Snowy days and saying goodbye to a legend

It’s been a busy (and very chilly!) month. I hope everyone has stayed safe. We get lots of members getting in touch about what to do when it snows, so we’ve put a guide together, click here to have a look at it: www.gmb.org.uk/snow

It’s always worth a thought for our fantastic energy members when the bad weather hits because they’re the ones making sure our homes and workplaces are heated. GMB members in energy have been keeping the lights on for 125 years - in gas, nuclear, renewables. I’ve been lucky to speak to a lot of our energy members this month, including our lead reps in British Gas who are working hard in the face of 4,000 potential redundancies. We’ll be uncompromising in fighting to ensure there are no compulsory redundancies there. Cadent Gas Network reps were also on good form, we had a good discussion about their pay, terms and conditions and what we need to do to protect an advance them going forward.

I’ll always fight to safeguard the gas industry from which our union was born. It was a pleasure to catch up with everyone, and I thanked our reps for the absolutely brilliant and important work they do.

Same with our Asda reps who have so much on their plates. I met with our Shop Stewards Forum, along with Gary Carter who is our National Officer for Asda. The attack on members’ pensions is nothing short of scandalous.

It’s not just the private sector where we’re battling away. I was able to pop into the sector committee meeting on schools, chaired by Southern Region’s Barbara Plant. We discussed the current pay offer, but also the wider issue of the fragmentation of our schools system. Zombie schools are now ‘a thing’ – schools where academies have swooped in and then done one after the going got a bit tough. (I won’t go into detail on the pay offer, you can see more about it here, but needless to say, when we are allowed to use online balloting it is much easier to get people engaged something the government continually prevent us from doing in industrial and internal ballots).

It was a privilege as always to be invited to regional committee meetings always good to report back and personally answer questions from senior regional activists. Thank you to Birmingham and West Midlands, Northern Region and London Region for the invites. And of course National Equality Conference, which you can see a roundup of here - I’m really optimistic about where we are going on equality, we have so many talented and committed activists that want to roll their sleeves up to make the world a fairer, more equal place – how can you not be inspired by that?

Finally, this month is where we said goodbye to a GMB legend.

Mary Turner’s memorial was held at St Paul’s Cathedral. I cannot express how proud and humbled I was to be asked by Mary’s family to give the eulogy. I don’t mind admitting that I was mildly terrified about addressing so many people in such a massive and prestigious venue, about someone we cared so much about. As I said in the Eulogy, which you can read here, for a working class lass from Tipperary to be having her memorial in the same building as Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King speaks volumes about our Mary.

#GenSec