GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

internal competition. They need the union movement standing together. So I

am in favour of developing new ideas on what greater cooperation could mean,

a bit like the old Bridlington Charter. Let’s resurrect something around those

principles that becomes a positive force, not when you have a dispute over

what union is trying to sort out a particular problem.

I always tell this story, because you can feel these things. My daughter joined

the 999 Ambulance Service and got a job doing that. She works at Waterloo.

She came to me and she said to me, “Dad, what union should I join?” So I

said, “What do you mean, what union should you join?” She went to work with

the equivalent of a paramedic outfit and when she went into work I just thought

she was in Unison, so I said, “Surely it’s Unison”. She said, “No, there’s three

unions that are in the workplace and they sit in the canteen. One is Unison, one

is GMB, one is Unite”, all great unions, in my view. I said, “What are the

workers?” She said, “From what I can work out they are sort of like split almost

on a third/a third/a third”. I said, “What do they say?” She said, “They wait until

something has happened and they move from one to the other. One week

they’re in this union”. She actually said to me that the unions offer different sort

of gifts and things like that and then they shift to a different union. I said, “What

do the reps say?” She said, “Well, they all slag each other off”. These are

three great unions. My point is that we cannot carry on with that type of trade

unionism in this country and expect to shift the balance of forces. It is just not

physically possible to do that, so it needs greater cooperation and I am open to

ideas as to what that means. I think it has got to go beyond where we are

currently and we can try some very different new ideas in how we cooperate

more to organise workers.

The third point in the four point plan is we do need a manifesto. We need to

say to workers in this country collectively again, “This is what we mean when

we say a new deal for workers”. The CWU has views on that and we have held

off a little bit in publishing our own views, because we think that we want

people to come to that together. My idea of a manifesto is not that we are in

competition with the Labour Party. We are workers and we should be saying

things to workers on behalf of the trade union movement and I think that

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