Unison's Andrea Egan: Labour Government Has "Done Very Little For Working People"
Unison general secretary candidate Andrea Egan (Photography By Dinendra Haria)
8 min read
Andrea Egan, the challenger to Unison incumbent Christina McAnea, talks about her own plans for the union, favouring Andy Burnham for the Labour leadership, and working in children's homes
“I haven’t stood because I’ve aspired to be the general secretary. Actually, I really haven’t,” says Unison hopeful Andrea Egan. “I love my life in Bolton.”
Her salary as general secretary would mostly go back into Unison’s coffers because she would only take the pay of a social worker – “to be rooted in members’ realities”, she says.
“There is a real disconnect with the leadership and the membership,” which she hopes to address. And she would not move down to London, where Unison headquarters sits on Euston Road, she tells The House.
The Labour Party under Keir Starmer is “not connected to working people” either, according to Egan. “Labour is supposed to be the party of the working people, and they’ve done very little for working people [in government]. The Employment Rights Bill? I think there should be an Employment Rights Bill Two, because it’s just not gone far enough at all.”
“I’m working-class, and I’m proud of that. I’m proud of my class. I’m proud because we’re grafters. We keep this country running,” she adds.
While Unison officially backed Bridget Phillipson for Labour’s deputy leadership, Egan favoured neither her nor winner Lucy Powell: “I’m not going to be drawn into lesser evils, because I spent years doing that when we used to go door-knocking.” Having joined Labour about 15 years ago, she says, Egan is no longer a member after being expelled for sharing articles from the proscribed Marxist group Socialist Appeal.
Nor is she a member of any other party, she clarifies, though she is personally enthusiastic about ‘Your Party’, the new one being started by former Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, as well as pro-Gaza Independent MPs. It has been a chaotic endeavour so far but when we talk – before its founding conference – Egan says she will have to “see how it develops”: “I do feel that it gives people hope again.”
If Keir Starmer does go before the next general election, as many Labour MPs suggest, would she favour any of the potential options for succession?
Take Angela Rayner, a former care worker who entered Parliament via Unison. “I can’t say that I’m an Angie fan, but I connect with certain elements,” Egan says of the working-class woman who similarly hails from the Greater Manchester area.
The former deputy prime minister’s stamp duty scandal harmed her chances, she agrees, adding: “If I saw her, I’d say, what were you thinking?” But ultimately, she concludes that Rayner should be forgiven for the tax error: “If you’ve got a prime minister that we had – Boris Johnson and all the mistakes he made – I would say, if she puts her name forward, why not? I hope she’s learned a really valuable lesson about integrity and making sure that you absolutely get the right advice.”
The Health Secretary is certainly not getting any backing here. “Wes Streeting? Anybody that thinks he’s going to try and save the NHS, I’ve got some magic beans for you, because he’s not. He is privatising the NHS now.”
Her true preference is Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham: “I am a fan of Andy. I mean, he’s the King of the North!” He would, of course, need a parliamentary seat to be eligible. (A backer of McAnea calls Egan’s support for Burnham “unbelievable” given Unison is in a protracted pay dispute with Transport for Greater Manchester, an arm of his combined authority.)
Egan was raised on a Bolton estate, surrounded by crime families, by a single mum who did odd jobs while sometimes relying on benefits. Her dad being in the armed forces, her parents had moved to Germany before separating in the early 70s, when that was “a bit unheard of”. She and her brother lived with their mum at their grandparents’ before getting their first council house.
As a girl, she wanted to be in the police – her dad became support staff after the army – but she opted for social care work instead as she was too young to join up. Enrolled in a course at the local college, she was sent on placements, and at 19 worked in a care home. In her early 20s, she moved to children’s residential care.
“These were big, 21-bedded units; big, sprawling houses. The kids in there were the most vulnerable kids in society. They had ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattooed on their hands. They had the borstal spots,” she recalls, referring to the face tattoos, dots under the eyes, that signalled the wearer had done a stint in a youth detention centre. “They were kids that had been horrendously abused, neglected.”
She soon became a union rep. “It got to the point one day when the branch secretary came and said, ‘Listen, I can’t keep coming out here. One of you is going to have to be rep.’” Her colleagues encouraged her to take it up; only years later did she realise that was because she was young and single with less to lose than those with families.
She worked her way up in residential care, becoming manager of the unit, then trade union convenor for children’s services. Did she encounter the grooming gangs in her work?
“Yeah, absolutely,” she confirms. “Young people were leaving the unit and going prostituting. There was a real frustration for myself and colleagues… We had loads of kids that would leave, and we would use physical force and measures to stop kids leaving the unit, and then ‘pindown’ happened.”
Egan blames the 1991 ‘pindown’ inquiry for stopping staff like her from protecting children in care. Officially called the Staffordshire Child Care Inquiry, it investigated the practice of isolating children in their bedrooms for sometimes long periods in overcrowded children’s homes. Its conclusions condemned the harsh behavioural regime used. Egan says it also heralded the start of an era in which staff were disempowered.
“I felt it was absolutely the wrong thing to do, because the frustration for us is that we knew that young girls were networking and the older girls were taking the younger girls out with them – prostituting, heroin…
“It was absolutely heartbreaking to see these kids walking past you and you couldn’t do anything. The next time they’d come through the door would be after a heroin night being on the streets or being brought back by the police. We battled with our management about being able to stop them, and they said, ‘You will be under disciplinary.’ So, the system’s wrong,” she says.
“The system failed those kids and continues to fail them. When Rochdale happened, it was no surprise to me.”
Egan does, however, find the “narrative” around the grooming gangs problematic: “Absolutely, get a gang off the streets – that’s what we need to do. But the focus that these grooming gangs are all just Asian grooming gangs, I just think it gives the wrong narrative… All that happened was the spotlight was mainly put on Asian taxi drivers and not the broken system. You’re not dealing with the root cause.”
After children’s homes, she started as an unqualified social worker, then took up a registered social worker role with training paid for by the council. As head of Unison, she would be leading over 40,000 social care staff.
A key focus if she wins would be nurturing a more active industrial strategy. “There was a nervousness when the NHS ballot and the local government ballot were running,” she says, referring to two Unison ballots run in recent years that ended in negotiated deals.
“Walking around on pay ballots, members would say to me, ‘What’s the point of going on strike? You go one day, then the union brings us back in and agrees the deal. What’s the point of that?’”
Another is standing up for trans workers. I wonder what she makes of Sandie Peggie, the NHS nurse who complained about having to use the same hospital dressing room as a trans colleague. She has launched legal action against her trade union, alleging that the Royal College of Nursing failed to support her. How would Egan react if a similar case came to Unison?
“I haven’t followed that case. But what were the real issues within that? I have trans friends, trans women friends; my nephew is a trans man. I wouldn’t have an issue. I’d want to understand. Because the argument can then develop to anybody saying… ‘Well, I don’t want you there because you’ve got blonde hair’ or ‘I don’t want them there because they’ve got blue eyes’,” Egan says.
“We have members come to the union with all kinds of issues, and some of them are unreasonable, but you’ve got to unpick them.”
It sounds like she wouldn’t be comfortable with the union representing someone like Peggie? “I wouldn’t,” she agrees.
