GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

Thanks for the invite. Sorry I did not get here yesterday. There was a bit of a

mix up in our secretarial exchanges. I thought I was coming today, you thought

I was coming yesterday, but I am here today, so I appreciate that. From what I

have learnt in my time in the trade union movement and particularly in my time

as General Secretary, it is not just great to speak at a GFTU event because of

the history of the GFTU, I think what is more important is that what I see and

what I hear and in talking to Doug on a fairly regular basis, I sense that the

GFTU are ready to make an enormous contribution to the future of workers in

this country and I do believe as an affiliate to the TUC and as a General

Council member I think that there is a healthy space here for the GFTU to

develop and for us to develop trade unionism in as many different ways as we

can, so I am pleased to be here with you this morning.

I do not know about yourselves, but the scale of the problems, again coming

back to that, it can overwhelm you at times. You wake up every morning and

you look at your day ahead and you look at how many meetings you have got

and you wonder whether those meetings are necessarily going to change

things. What I try and do is keep it into very simple things about what occupies

my thoughts and I try and do everything I can at every meeting to achieve

certain objectives and there are three objectives for me since I have been

General Secretary of the CWU that I wake up pretty much every morning and

think about first thing. The first one is to ensure that the CWU as a union

continues to protect and enhance the terms and conditions of our members,

because I think that is ultimately what we exist for, and we always have to

remember that that is our bread and butter, if you like, we have to get out there.

The way we do that in the CWU is we are developing plans all the time to get

closer and closer to the frontline where the workers are, where the members

are, where the reps are. We value our structures where we have reps still in

every workplace, but we have some issues as a trade union where we are not

doing enough to organise workers outside of our core industries and we need

to do a lot more in that field.

In terms of getting closer and closer, one of the things I was talking to Doug

about, we are going to launch a new app later this year, hopefully by around

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