GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

what exactly we are going to do in response to that attack on our working

conditions as well.

What I am here to talk about today is a slightly happier topic, which is the role

that culture can play in the trade union movement. There is a common sense

that trade unions are primarily concerned with economic matters – rates of pay,

working hours, job security, working conditions – and faced with these pressing

demands isn’t culture at best an optional extra, possibly a luxury item, at worst

even a distraction? Unsurprisingly, I want to suggest that culture has a vital

and central role to play in the trade union movement and to outline some of the

ways in the work of the GFTU’s educational trust is contributing to the means

and the end, the activities and the goals of the wider movement.

I would like to start by saying that it is important to remind ourselves from time

to time that the Labour Movement is founded on the proposition that human

beings are more than simple factors of production, that human beings are

rather more than mere economic agents. Yes, we have always fought for a fair

day’s wage for a fair day’s work, but we have also always fought for more than

economic justice. As one of the classic anthems of our movement puts it, ”Our

lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes, hearts starve as well as

bodies, give us bread, but give us roses”, roses, a symbol of something beyond

wages, something beyond conditions, a symbol of a human and humanising

culture, a recognition, as Steve put it, that we are creatures of creativity,

creatures of craft, creatures of imagination and that we both need and deserve

a society that recognises and satisfies those aspects of our being. In short, we

need culture, not just in the sense of high art, as important as that might be, but

in the more fundamental sense of culture as a way of life, culture as embedded

values, as social practices and relationships which realise those values, a

genuine emancipatory working class culture.

The redesign of the GFTU’s education programme reflects this in a number of

ways, not just in its expanded content, the inclusion of Labour and radical

history and culture alongside technical and skills based courses, but, even

more importantly, in the rethinking of our own educational practices. It is a

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