Relocation, relocation, relocation

posted by: Nick Lowles | on: Wednesday, 14 January 2009, 07:48

I’ve been up in the North West this week speaking at meetings, planning strategies with unions and making a short film which will be out next month. My day was somewhat disrupted yesterday due to a powercut which brought Manchester City Centre to a standstill. I was actually visiting Unison at the time and they, like many other offices in the area, were force to shut down as the lights went off. Fortunately a few of us were able to relocate in a watering hole where we enjoyed a good healthy British breakfast.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to stay there for long as I had a lunchtime meeting with Kevin Coyne, the regional secretary of Unite, and a couple of his political officers. We discussed the forthcoming European Elections and agreed to work together on a number of projects. I have been encouraging unions to start engaging with their members more directly than they have in the past, especially when it came to tackling BNP and racist sentiments amongst their members, and this appeared to be in line with Kevin’s own thinking. Unite have been one of our biggest supporters over the past few years and I’m sure this will continue into the future.

I’ll leave you with one statistic. Unite has 280,000 members (inc retired members) in the North West and when you take into account spouses and other people of voting age in the household then this figure rises to over 500,000. That is almost 10% of the electorate in the North West. You can now see why it is so important to get the unions to talk directly to their members!