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A conference for activists who want to transform the labour movement, hosted by WORKERS’ LIBERTY,the IWGB UNIVERSITY OF LONDON BRANCH, LAMBETH ACTIVISTS and PCS INDEPENDENT LEFT.

Tickets will be £10 waged, £7 low-waged/students, £5 unwaged/school or college students – including lunch.

How can we defend ourselves against the bosses’ attacks, rebuild working-class power and transform the labour movement, including trade unions, into a force which can change society?

Trade unions in Britain still have almost seven million members. When they move, they can shake society, but this doesn’t happen very much. For the most part, unions have little base among the millions of casualised (often young, often migrant) workers in growing industries like fast food, retail and hospitality; millions of union members are not really organised; and defeats like Grangemouth and Royal Mail show even organised workers struggling to assert their power. The interests of the unemployed, benefit claimants, service users and pensioners are sidelined. Unions have tolerated the continuation of Blairism’s neo-liberal policies by the Miliband Labour Party.

Yet there are also many inspiring workers’ struggles springing up, often where you would not expect them.

This conference will discuss and seek to learn from the experience of organising the unorganised, in Britain and other countries, in history and today. It will hear from working-class activists on the frontline of today’s class battles, and of struggles to reshape trade unions.

Sessions will include
• One, two, many ‘New Unionisms’: how the British labour movement has fallen and revived over two centuries
• How to transform your union branch
• The story of the IWGB and “3 Cosas”: what lessons for labour movement activists?
• The lessons of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-14
• What is independent working-class education?
• The NUT: building a rank-and-file opposition in a ‘left’ union
• Do unions need a political party?

More info and agenda with speakers very soon!

More information: email daniel.cooper@ulu.lon.ac.uk or ring 07840 136 728 or check out www.workersliberty.org/newunions