As the UK adjusts to life during COVID-19, one of the unexpected features is that it has created a better appreciation of workers in low-skilled, poorly paid and precarious work. For example, the BBC One Panorama programme ‘Lockdown UK’ referred to hospital cleaners and supermarket workers as ‘minimum wage heroes’ and food delivery drivers were added to the government's list of key workers. Yet as Jason Moyer-Lee of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain points out, although these workers are doing essential jobs, they have the least rights and little or no job security.

As Chapter Six showed, the world of work has already been changing over the past decade, with a rise of in-work poverty, low-paid work and insecurity, caused by low-paid self-employment, temporary work and zero-hour contracts. COVID-19 has accelerated the move to online work, created new kinds of precarity and increased the risks for workers who are already engaged in low-paid jobs serviced by digital platforms.

So apart from a better public appreciation for workers who do low-paid, stigmatized or dirty work, what have we learned from COVID-19? That decent work is a right for everyone but that lockdown has made the possibility of finding and keeping decent work harder, especially for those working in the gig economy or in low-paid, low-skilled work.

These are issues that trade unions can and should address, but unions are facing a number of serious and existential challenges that frustrate their efforts. These include: difficulties in recruiting and retaining members; a decline in activism; ageing membership; and diminishing union density, bargaining power and representation. Furthermore, many unions have been pursuing a member-servicing approach at the expense of more traditional organizing tactics.

In this chapter, we consider decent work for life after lockdown by reimagining industrial democracy. We do this by proposing a ‘union co-op’ model of work. This is a fully unionized, worker co-operative, owned and controlled by those who own and work in it. Workers’ control, democracy and equality are built into the model, which offers a solution to inequality and injustice both in and outside the workplace.