November EC Meeting 2019

We now have a ladder of opportunities and a climbing frame of entry routes to train people from initial rep to experienced rep to specialist rep to trade union official to senior trade union manager and eventually we will have a set of standards for general secretary support and training. At this time we need to recall our initial discussions about opening affiliation and partnership to non trade union, but trade union related community organisations. The greatest divide in the working class movement is the divide between workplace organisations – trade unions – and neighbourhood and interest organisations like community groups. We should seek to play a role in healing this divide. The imaginative foresight of our predecessors to establish an educational trust as a charity has been insufficiently exploited and we need to do much more to use the charity to work in partnership with others and draw down funding. We have also touched previously at EC meetings on the need for a written constitution in Britain and this may be a really interesting area of debate to consider.

The importance of the Union Building Conference.

All of this only underlines in my view the importance of the decision we have made to hold a major union building Conference February 22-24 2020.

This should be seen as a major opportunity to take our work as a GFTU forward.

Prior to that we will consolidate and re market our shared services under the banner win win. We will consider new services. We will extend our education programme and hopefully have a new education funding strategy. We hopefully have recruited new affiliates and we will identified more to speak to.

DN20112019

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