Trade unions cannot focus just on pay and conditions, Mick Lynch tells Cork event

Trade unionism cannot be just about pay and conditions but should be about seeking to eliminate poverty and inequality and making society a better place for all, leading London born trade unionist Mick Lynch has told the annual Mother Jones Festival in Cork.

Mr Lynch, whose late father, Jackie Lynch, came from Gunpowder Lane on Cork’s southside, said he was deeply honoured to accept the Spirit of Mother Jones Award which recognises those who campaign for social justice and human rights.

The General Secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), which is in dispute with privately-owned rail companies in the UK, said that people need to realise that trade unions cannot just be about fighting for pay and conditions for their members.

“Trade unions will have to do the basics, so that they have the respect of working people and so that they can demonstrate that they can deliver tangible results at work and on work issues – improving pay and conditions and defending and improving health and safety.

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“But we must always fight for social advance and political change – there is no secure bubble of purely workplace activity on the so-called ‘bread and butter issues’ – we live in an unfair and unequal world so trade unions must always be immersed in campaigning for a better society.”

Mr Lynch said this was true not just in the UK but across the western economies where a new ideological consensus has emerged over the past 40 years, based on a deeply embedded Thatcherism, which seeks to roll back the advances made by the working class after the second World War.

This ideology seeks to replace the collective with the individual and has resulted in the privatisation of both industry and services such as transport and energy with disastrous consequences for ordinary working people and their communities across western economies.

“The postwar advances in the welfare state and the building of a more equal society have been under sustained attack in a modern capitalist world that is now in the grip of a Thatcherite and right-wing ideological consensus,” he said.

“Across Europe, governments and the ruling class are seeking to renege on existing agreements and arrangements at work and across society as a whole – as Tony Benn said, ‘Every single generation has to fight the same battles again and again and again – there’s no final victory, there’s no final defeat’.”

Mr Lynch said the RMT was fighting these battles in its dispute with the private rail companies, but they were also seeking through their campaigns to “put class consciousness, social justice and economic fairness back in people’s minds as values to be cherished”.

He said he hoped that Labour was on a trajectory to form a government in Britain in the next year while there may also be a change of Government here in Ireland and he believed it was the political role of trade unions to put professional politicians under pressure to deliver for workers.

“Every politician needs, as my mother used to say, put under manners by organised labour and they need to take heed that if they don’t deliver for working people, we will call them out directly and take industrial action whenever needed,” he said.

Mr Lynch said that it was a sad reality that every Labour or progressive government that workers had placed their hopes in historically had disappointed their activist base which was why it was important for trade unions to keep the pressure on progressive governments to deliver.

“We have to understand in our movement that there are no political saviours coming to our aid and that the only answer to the power of capital and the organised ruling class is the power of the organised working class – that means we have to organise for ourselves if we are to control the destiny of the working people of the world and build a better society.”

The Mother Jones Festival, which runs in Cork until Saturday, commemorates Leeside-born American labour activist, Mary Harris, aka Mother Jones, who campaigned for better conditions for miners and children working in factories and mills in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.