LUDDITES?

Suggestions for a speech

§ The main purpose of Trades Unions is to improve and defend their members’ pay and conditions in the workplace

§ The Green Party has consistently supported Trades Unions in this role; it has a detailed Workers’ Rights policy and an active Trades Union group.

§ Sadly or the past 20-30 years Trades Unions’ have been forced more and more onto the defensive against the resurgence of free market capitalism. British Trades Unions have kept up their strength in many public sector, (and recently privatised) industries, but in the private sector they are very much weakened.

§ Although Trades Unions campaigned actively for the rights of migrant workers and against racism and fascism, (again things that the Green Party wholeheartedly supports), there have been are tragic cases of the gross exploitation of migrant workers in Britain, the EU and in the USA. For some workers such as these, the clock has been forced back by some employers to conditions almost unknown since the early days of the industrial revolution.

§ Throughout their history, Trades Unions have seen their role as extending far beyond the workplaces. Through the labour movement, Trades Unions have campaigned for the improvement of workers’ social, political and economic rights. In Britain one of their most notable achievements was their contribution to the creation of the Welfare State.

§ The Green Party has policies on health, housing, education, and a minimum wage (to name only a few such areas), that are in accord with the wider social and political aims of the Trades Union movement.

§ Climate Change is now posing a huge and urgent threat to human societies all over the world. Most scientific uncertainty about this is not about IF it is happening but about when, where, how and how fast it WILL happen, and the worst case scenarios include the possibility of the destruction of most currently existing human societies.

§ Perhaps the Green movement realised the nature and scope of this threat before the labour movement, but over the past ten years things have changed rapidly. Many British Trades Unions and the TUC are moving environmental concerns towards the top of their agendas and recognition of an environmental crisis has been forced into the manifestos of mainstream political parties.

§ This is a welcome development, the Green movement needs Trades Unions and Trades Unions need the Green movement, working together we could have the scientific understanding and organisational experience and muscle necessary for societies to survive and deal with Climate Change.

§ Governments from mainstream political parties left to themselves cannot be relied on to do what is necessary, they may been forced to recognise Climate Change, but they have tended to talk more than act and when they have acted they have not done enough. They also have a dangerous tendency to look for false solutions such as nuclear power or to ignore some dangerous problems such as the expansion of cheap air travel, preferring to pretend that Climate Change can be tackled without people changing some aspects of their current high-consumption lifestyles.

§ There are some issues like nuclear power, cheap air travel and airport expansion that are going to be contentious in any discussion between Trades Unions and the Green movement, and this cannot be dodged, but what is needed is to debate these differences with mutual respect.

§ There also needs to be a realisation that the phasing out of old technologies and lifestyles is not simply a threat to existing jobs and conditions since the construction of a Low carbon economy must entail the creation of new sectors of employment. Greens and Trades Unions must work together to ensure that this process of change is never carried out with the brutality characteristic of free market capitalism which has wrecked entire industries, regions and millions of peoples lives in its search for profit.

§ Greens have recently been accused of being Luddites, in one sense this is untrue because we advocate new environmentally benign technologies and the new employment they will bring, but we also remember that the original Luddites were defending employment in a low technology craft industry against the introduction of the environmentally damaging industrialisation whose consequences we still live with today, so perhaps being called a Luddite is not such an insult after all.