Unite general secretary Len McCluskey’s recent claim that clamping down on migrant workers will make Labour more attractive to the “white working class” doesn’t reflect a trade unionism that I and many other organisers – migrant and UK citizens – believe in.

I worked as an organiser for Unite on and off for seven years between 2005 and 2014. I’ve worked with warehouse packers and pickers, meat-processing workers, cleaners, baggage handlers, cabin crew, waiters and drivers, in the north-west, south-east and London. My parents were immigrants from Poland - my dad trained with the RAF after spending years incarcerated in a gulag in Siberia, and my mum came in the early 1970s to marry my father and see life on the other side of the iron curtain. Friends and family followed suit over the years, every time for “bread”, working on construction sites, in hospitality, tailoring, whatever they could find.

My job, as a trade union organiser, was to organise with workers. All workers. One class: the working class. They had different languages, different religions, different beliefs, but one common experience of exploitation by a system that treats them all as labour, giving some more status than others, but all under the same boot when it comes to the needs of capital. Workplaces where three agencies functioned simultaneously, playing workers off against one another. Workplaces where cleaners were registered at Companies House as directors and had to pay £30 a week to an agency just to have their wages processed. Workers who weren’t paid at all. Workers on zero-hours contracts who were “switched off” and sent home as per the needs of warehouse orders.

How did the UK become such a perfect arena for a race to the bottom? Over the past few decades, Labour and Tory reluctance to change anti-union legislation, and their failure to amend the Agency Workers Regulations to ensure parity between agency (mostly migrant) and contract (mostly British) workers, crushed the conditions under which the poorest workers could organise and fight back. The legal, structural barriers to organising – try to fight back as a group of agency workers and suddenly you have no shifts any more – meant workers who rose as leaders, British or migrant, were shot down. But this isn’t the only factor in undermining solidarity: mainstream trade union bureaucracy also plays a significant and enduring role.

From the late 1980s to the mid-2000s, most trade unions in this country have pursued a “servicing” approach to members rather than an “organising” one. Servicing treats a member as a service user – they’ll get representation when the proverbial hits the fan in the form of advice and casework, with cheap car insurance thrown in. Organising hails the member as a potential activist and organiser in the union: they are the union, capable of taking collective action to change their terms and conditions. Servicing focuses on casework and individuals; organising focuses on collective change.

Both approaches are needed in a trade union. Not everyone will want to step forward and confront the boss, but, as hyper-individualising neoliberalism has risen over the past 30 years, so has the focus on servicing in unions. As injunctions and lawsuits have become more accessible for companies to use to prohibit strikes and silence workers (see the Communication Workers Union’s recent treatment at the high court), mainstream union establishment culture has, unsurprisingly, become risk-averse: workers representing themselves and publicly speaking out have been replaced by men in suits sharing pre-prepared statements to national media.

Limiting the presence and supply of human beings for capital in this country because you think it will help you organise in workplaces better is not a trade union approach – it’s a boss one. You never punch down. You never collude with the state to stop poor people seeking bread, and you never collude with a classification of people as lesser. You wouldn’t accept a two- or three-tier employment contract system in a workplace, which is rampant today, any more than you should collude with that in immigration status. These concepts of class, underclass, a black-market workers’ class, serve neoliberal states, which continue to pursue policies of atomisation, authoritarianism and poverty class-reproduction. Why would you follow this model?

Unions need to do their organising and invest in it, properly. To empower rank-and-file workers. They should never let bureaucracy direct workers’ struggles, or allow officials to give away deals in the name of “good industrial relations” when workers would be better served by calling for strike action.

The dynamics that prevent workers organising are as much about the “external” world of capital – laws, use of police and military, professional union busters, HR – as they are the internal ones within some mainstream trade unions. These include factional networks that know how and who should gain positions of power, which can be exclusive; a kind of Fordism that leads to bureaucratised and sectional piecework when a campaign process could be handled from start to finish by one group of workers; a deference to position by hierarchy rather than capability; and a prioritisation of the political capital of the institution, rather than its redistribution to grassroots organising and initiatives. All of this plays out in a social framework of institutionalised racism, gendered and gendering power relations and the hostile environment that hits migrant workers the hardest, all of which unions should be working to undo at every level.

Established industrial relations theory talks about three different approaches. The first is a pluralist approach: workers and bosses exist; unions and capital can work together. An example was the post-second world war strategy of planning and supposed power sharing between largely nationalised industries and trade unions. The second is the unitary approach (the dominant one today, otherwise known as HR in a tin), which says that we don’t need unions, as businesses and workers have the same interests. And then there is the conflict approach: our interests are in conflict, yours are extracting as much profit out of us as possible whereas we are for dignity, justice and a shared bakery, not just a bigger slice of the pie. It’s the last approach that carries most hope for an end to the humiliation and exploitation people are being made to put up with generation after generation.

There are unions in the UK that actually practise united class organising; the two most strident and grassroots today are United Voices of the World (UVW) and the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB). Both were dismissed by some in mainstream unions as “pressure groups” or protest organisations, totally overlooking the fact that they launch and win disputes and also employ legal and casework staff as well as organisers. What they have in common is that they allow for a necessary “conflict” approach.

United Voices and IWGB, on shoestring budgets, are uniting all their members to strike for their collective interests, without classification or reservation. They’re a model for what united unions can look like. The older unions, by contrast, remain stuck in an industrial past. When will Unite live up to its name?

• Ewa Jasiewicz is a trade union organiser based in Manchester