GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

the time of the Labour Party/TUC conferences and we think that app has an

opportunity to really build a connection with members. The sort of things that

we have been doing, if you have been following our approach to social media,

we always value face to face meetings, but we have learnt that you can

combine face to face meetings with social media in order to contact your

members, in order to generate activism, in order to do things. We smashed the

new Tory laws in a ballot the other year where we got a 75% turnout and a

90% yes vote for industrial action and we did that by combining our ability to

talk to members in the workplace with what social media can organise for you

and we are looking at ways under this app where at any minute of the day if our

members download this app, which we are confident they will, we can

communicate with them at any given point and ask them to do things in the

support of the union and its wider objectives and in support of themselves.

That is a key objective for me, always to try and build a union that can get

closer and closer to the frontline workers and frontline members. That is the

first point.

The second thing that occupies a lot of my thoughts is how are we going to

reassert trade union values across society and this has led me to talk quite a

lot at the TUC and spend a lot of time thinking about how do we harness the

strengths of the whole of the trade union movement to bring about a new deal

for workers, to challenge the balance of forces in the world of work and I am

going to talk about that in a minute, about what we think we need to do to

achieve that.

The third thing that occupies my thoughts goes back to the point about where

Roy and Community find themselves and where manufacturing finds itself. We

need fundamental political change in this country and I want our union to be

part of bringing that about. I want to work with other unions, I want to work with

Jeremy and John, the Labour leadership. CWU was the first union that came

out properly in support of Corbyn and McDonnell, because we took a view that

the previous Labour leadership had walked away from working people and we

needed to get back to representing working people. Yes, there are problems

at the moment, but I still think that getting that type of manifesto to this country

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