New TaxPayers' Alliance research is out today looking at how taxpayers' money is being spent supporting the trade unions. The report looks at Government departments, quangos, councils, NHS Trusts and fire services; over 1,200 organisations. We found that £85.8 million went to support the unions in 2009-10. £18.3 in grants and other payments and £67.5 million to support 2,493 employees working for the unions but paid by the taxpayer. The total was up 14 per cent from 2008-09.
This is a huge amount of money, significantly more than both the main political parties will typically raise in a non-election year. The unions know how much of a scandal it is, they tried to stop organisations answering our Freedom of Information requests.
They will claim that the presence of union staff helps improve workplace relations. But research by global business performance advisors McKinney Rogers shows that most employees consider their trade union representative uninspiring (54 per cent) or downright demotivating (27 per cent). By contrast, 52 per cent find their company's CEO inspiring and 56 per cent find their colleagues inspiring.
Our report shows that the unions have a huge network of paid organisers at no cost to themselves. And programmes like the Union Modernisation Fund support a range of projects that improve their technical capacity and recruit new members. All of their actual work representing employees is paid for, so they can use their own income to build multi-million pound warchests to fight spending cuts. £85 million in public subsidy gives them a huge advantage in their attempts to turn the clock back by decades, and go to war with an elected government with a clear democratic mandate to curb the deficit.
Public sector staff strike for fifteen times as many days per worker as private sector workers. They rely on the fact that politicians and managers aren't spending their own money, and that their employers can't go out of business. It is ordinary taxpayers who pay the price when they don't get the better schools that reforms should be delivering; when money is wasted on excessive spending and higher borrowing costs thanks to a failure to make necessary cuts; and when services they have paid for are disrupted by strikes. It is an absolute outrage that taxpayers are being forced to finance their own muggers.
The regulations that force employers to pay for staff working for unions should be scrapped, the unions should pay those salaries themselves, and scandalous slush funds like the Union Modernisation Fund should be abolished. If the Government don't act on this issue, they will accepting a gross distortion of our democracy that threatens their own efforts to fix the public finances, and they will be allowing a chronic waste of taxpayers' money to continue.
