GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

At the BGCM two years ago, I suggested that we should seek to grow the

GFTU’s affiliation base by ten unions. That was a bit tongue in cheek. I never

genuinely thought we could manage that, but I was determined that we should

seek to recruit new unions as I was painfully aware that we had been pretty

unsuccessful in recruiting new organisations hitherto, so I am really delighted to

be able to say that over the last two years we have recruited not five new

unions, as we say in the report, but in fact six. So a huge specific welcome to

Nautilus, the Artists’ Union England, the Scottish Artists’ Union, the Prison

Officers Association, the Social Workers Union and in the last couple of weeks

the Writers Guild of Great Britain. It is an extraordinary level of growth in two

years.

I think the GFTU can now genuinely claim to be the home for specialist trade

unions and what seems very clear to me is that they are joining us partly out of

solidarity, but also very much for what we can do for these unions. The

movement is a collective and there are very few better examples of that than

the GFTU. We are able to do things for our partners which they may not be

able to do for themselves and that is the point of us and I think we have made

some really significant steps in that direction in the last few years.

I think it is important to recognise that we have made these significant strides

against a very difficult background. I became a fulltime official in 1981, a hell of

a long time ago, and that means that I have been a trade union bureaucrat, and

I hope also very much an activist, at a time of continuous pressure on the

movement. That said, we have achieved some extraordinary things as a

movement in that time: The minimum wage - still too low, but still a massive

achievement; securing new recognition deals all over the UK’s employment

landscape, including some significant deals that my own union has been

responsible for. Some of my colleagues who have been working with me in

that regard are here today; securing real improvements; for example, for the

rights of gay, BME, disabled, women and LBGT+ workers; huge strides in

terms of equal pay as between men and women, something I am inordinately

proud of in relation to my day job, by the way.

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