Blackburn & District TUC

Talk by Ian Gallagher

  • Covers 2 local authority areas - Darwen (unitary council) and the Ribble Valley (district council within Lancashire CC)

  • Blackburn/Darwen is industrial and Ribble Valley is rural

  • Both areas have high industrial emissions - the highest in Lancashire. Ribble Valley has a large cement quarry and cracking plant.

  • Employment: manufacturing, retail, health services, local authority, logistics - linked to location near motorway.

  • The Trades Council struggles to fill key positions in its organisation - for several years main discussion at AGM has been whether to merge with Lancashire TC

  • No delegates driving climate, so engagement is ad hoc

  • Committed at AGM to host a performance on real living wage in the care sector, and to run a public meeting on trade unions and the climate crisis

Public meeting - “Trade unions and the climate crisis: green jobs and just transitions” 

  • Hosted by the TUC at Blackburn Library in October last year. 

  • Published through social media, outreach to trade unions and local climate groups (People’s Jury on the Climate Crisis, Lancashire Climate Action)

  • Speakers were

    • Ben Crawford - Academic writing about unions and just transition, wrote pamphlet “Working for climate justice: trade unions in the front line against climate change”

    • Unison has had a climate emergency group meeting since November 2000 every month. Have massively increased number of environmental officers and green reps at branch level.

    • Has produced a green bargaining guide 

    • NE Lancs Trades Council has worked on opposing far-right, who are also often climate deniers - e.g. prevented Farage from launching his campaign for a referendum on net zero in their area.

    • Talked about need to build union membership in order to have the power to impose green solutions

    • Michael Agboh-Davison - Leeds-based Unite fulltimer, working on Unite for a Workers’ Economy - including campaigns on steel and offshore oil and gas.

    • Emphasised community organising, including in Sheffield, as well as the need to speak in terms people can understand - prosperity and green industry, rather than doom-and-gloom ‘hairshirt environmentalism’ to cut through the spread of net zero conspiracism in working class communities.

    • Port Talbot, Unite produced a detailed alternative plan - only some of this was taken up by Tata Steel and the government. Did not call for nationalisation - the workers were opposed to nationalisation being part of the demands.

    • Unite and GMB could not agree on a single plan - GMB plan produced by a consultancy and included redundancies, which Unite opposes.

    • Engagement with offshore workers and communities in Scotland. ‘No Ban Without a Plan’ - Michael pushed back on idea that this means opposing the ban on new licenses, the point is the need for a plan to support communities and workers and the requisite funding for that.

    • Skills fit between offshore oil and gas and jobs in wind, laying undersea cables, and decommissioning old oil and gas infrastructure. Jobs already going, limited ability of new licenses to extend the life of the industry - need for a plan.

    • Political engagement for the campaign - backed by 35 MSPs across most parties, including Tories. 

    • Jason - Unison North West full-timer, part of North East Lancashire Trades Council

    • (no notes from meeting on Jason)

Challenges with climate organising

  • Difficulty of getting engagement from climate organisations and unions

  • Asked groups like Green Party to publicize the library event but didn’t get engagement. Local climate groups didn’t engage either.

  • Engagement mainly came from climate change deniers, claiming the science is made up to con workers into being subservient to an agenda

  • Dealing with the deniers was tiring

  • Lack of interest from the manufacturing trades, perhaps due to low union membership among the local manufacturing industry - only around 16% trade union density

  • Local unions are insular and the TC doesn’t have regular contact

Key points from Q&A and discussion

  • Question about how active climate groups like XR are locally, and if the TC has had contact. 

  • They were invited to the event in Blackburn but didn’t respond. The nearest climate protests were the anti-fracking protests in Preston. Lack of response from the Green Party as well.

  • It’s useful to have figures of the carbon footprint and the employment in sectors. There’s a lot of resonance with Sheffield or South Yorkshire and the difficulty of reaching large manufacturing sites. Importance for just transition thinking about the whole economy. Not just the ones traditionally thought of as heavy industries.

  • Idea of a joint meeting with the Greens and the Trades Council to talk about why trade unions are important, how they could be working better working together. A lot of it about democracy and the right to protest as well as climate change. 

  • Boosting Facebook posts (in politics and environment categories) led to getting a lot of conspiracy theorist comments. They were seeing things from a perspective of distrust of the establishment. There's definitely a sense that someone's pulling our leg, and it's being done for malign purposes by an international elite.

  • Climate denial is policy for Reform and the new President of the United States. There was a screening of a film about the Lucas workers in Derby at the Peace Festival 2 years ago and 2 Unite members were asked to speak from Rolls Royce. They basically just derided the whole notion of the Lucas plan, and said it couldn't possibly work.

  • Sometimes you've got to meet people where they are and show that the issue of the climate crisis is not just about jobs. For example, talking about health and safety - heat waves are affecting a lot of workers. And it's a much easier approach to engage people with that, because they're actually living it right now. Another good issue is fuel poverty and retrofit.

Resources and links