The hypocrisy test: Can UK trade unions truly confront racism?

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak* 

The death of Professor Jason Arday has reignited public debate about racism in Britain and renewed calls for a robust anti‑racist movement capable of building a genuinely egalitarian society. Yet the path forward remains steep, not least because people of colour must themselves sustain the struggle for racial justice—and because too many institutions, including trade unions, continue to exhibit patterns of racial bias and entrenched white entitlement.

Racism is not a problem confined to universities or media circles, where it manifested in the public harassment of Professor Arday even before his death. It is a daily lived reality for people of colour across workplaces and communities, one that has historically and presently inflicted severe damage on lives and livelihoods. For many, the death of Professor Arday has become a symbol of the urgent need for systemic change. However, the persistence of white privilege—often blind to the realities of racial discrimination—makes meaningful progress difficult.

Trade unions, as key pillars of workers’ representation, are not immune to these dynamics. Historian Alfie Hancox’s insightful essay, “When British Trade Unionists Debated Black Power,” published in the New Socialist on 30 September 2023, serves as a timely reminder of the movement’s complex racial past. Hancox recounts how, during the “immigrant strikes” of the 1960s and 1970s, workers from India, Pakistan, and other former colonies united against racial wage inequality and segregated conditions in factories across Birmingham, Lancashire, and the East Midlands. These activists, defying the racial division of labour that separated Asian and Afro‑Caribbean workers, coalesced under a Black political umbrella—yet they often encountered hostility or indifference from mainstream trade unions.

John Wrench’s seminal study, Unequal Comrades: Trade Unions, Equal Opportunity and Racism (1986), documents this history in detail. Its central findings remain relevant today: despite nominal improvements, trade union bureaucracies have frequently failed to confront racism structurally, and the legacy of that failure continues to inform leadership practices. In effect, the racial past persists in the present, leaving many people of colour feeling either unrepresented or deeply distrustful of predominantly white union leadership, owing to historical betrayals and a lack of progressive consciousness around discrimination.

Critics argue that trade union leadership often responds to members’ complaints about racism with lip service rather than meaningful action. Concerns are seldom raised with management; legal support for victims of discrimination is limited; and some union officials resort to bullying or procedural manoeuvres to sideline or silence activists of colour. Such behaviour, it is contended, reflects the enduring influence of racialised colonial capitalism, which has shaped not only workplace hierarchies but also the internal cultures of trade unions. In this view, union leadership has become complicit in a managerialist approach that undermines working‑class unity and dilutes the movement’s radical potential.

This pattern is not without historical parallel. Some observers have drawn uncomfortable comparisons to the complicity of religious and social institutions in systems of racial exploitation—such as the documented entanglement of Quaker communities with slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While the contexts differ, the underlying theme of institutional hypocrisy and self‑interest resonates.

The result, critics say, is a trade union movement that risks irrelevance. When leadership fails to address racism substantively, it fractures solidarity and weakens the movement’s capacity for wage bargaining, workplace support, and broader social transformation. A culture of compliance with management, coupled with internal toxicity, drives away active members from ethnic minorities and alienates progressive white workers alike.

Yet these challenges are not insurmountable. Trade union leaders—regardless of their own racial identity—must develop a genuine political and ideological consciousness that encompasses not only race but also all other grounds of discrimination, exploitation, and marginalisation. The alternatives are stark: either the movement perishes through division and inaction, or it rediscovers its core democratic, non‑hierarchical principles. Accountability to the membership, transparency, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable histories are essential first steps.

In the end, equality and justice cannot be bargaining chips. They are the foundational objectives of any credible trade union movement. The choice, as history and current experience both suggest, is between perpetuating a reactionary status quo and building a genuinely inclusive, revolutionary force that serves all workers, regardless of colour or creed.

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*Academic based in UK