GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I think we all do.

BRO JOE SIMPSON: Joe Simpson, Deputy General Secretary of the POA. Thanks

for that. It is a breath of fresh air. I have been around the TUC for a long time

and I think I am one of its biggest critics, especially when I have spent a lot of

shoe leather walking round London behind the bigger trade unions. I think it is

about time that the TUC got together and said, “We are a trade union

movement rather than constituency trade unions”. I go back to what you were

saying with the collective action. As a public sector worker and as people in

the room who have attended TUC, there has been, I think, about three motions

on public sector pay and how we get together and take action. The frustrating

part for me is the fact that once we all sit down nobody can agree on what we

are asking for pay rise-wise, for the simple reason because each individual

trade union has got a different pay formula and when we are talking about

taking action together, as a trade union we have got, I think it is a super super

injunction now against us. We cannot even protect the health and safety of our

members. We cannot withdraw to a place of safety which is our right, because

instantly we are taken straight to court. These are the problems that we face.

The other thing about the app, we love the idea of an app, because we

produced one, but what we forgot was that we cannot take mobile phones into

prison and it fell on its backside. But the other thing that we are talking about

as well is the pace of communication amongst young people is moving along. I

thought I was quite friendly with Twitter and then I found out there is Snapchat,

Instagram, different things, and we need to keep up with that. But the one

thing that I think we need to develop as a trade union movement is

communication amongst us all and I will take it for my colleagues in Community

and the news that they have heard this morning. We have got prisons in the

north east whose families are employed there - brothers, sisters, cousins,

friends - and we should be using that and we should be coming together as a

trade union movement in order to combat them. We are not doing that and we

are not listening what the problems are in the CWU, GMB, Unite, Unison. We

are not talking to each other and not allowing our members to see what is

happening.

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