From The Guardian, a Manchester based trade unionist complains about the leader of Unite. .
I Am A Union Organiser. Len McCluskey’s Migrant Clampdown Will Only Benefit Bosses
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| By Ewa Jasiewicz |
The Unite leader’s claim that a crackdown will help the white working class is wrong. Only solidarity can end exploitation.
Unite general secretary Len McCluskey’s recent claim that clamping down on migrant workers will make Labour more attractive to the “white working class” doesn’t reflect a trade unionism that I and many other organisers – migrant and UK citizens – believe in.
I worked as an organiser for Unite on and off for seven years between 2005 and 2014. I’ve worked with warehouse packers and pickers, meat-processing workers, cleaners, baggage handlers, cabin crew, waiters and drivers, in the north-west, south-east and London. My parents were immigrants from Poland - my dad trained with the RAF after spending years incarcerated in a gulag in Siberia, and my mum came in the early 1970s to marry my father and see life on the other side of the iron curtain. Friends and family followed suit over the years, every time for “bread”, working on construction sites, in hospitality, tailoring, whatever they could find.
My job, as a trade union organiser, was to organise with workers. All workers. One class: the working class. They had different languages, different religions, different beliefs, but one common experience of exploitation by a system that treats them all as labour, giving some more status than others, but all under the same boot when it comes to the needs of capital …
... United Voices and IWGB, on shoestring budgets, are uniting all their members to strike for their collective interests, without classification or reservation. They’re a model for what united unions can look like. The older unions, by contrast, remain stuck in an industrial past.
When will Unite live up to its name?
Continue reading @ The Guardian,
No Irish, no Polish — no black and no white. There is only the worker. I don’t know where McCluskey is getting this line but it is a dangerous turn for the supposed Left across the water.
ReplyDeleteSean, You don’t agree in the context of an unequal society such as the West constructed, treating everyone “equally” is actually enforcing inequality? That special dispensation is needed to correct this gap? You don’t think it’s your Western privilege as a white male missing these salient points ?
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