Whose Side Are You On?

Presumably Baroness Prosser is here to associate herself with the Chainmakers struggle and relate this to women's equality in the workplace and the struggle for low paid workers.

Since rising up through the ranks of the trade union movement she is now a non-executive director of the Royal Mail. Recently Baroness Prosser urged her company to stand firm against striking postal workers and insisted her company's management shouldn't give in because ‘they wouldn’t be able to compete with their competitors’. This echoes the Chainmaker's bosses who also claimed the fight for a fair wage would render them uncompetitive.

What a Prosser!

So we have a former trade union leader who is also a boss speaking at a festival sponsored by a union (CWU) that represents the workers that she has attacked. You wouldn't be wrong in thinking there's a considerable conflict of interests here. Did Prosser develop her anti-worker stance after her time at the head of the Trade Union Movement or did she have that approach all along? With leaders like this it is no surprise that unions have been so ineffective in defending the gains that our ancestors fought so bitterly for.

The Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW)

If you're looking for an alternative, then the Industrial Workers of the World is a fighting union that doesn't compromise with the bosses.

The IWW is a union for all the workers of the world, One Big Union, across all industries, uniting all workers in all workplaces. We have no union bureaucracy and the bosses can't join. We also have no links with political parties.

We welcome dual membership so we are not urging you to abandon your current union.

We are building a union that represents only workers’ interests, run by workers for workers.

An injury to one is an injury to all!