UNITELANDWORKER Comment now it’s
Sharon Graham General Secretary
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham writes
This year is 40 years since the Miners’ Strike. Four decades of mass privatisation and profiteering; poverty and homelessness; low paying jobs and a crumbling infrastructure; billionaires and food banks and phony fiscal rules that they make up and austerity.
It is also now 20 years since the Morecambe Bay disaster and the dangerous exploitation of vulnerable workers is still rife.
Unions have always been at the forefront of defending workers and Unite’s predecessor union – the T&G – successfully fought for the establishment of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority to prevent such tragedies happening again.
It is an outrage that since then the government has repeatedly chosen to attack unions and weaken employment rights wherever possible, instead of trying making people’s lives better.
The replacement of the GLA with a dangerously under-resourced and overstretched organisation, the GLAA, with no trade union oversight, is just one example of this. My fear is that unless something changes it can only be a matter of time until the next tragedy.
Once again the Budget offered nothing but the same old failed choices and phony fiscal rules. The real issue is the crisis of under-investment in our industries and public services. We have a multi-billion investment gap, leaving the UK lagging far behind comparable G7 nations.
The chancellor’s national insurance cut is small change when the average worker has taken a £3,100 pay cut from inflation. Meanwhile, corporate profits have soared by nearly twice the rate of wages.
Workers can see the profiteers draining our economy. With the endless parade of profiteering announcements as company after company reports ever bigger pay- outs for shareholders.
None of this is inevitable – it comes from political choices, and workers and their communities have to pick up the pieces. Our political class is playing games, where our economy is broken and our society is fractured. We have a pathetic legacy left in terms of what free marketeers have left us.
But friends, there is hope. Inequality does not have to be inevitable, inequality is not enshrined. It’s a political choice. And yes, over time, there have been flashes of hope. There have been political heroes, there have been projects that have arrived and failed, burning brightly but all too fleetingly.
For those of us that believe in change, for those that believe change is possible –
that a break with the last 40 years is possible, we've got to rebuild, to start from the ground up, from the workplace, from within our communities.
Because now it’s time, 40 years on from the Strike, to embark again on our central mission to make a better world possible.
Find out more
See
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GLAA – No trade union oversight
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