A new book exploring the history of the British trade union movement through the lens of education, titled Libraries Gave Us Power: A History of Trade Unions and the Fight for Education, is due for publication early next year.

Gavin McCann’s Libraries Gave Us Power – A History of Trade Unions and the Fight for Education tells the history of the British trade union movement and their role in transforming access to education for working people. The book explores the development of trade unions in the early 1800s through to the present day, and follows the self-taught activists who demanded learning opportunities for working people and refused to accept exclusion. It traces the movement’s growing influence, the creation of institutions such as the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) and Ruskin College, and the shaping of Labour’s educational mission. Libraries Gave Us Power reveals how trade unionists carried these ideas into Parliament and government, drawing on their own experiences and the sense of opportunities denied to them to widen access to learning for others.

Gavin McCann has worked for UNISON for more than twenty years as a Regional Learning and Development Organiser. His professional life has been dedicated to supporting the education of working people. He explains that his inspiration for writing the book came about following the end of the Union Learning Fund (ULF) in 2020.

The ULF was funding that the Government had made available to trade unions since 1997 to help engage their members and the employers they negotiated with. It generated a tremendous amount of work and enthusiasm, but as it ended I wondered ‘where now’? To answer that, I wanted to look back and try and place this ‘very modern’ activity within an historical context. We often hear that education has always been a key pillar of the movement, but to what extent is this true?

The story continues into the present, illustrating how trade union engagement in lifelong learning has benefited workers and communities, helping to bind society together and strengthen democracy. Today, unions continue this work through training, learning programmes, and campaigns that support workers in a changing economy, while remaining rooted in values that would be instantly recognisable to the movement’s earliest pioneers. The book highlights the role of trade unions in helping to unlock the “untapped potential” of millions and considers the future of trade union education.

Libraries Gave Us Power: A History of Trade Unions and the Fight for Education will be published by Manchester University Press in April 2027 and is available to pre-order here.

Find out more about Gavin McCann’s project here.