Prospect speaks up for members at TUC Congress 2023
Reps from across Prospect made members’ voices heard loud and clear from the rostrum at Trade Union Congress in Liverpool.
Prospect’s Mike Clancy speaking at TUC Congress 2023
Public Services
Congress opened with a debate calling for fair funding of our public services.
Neil Hope-Collins, Prospect Vice President and Health and Safety Executive (HSE) branch member, told Congress that civil servants were facing:
“A relentless barrage of attacks from ministers looking for people to blame for their own shortcomings.”
He went on to warn that government is haemorrhaging key skills, saying that rather than “far from health and safety gone mad, we have health and safety, well, just gone.”
He on to highlight the situation in the HSE, where funding has fallen by 43%.
Pay Review Bodies
The FDA union moved a motion which called on government to make sure that pay review bodies (PRBs) were fit for purpose. It noted PRBs can only function effectively if they are independent of interference and direction by government and the evidence of all parties carries equal weight. But that unfortunately, in recent years that has not been the case.
Supporting the motion, Mike Clancy, Prospect General Secretary, said:
“The setting of civil service pay is an opaque, unaccountable and evidence-free zone.”
He argued that “the incoming government will need to engage with unions like they never before if they are to solve the problems in the civil service.”
While some unions had raised concerns that pay review bodies may constrain collective bargaining, the General Secretary emphasised that pay review bodies could have their place if they worked properly, independent of government interference.
President of the AFL-CIO, Liz Shuler at TUC Congress 2023
Learning lessons from elsewhere
Liz Shuler, President of the AFL–CIO gave the international address. She said: “For a long time workers have felt powerless and been powerless.”
But she argued that thanks to the organising efforts of workers “I am more confident than I have been in a long time”.
She declared “this is our time” to win a better world of work, with 88% of Americans under-30 supporting trade unions, with young workers hungry for a way forward and better.”
She argued that this was a challenge to unions to build a powerful and inclusive movement to make their lives better, including building unions in technology and in clean energy, taking full advantage of the investment delivered by the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction act.
Read more about Prospect’s work with North American union IFPTE on building strong unions in the race for clean energy.
Trade Union Congress continues in Liverpool, 10-13 September.