We Need a Union for the Unemployed

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People's March shows the potential for uniting the employed and RECENT pressure, through growing dole queues and sheer embarrassment, has forced the TUC to think seriously about organising the unemployed into the trade union movement.

However, rather than build an active campaigning body of unemployed trade unionists, the TUC are at best supporting 'tea and sympathy unemployed day centres', or forming unemployed branches in existing unions.

As a member of one such branch of the TGWU based in Liverpool, I find myself attending inactive meeting consisting mostly of correspondence saying how wonderful it is for the T&G to have an unemployed branch.

The branch keeps a very low profile and most people, including T&G members, don't know of its existence. Despite the lack of enthusiasm from many full-time officials, ( the branch has over 200 members, although less than 50 ever turn up to meetings. The branch sadly fails to reach the masses of unemployed youth. This is basically because of its meetings and organisation.

I challenge the TGWU to find an unemployed youth with no political or trade union experience to one of our branch meeting come along and sit throug without being totally bored. Yet this is the type of person we must attract to the trade union movement.

We do this, not by having patronising meetings dominated by right-wing full-timers, but by having meetunemployed ings that coordinate the unemployed into direct action to fight alongside workers in struggle.

The key to most successful bodies of workers is activity and organisation, and unfortunately the TUC is unable, or unwilling, to provide this (mainly because of its undemocratic structure).

The National Unemployed Workers' Movement of the 1930s discovered that the real power of the working class lay with the people who were still employed, and therefore built for unity between employed and unemployed. This theory still holds true today. While we must call for the right of the unemployed to organise among themselves, and we must also fight for the right of the unemployed to take an active part in the existing trade unions.

At the moment if you are an unemployed union member you are probably stuck in your 'trade' branch without voting rights or in an unemployed branch isolated from members of your trade and also isolated from the union mainstream.

So we must consider the prospects of an unemployed workers' union, which is already in existence.

Potentially the largest union in the country, the UWU must take up the problems facing the unempioyed and must attract all sections of people hit by unemployment at the same time as being an essentia part of the trade union movement. And its membera must have dual union membership, i.e. a member of the UWU ghould also be a member of an established trade union.

The UWU must form a national network of unemployed organisations, and link up and build autonomous unemployed day centres that will offer recreational and meeting places for its members while being a focal point for an unemployed workers' fightback.

The TUC will no doubt turn its back on this movement, as it did with the NUWM, but we must force TUC recognition and affiliation and fight for the preSent trade unions and Labour Parties to build and finance the UWU both locally and nationally.

On that basis we can truly fight for working class unity and a mass organised fightback for jobe.

BOB TOWERS Liverpool.