For some time now, there has been a concentrated effort on the part of society’s most powerful to claw back the gains wrestled out of their hands by our class – the working class.

This process accelerated with the 2008 crash and the election of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition. The austerity measures that followed targeted the public sector particularly, slashing vital services to ribbons while the government refused to touch a penny of the bankers’ bonuses.

At the same time, the influence of the so-called New Realism kept many of the country’s largest unions punching well below their weight. A host of right-wingers held top jobs, seeing their role in very simple terms: to ‘pick up the phone and speak to the boss’ (to paraphrase serial Unite loser Gerard Coyne) and negotiate compromises that kept themselves and their inner circles on good terms with the employers.

In technical terms, this is called class collaboration: where workers’ leaders spend more time trying to placate the bosses than they do fighting for the interests of their own members. This has especially characterised the recent past of my own union, UNISON.

Over the last decade or so, however, the bosses and their Tory Party have made their stance on such arrangements very clear. They’re not interested in cozy chats with self-proclaimed ‘moderates’. The capitalist system they represent is coming apart at the seams, and they are desperate to patch it up by whatever means necessary. This means trying to pass the cost onto workers.

In response, a new generation of fighters have begun making their presence felt in the labour movement. The Corbyn movement saw thousands of young people enter politics for the first time, energised by a chance to see real change. This politicised generation did not vanish into thin air after the 2019 general election defeat – whatever those who now surround Keir Starmer may have hoped.

Now, particularly following the devastation of Covid-19 and the lack of preparation in the public sector—care homes becoming hospices as the elderly were abandoned, hospital workers forced to carry out their jobs without adequate PPE—we are seeing a similar phenomenon beginning to occur on the industrial front, too.

Many of the people getting involved are new to trade unionism. But being new doesn’t mean they’re not willing to fight. Neither myself or my running mate Kiera Hilder had ever been anything but ordinary union members before we stood as young members’ representatives in Unison’s recent NEC elections.

However, our experiences had already taught us some sharp lessons about the world and our place in it as workers. And like so many others we felt we needed to fight for something better for our class. Thanks to the encouragement of our friends and comrades, we decided to run for the NEC.

The crisis in the public sector has hit those who work within it hard, particularly young workers. I know healthcare assistants who regularly work ten-hour shifts or longer due to lack of staff. And some of my friends in the care sector are often paid under the minimum wage for their work through some legal loophole. Young people often work the longest hours for the least pay; and when redundancies are declared we are often the first to be given the sack.

This must change – and we intend to change it. Unison is a huge union, with enormous potential strength. It also has significant weight in the Labour Party, contributing two NEC members to its ruling body, as well as a host of conference delegates. A union like this could clearly do a huge amount to not only organise and defend workers, but also to use its political influence to help change society for good.

We stood as part of the Time for Real Change platform, a broad front of left-wing candidates determined to see Unison transformed into a fighting union. Now that we’ve won, we intend to make the most of the historic chance we’ve been given. The Corbyn movement showed how hard people are willing to fight for a better world, and we want to enable our members to win exactly that.

However, there is another lesson of the Corbyn era. There are some who are quite happy with the status quo within our organisations, who see change as a threat to their privileges, and who are prepared to do anything to defend them – up to—and including—internal sabotage.

If it meant they got to run the party again, many of these people were happy for Labour to lose under Corbyn. NEC members elected from the Time for Real Change platform are already facing similar opposition. Our efforts to put through policy are being frustrated. Meetings are turned into screaming matches. Worse yet, some of our members are being hung out to dry when they need the union most.

Scandalously, our union’s president Paul Holmes is currently being victimised by his employers at Kirklees Council, having been suspended for 21 months now despite not even knowing the charges against him. Given the lack of response from the union bureaucracy on this issue, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that some in our union would be quite happy to let this employer sack a prominent left-winger without any pushback.

Clearly the effort to change Unison into a union that will use its full weight for the benefit of workers, take on the Tories, and push for socialist policies comes with some huge challenges, and there are many obstacles in our path we’ll have to overcome. As great as it would be, these changes cannot and will not happen overnight.

They will require the full mobilisation of grassroots activists in Unison and across the labour movement in order to carry out this struggle. And it will require non-unionised young workers who are eligible to join the union to do so, and to help us in this fight.

The fact is that we need to radically transform society along socialist lines in order to tackle the problems we face across the world – and that means transforming the organisations the working class has built for itself so they’re up to the task. It’ll be tough, but the prize is well worth fighting for.