Free Our Unions

This May Day, support workers’ action for rights and safety

For International Workers’ Day (1 May) 2020, Free Our Unions is calling on labour movement activists and supporters to raise their voice – in support of workers taking action in the crisis to stand up for their rights and for safety, and for the abolition of the anti-union laws which constrain such action.

We say:
“Support workers’ action for rights and safety”
“Free our unions: repeal all anti-strike laws”

Please use our poster or make your own to take a photo and send it to us to share on social media. In advance of May Day, on May Day, or after is fine.

You can download the poster to print as a pdf here, as a jpg here, or as a Word file here. If you want us to post you one or more copies, email freeourunions@gmail.com with your address, specifying how many you want and A3 or A4. Or, if you’re feeling creative, make your own poster.

Please send pictures to freeourunions@gmail.com, including information on who you are to go with your photo.

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Background:

The anti-trade union laws require postal ballots for strikes to be legal. Under the lockdown, the organisations that administer these ballots cannot guarantee their functioning. So even the heavily limited right to strike we have in normal times has gone. In any case, confronted by urgent issues of safety, workers cannot wait to go through a lengthy bureaucratic procedure before taking action.

From the NHS to libraries, from Royal Mail to construction, many groups of workers have simply walked out to defend rights and safety – either using health and safety rules or simply defying legal restrictions.

We must support these actions, and at the same time demand that the anti-union laws which often make it complicated and difficult to go on strike are scrapped – all of them. Unions and the Labour Party must start seriously fighting for this.

Help push this struggle forward by taking a photo and sending it to us at 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.”