Free Our Unions

Covid-19 crisis: Protect the right to strike!

Already in the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve seen examples of workers taking industrial action, often to improve workplace safety. Outsourced cleaners, caterers, and porters at Lewisham Hospital walked out to demand the payment unpaid wages. Workers in Lambeth libraries took action to demand the closure of their workplaces. Postal workers in Bridgend struck, after bosses refuse to revise shift patterns and staffing levels to ensure safe distancing in the workplace.

Benefit gig for Free Our Unions – Tuesday 3 March

Poetry on the Picket Line, a collective of poets active in and around the labour movement, will be hosting a benefit gig for the Free Our Unions campaign at the Betsey Trotwood (56 Farringdon Road, London, EC1R 3BL), at 19:30 on 3 March.

FBU motion to Labour East Regional Conference 2020

The Fire Brigades Union, one of three national trade unions to support the Free Our Unions campaign, has submitted the following motion to the Labour East Regional Conference, which takes place over the weekend of 22-23 February.

For a united front to resist anti-union laws

The Free Our Unions campaign has written to other campaign groups active on similar issues to propose joint activity to resist the threat of new anti-strike laws. The following letter was sent to the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom, the Institute for Employment Rights, the National Shop Stewards Network, and Unite the Resistance.

Free Our Unions pledge for Labour leadership candidates

The Free Our Unions campaign has written to all the Labour leadership and deputy leadership candidates asking them to sign the following pledge.

Resist the Tories’ new anti-strike law!

In his government’s first Queen’s Speech, Boris Johnson has announced that he plans to introduce new laws to restrict strikes. There could be little clearer indication of the class loyalties of his government than this.

Gregor Gall on Labour’s manifesto, trade union law and workers’ self-activity

Gregor Gall is a visiting professor of industrial relations at the University of Leeds and an affiliate research associate at the University of Glasgow. He supports the Free Our Unions campaign.

Gregor spoke to Free Our Unions about the commitments on workers’ and trade union rights in the Labour Party manifesto, and the wider issues they raise.

Yes, we need to strike for each other

This article, by Gregor Gall, was originally published on Jacobin in November 2019. Find it here.

In 1980s Britain, miners went on strike in support of nurses’ pay claims, throwing their industrial muscle behind under-pressure hospital staff. After decades of harsh anti-union laws, Labour’s manifesto promises a way to rebuild this culture of solidarity.

Labour’s manifesto and the right to strike: a welcome step forward, more to fight for

Published 23rd November 2019.

In the general election, Free Our Unions is working to kick out the Tories and win a government led by Jeremy Corbyn. In the words of a Fire Brigades Union general secretary Matt Wrack, a Labour government can “deliver a shift in power away from wealthy elites and towards workers. The Tories and Liberal Democrats have left the country… in tatters. We must remove them from power.”

Royal Mail’s anti-strike injunction is an affront to democracy

Published 13th November 2019.

The High Court injunction granted to Royal Mail to prevent postal workers from striking, despite their overwhelming vote to do so, highlights the profoundly undemocratic nature of Britain’s anti-trade union laws, and the urgent need for the whole labour movement to renew our fight for their abolition – including by demanding that the Labour Party commits to fully repealing all existing anti-union laws when in government.