PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

RMT helpline 0800 3763706 :: june 2009 :: RMTnews President’s column TRADE UNIONS AND OUR PLACE IN HISTORY AND THE FUTURE Trade unions have been around for nearly two hundred years. Our union as we know it today was formed in 1990 – as a merger of the National Union of Seamen and the National Union of Railwaymen – bringing together long and vibrant histories of struggle. And more recently OILC, a union born in the most difficult of conditions, came into the RMT ranks as the offshore energy branch of our union. There have been three authorised accounts of our union’s history written already: Philip Bagwell’s two volume The Railwaymen - The History of the NUR; Mike Berlin’s Never on Our Knees and Arthur Marsh’s and Victoria Ryan’s The Seamen. It’s important that these accounts are there both for the record and also as a resource to enable us to learn from the past. The importance of this was brought home to me very recently when my 10 year old son showed me his homework from school, which included history. There was no trade union history and I wanted to know why. Asking his teacher why this was the case I was told that it had been an oversight. This year it is 175 years since the Tolpuddle Martyrs were arrested, convicted and deported to Australia for forming a union. I thought this was a good opportunity to correct the school’s previous oversight. So, I popped into the school and strongly suggested that they put something on for the kids, to celebrate this historic moment in the history of trade unions. The head teacher agreed, and has asked me to come in and put it on. Trade unions going into schools is not new, in fact it goes on in some places, but in nothing like the numbers that they once did. It is crucial that we explain to the next generation the relevance of trade unions in society. After all we are living through a period of big political change that people find difficulty in making sense of. People get turned off by the word “politics” which has been given a bad name by MPs. But politics is about more than parliament. It isn’t something that happens to us, it’s part of our daily lives. It’s about the way in which decisions are made about people, and by people. It is without doubt that literally millions of working class people feel completely ignored by the political system. This is especially the case with younger people who wonder what politics has to do with them. I bet if a breakdown of the voter turnout in the recent European elections was compiled then we would hardly see a whisper of people under the age of 27. And we can see where disillusionment with the political process leads. Looking at the results of the recent European elections, we have seen the collapse of the Labour vote and the election of two British National Party MEPs . I have written before about the total incompatibility of the racist BNP’s message with the whole being and nature of trade unions and specifically RMT. It needs to be restated now. Our history is one based on a class understanding of history and economics. We totally reject any form of division on the grounds of ethnicity, race, or gender. We will not scapegoat one working class person against another. We want the best for all working class people. The enemy of working people is poverty and its causes. And as trade unionists we are about helping to build a better world where all people live out of poverty. The trade union and labour movement has historically played a magnificent role in fighting racial hatred. From the defeat of Nazism in Europe, segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa trade unionists have always been in forefront of resistance. We have never stopped fighting racism, and in these recent elections many of our members campaigned against the BNP. The BNP is the enemy not only of black members of RMT, but all our members. That is why RMT won’t cease from campaigning against the BNP and organisations like it until they cease to exist and racism is confined to the dustbin of history.