - and quite quickly.

But going back to what Steve said about CaSWO being a vehicle of solidarity, it’s interesting, because after that meeting Emma said that if there was anything the BMA could do to support care workers to let them know, because they were open to it. And we took them up on that. I said, you know what, I work in care homes. My organisation has over a thousand workers spread across 150 homes. Our level of vaccine uptake has been pretty high but it’s still looking like people are going to lose their jobs. Could you help? So Emma arranged for doctors from the BMA to come in and offer individuals appointments with workers to address their concerns. The care and solidarity they showed was incredible. GPs taking time out of their day to do it for us, it was really affecting. That’s what solidarity looks like. Working across unions in a really non-territorial way. In the end the vaccine uptake at my place was 97 or 98%, whereas across the country more than 20,000 people lost their jobs.

And then on the second side of my response: when the unions do nothing. Steve mentioned the conspiracy theorists, but there was a darker side to it too. On the care forums you could see people encouraging each other to join CaSWO, or join unions, but not all unions were on the right side of this. A far-right “union”, the Workers of England Union (WEU), was fiercely critical of the vaccine mandate and lapped up membership because the big unions were silent and unresponsive to their rank-and-file. The WEU said don’t organise, join us for individual legal support and we can challenge your dismissal. It was completely opposed to the rank-and-file approach CaSWO took, which was all about empowering members to organise and take action themselves.

SYeah, you saw this bizarre thing, didn’t you? A racist right-wing union successfully recruiting black women because they were concerned about the vaccine, and these people were saying they’d support them. Clearly, supporting black care workers wasn’t their priority, but they did want to draw people towards themselves and establish credibility. We could see it happening and it was tragic. But thankfully, by the time the issue arose, we’d already been doing good work in the care sector and already established trust, so that enabled us to create an alternative space for those conversations. Because, as uncomfortable as it was, someone had to go there, and we did.

So, the care sector is obviously enormous. There are more than half a million waged carers in the UK - the most common single occupation - and many more have churned through the sector at some point. Within that there are people from a wide range of backgrounds and the sector itself is highly fragmented. Amongst all that diversity, who got involved in CaSWO? Who didn’t?

AFor the most part we were support workers. Our roles mainly focused on helping people access the community, engage with services, and elements of advocacy. Sometimes that will also involve aspects of personal care, but not necessarily. There’s an unspoken hierarchy in the care sector that comes along with that - with support worker roles on top, because they’re easier and less manual. You’re not normally having to hoist people or clean them. In CaSWO, these workers formed our core, but care workers were definitely present too, and a healthy contingent of personal assistants - who brought a really interesting dynamic since they don’t necessarily have a fixed workplace. They’re also generally employed by the person they care for. They brought something really interesting and different because they didn’t turn up saying they were there to fight their boss, just that they were being forgotten about.⁴

SYeah, the one area that we really struggled with was home care workers. We had people who worked in care homes, but domiciliary care was hard. It feels like in more recent times in Salford we’ve finally managed to crack the home care market, so to speak, but that’s come through organising off the back of high level political agreements about concerns over sponsored visas and workplace access. Without that, getting in contact with domiciliary workers is really hard. Especially during the pandemic, the kind of places you’d normally hang around to meet them weren’t available.

The point about hierarchy is interesting, because as a former support worker I can totally recognise it. It’s probably also worth noting that support work can give you a bit more time and flexibility to organise, in a way that care work often doesn’t - with such long hours and low pay and exhaustion.

AI think we had one sister from London who was a home care worker who was really engaged for about a year. That’s where the Leytonstone campaign came from. She brought that issue, and I remember feeling, oh my gosh, you’re the unseen, and you’re the unheard in here.

We also need to mention the Sage care home strikers.⁵ They were so important for us. They were concentrating on building their strike, working in their local community. They’re incredibly kind and loving people. We had a real window into their strike and it was also somewhere where we could genuinely help. We raised hundreds of pounds for them and organised meetings to build their profile. We wanted to allow them to concentrate on building and maintaining their relationships in the workplace while we amplified their struggle from outside. It meant so much to them, and to me. I still have messages from them up on my wall at home.

And the solidarity continued, because when we were organising for a pay dispute in my organisation we had a Zoom meeting with 50 care workers from around the country and one of the Sage strikers had offered to speak. I had to warn him, just seconds before we started, to watch what he said because senior management had jumped on the call. But he was so professional, he jumped on and just said: care for each other, remember who you are, and fight for each other. Really broad strokes but it really landed and drove the turnout and campaign in our workplace. This was six or seven months and their strike finished. But we’d made that relationship and he saw how much we cared about their strike and now here he was shitting up my management and investing himself in ours.

CaSWO was clearly really shaped by the pandemic. How did things change coming out of the lockdowns?

AWe had a day of action in September 2021. There were small demonstrations in five or six cities, some of them tiny - only four or five people - but in Manchester we probably had about 150 people in the square. It was emotional. A comrade in UNISON had died from covid and it was also just an opportunity for us to see each other. Some of the signs were super radical, about co-produced care, and chants like “social care should be free - not just for the bourgeoisie!” It was great, and energising. Because another thing that stopped our growth had been our inability to be in the streets, to see that crystalisation of our solidarity with each other. To enjoy yourselves together and scream, to have that outlet. For a long time we didn’t have that. So after the lockdowns we made big CaSWO banners, one of the north and one of the south, and tried to get them out on all the demos.

There was also a slight shift in direction. We always wanted to make sure we had disabled comrades on the platform with us, because we knew that was another important voice that is continually ignored, but we also veered - and this was something Steve warned me about at the time - from the organisation of care workers into a platform for imagining what beautiful social care could be like. There were some other organisations at that time who were incredible comrades to us - Act for Inclusion, End the Social Care Disgrace - who platformed us as care workers, but as we broadened our political scope we also diluted it, and that core care worker contingent no longer felt as solid.

At the same time, we kept meeting each other. We went down to London for the Leytonstone campaign. But we didn’t really have any money and that made it hard to meet in person since we’d met on Zoom from all over the country. One time we did actually meet was in Scotland, when the Edinburgh Arts Festival found out about us. They paid for us to go on a retreat together and meet each other for the first time. That was really beautiful. Fifteen of us descended on a house in Scotland and cooked together and spoke about our experiences. We organised a protest at a local community centre afterwards and put on workshops about community-based care. But that was only fifteen out of 60 or so of us that met online. It was hard to bring that full group together, especially as things opened back up.

SThe work we did opened up space within the trade unions. And then, depending on where you were, you had choices to make about where you expended your energy. Early on in the pandemic, for me, it felt like expending energy on this issue beyond my own branch in UNISON wasn’t getting anywhere, so CaSWO felt like the most useful place to channel energy into. But then, as the work we did together did open up more space, it then felt like actually the best thing I could do now was to continue that work by getting more people active within the union. And that obviously had consequences for CaSWO. As more active trade unionists left - not all of course, Ali stayed until the end - it did become very broad, but that allowed some beautiful things to happen. I don’t think anything’s lost by that experience, and let’s hope we’re in a place in society where the lessons from that can make a valuable contribution to the future state of social care.

And then if I look at my own union, at UNISON, we didn’t previously have a particularly intersectional approach to organising in social care. We were interested in those age old demands of pay, conditions, and security of employment. They’re fundamentally important to fight on, but we didn’t refine it beyond that, and didn’t really understand who we were trying to organise. Taking the lessons of CaSWO into UNISON, for example, meant that when the social care visa scheme started a couple of years ago we were far better equipped to address it. It made a big difference to our organising in Salford among migrant care workers, and helped us pull them through onto our branch committee to help organise a new generation of activists. A lot of the things I and others learned that allowed us to play a productive role in that were not things our union taught us. They were things CaSWO taught us.

That feels like a good bridge to our last question. What would you say to any readers considering rank-and-file organising in the care sector? What are the main lessons from CaSWO?

AI wish we’d had more time to bring people in. We were pretty much organising an internal meeting once a week, a public meeting once a month, and all from people working at least 45 hours a week, a lot of us on minimum wage, many without a social network. We needed more support - and where was the organised left? NHS Workers Say No were absolutely solid, always promoting us and offering what they could. That solidarity from another rank-and-file organisation was really beautiful.

But when it came to infrastructure, setting up a bank account, a treasurer, it was like - do we have to do it all ourselves? I’m not sure if I think this goes against the principles of rank-and-file organising or not, but having a paid organiser would have been a massive help, even if just for ten hours a week, to support the work of overstretched rank-and-file activists. If we’d gotten two grand from four or five organisations that could have been enough. And then we could have focused solely on our organising, on bringing people in, while someone else took care of the admin. Like Steve says, no one wants to join an organisation when everyone is fraught and burnt out. That’s not how you recruit.

SCould we have done more as CaSWO? I think you have to think about what an incredibly challenging and intense time that was, and all the demands and pressures it placed on people who were already carrying society on their shoulders. I’m not sure, even with the most critical of eyes, you could say there’s more we could have done as CaSWO.

But I think the unions certainly could have done more. And more of us in the unions could have done more to recognise the value of something like CaSWO. I’m not someone who believes that unions should cede their role in society to decentralised grassroots campaigns. I think there’s a hell of a lot we can only achieve through the trade union institutions we’ve built. But there is a balance to be struck. You need that space for rank-and-file grassroots organisation which isn’t encumbered by the bureaucracy, but we also can’t ignore the fact that real systemic change will only come through organising collectively in unions. Projects like CaSWO are crucial, but they have their limits, because they’re just too bloody hard to sustain. Ultimately we won’t fundamentally change social care in this country through top-down or bottom-up methods alone. We need a way of bringing them together.

The Care and Support Workers Organise! (CaSWO!) demands were:

1. Social Care Workers deserve decent pay! We demand at least £15 an hour with holiday pay based on normal wages and pension parity with public sector workers.
2. Fair Contracts for Social Care Workers! Contracts of employment, including minimum hours to be led by the needs of workers and those in receipt of care and support.
3. Full sick pay for all Social Care Workers! Occupational sick pay for all, including full pay protection for any absence arising from COVID-19.
4. Health & safety at work! Safe workplaces with genuine support for every aspect of workers’ health and wellbeing.
5. Full Acknowledgement of our keyworkers rights! Care and support workers should be entitled to benefits including access to Keyworker housing and eligibility for Low Cost Home Ownership Schemes.
6. Trade Union recognition for all care and support workers! Trade union access to all social care workplaces and the right to full union recognition.
7. Sectoral collective bargaining rights for care and support workers! Mandatory sectoral collective bargaining relevant to all governmental and devolved jurisdictions across the UK.
8. Democratising Social Care! Social Care to be brought into democratic public ownership, guided by co-production of workers, disabled people and those in receipt of support.