Speaker Bill Adams - Are Trade Unions Still Necessary?

Despite being full of cold Bill gamely drove over from Preston to give us information about the TUC.

He said that he is the TUC outward face for 630,000 members in 48 unions in this region. It is hard trying to keep all 48 unions on side and to keep blood off the wall. There are 6.1 million union members in the UK but some companies such as Amazon and ASOS refuse to have unions in their workplace. However, 95 out of the 100 companies in the FTSE 100 do and some companies such as Siemens say they couldn't operate without the unions. The lowest paid workers find they can't afford to be in a union.

Bill is on the European and the International TUC climate change committees and from these he has found that we are the only country in Europe that doesn't like unions. On one trip he visited a steelworks in Sweden close to the Arctic Circle that had been very polluting but the union had helped to sort it out and now emissions were down by 80%. Last week he went to East Germany where they are intending to close all the lignite mines (brown coal) by 2033. But the government there is working now with the unions to retrain the miners. One vast open cast mine has plans to make it into a large industrial park to take up the slack.

He believes unions have gone wrong in the post war period as they have not kept pace with the changes in the type of industries which have moved from very large factories to much smaller units. Also, the workers in the "Gig" economy have neither the time, inclination nor the money to be involved with a union. He thinks that the way forward is for unions to become more involved with the community such as faith groups. To do this the TUC needs to persuade its member unions to streamline down from 48 to 10 or 11 so that there is just one union for each sector such as "Shop workers", "Catering trade" or "Manufacturing".

Bill feels that the priorities for unions should be:-

1. Recruit more younger members
2. Highlight the dangers of Brexit which he sees as being job losses.
3. With a massive rise in the far right more training is needed for union representatives to help in the workplace.
4. Automation and climate change. He sees that 30,000 jobs are at risk in Yorkshire because of the Paris Climate Accord.
   
5. The need to set up a taskforce in the North where the TUC, Industry and local authorities all work together.

More information about Bill and the TUC can be found on the TUC web site - www.tuc.org.uk/