"THEY LOOKED INTO THE ABYSS - AND DECIDED The GMB, having notched up a 100,000 less in membership, and facing a E16.7m deficit, has opted to seek improved value for money from its Labour Party donations.
Rebuffing an appeal from GMB bid to cut Labour losses
New Labour for an increased donation to help fight the next general election, the GMB has now decided only to give financlal backing to candidates which it believes share the union's aims and values. Given the complexion to today's Parliamentary Labour Party, this could save the union up to £750,000 a year. But the union insists that
"This is not about money: It's a message to the government." - NO DELAY
HOT be, the fundamental direction of Labour is left unchanged.
Commitments include: Bank holidays to stand separate from the statutory annual leave entitlement, giving many workers an extra eight days leave; The EU Agency Workers Directive to be implemented giving extra employment rights to temporary workers; Concessions to be made on pension rights and public ownership.
But in every case, these are either necessary tidying up of existing legislation, or merely bringing Britain into line with the existing EU framework. The threshold when strikers can be dismissed to be raised from eight weeks to twelve - a real victory there, then!
Even straightforward promises look pathetic on closer examination. For instance the CWU has threatened to suspend its £300K donation to Labour if it does not defend a publicly owned Post Office. So at the Policy Forum, ministers duly obliged - but then pledged to continue allowing alternative carriers to Royal Mail to offer postal services.
They agreed to review the impact of market liberalisation - as if it was some independent process over which they had little control rather than a deliberate set of government policies.
The "awkward squad" can claim that these concessions will be of real benefit to some millions of working people. But in practice government policies on privatisation and attacks on workers' rights remain unabated.
Labour may have listen to the trade unions for a weekend, but it is clear that they will continue to listen to their friends in the City every other day of the year.
Despite all the hopes for a Labour government altering the balance of power in the workplace, making it easier for trade unions to organise, membership of trade unions has continued to fall to the lowest level for sixty years.
Membership stands at half the level of twenty-five years ago, with unions representing less than one in five workers in the private sector. Nothing in Warwick is going to change this.
The majority of the "awkward squad" have been arguing the need to rebuild the Labour Party of old - what Tony Woodley calls «True Labour". Rather than build an alternative party this was put forward as the realistic way to progress a socialist agenda.
The problem, was argued, was that the old union leaders had allowed the Blairites to drag the party in the wrong direction. Now, by exercising their collective will, the aim was to drag the party back.
No doubt in a deliberate play on words, Tony Woodley in describing the Warwick meeting claimed, "Now we have got our respect back within the Party." It neatly sums up his political dream -that it will be possible to