Photo: Hert Niks on unsplash

On the Sunday evening, a climate fringe, The Climate Crisis Is Here: Trade Unions’ Time To Act, hosted by Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Group, Greener Jobs Alliance and PCS, included a rousing contribution from Asad Rehman, Chief Executive of Friends of the Earth, while Debra Beale, NEU Joint President, spoke eloquently about the impact of the heatwaves in schools for both teachers and pupils, and the urgent need for investment to upgrade school buildings.

The tone for the week was set by FBU General Secretary Steve Wright, who related the difficulties of meeting the wildfire threat with an inadequate number of workers.  He acknowledged the heroic work of members in dealing with the huge number of calls when resources are stretched thin:

As firefighters, we’re getting quite impatient at politicians talking about the role that firefighters take in these incidents and the craziness across the summer, with no real direction about how they’re going to fix it.

This topic was the central theme of Motion C14, Climate Heat Emergency, heard in the Tuesday morning session.  As well as demands arising specifically from the impacts of the heatwaves, notably a call for a legally enforceable maximum working temperature of 26C, an increase in firefighters and a National Wildfire summit, the motion also reinforced key climate demands such as rights for Green reps, funding for solar panels and implementation of the Green New Deal.

The motion was moved by NEU General Secretary Daniel Kebede, who cut to the heart of the issue, I.e. societal breakdown under neoliberalism: it is, he said, ‘not simply a failure of policy…or a failure of imagination.  It’s the failure of an economic system that has made profit god and treated the living world as sacrifice…an economy organised around extraction, exploitation and endless accumulation.’  FBU’s Dwight Williams underlined the urgent need to reverse 15 years of cuts, provision of proper PPE equipment, better land management and a U.K.-wide wildfire strategy.

On an agenda packed with worthy motions, of particular note here were:

Motion 75, moved by UCU, supporting the Wages not Weapons campaign, and promoting ‘a trade union vision of security based on decent work, quality public services, equality, climate action, democracy and peace’, a welcome and widely supported riposte to the idea that unions should passively ‘chase the money’ if it’s going into weapons manufacture and thereby reinforce the drive to militarism.

Motion C8 (BFAWU) called on the TUC to campaign for ‘the right to food to be enshrined in U.K. law’, ending food poverty and implementing a food and nutrition strategy while ensuring secure unionised jobs to replace unpaid labour.

Motion 55 (ASLEF) and 56 (TSSA) both addressed aspects of the much needed transformation of the rail industry.  Motion 55 won support for ASLEF’s Own Our Trains campaign, which calls for public ownership not only of U.K. rail operations but the rolling stock itself.  Motion 56 demanded guaranteed job protection for workers as they transition to Great British Rail, exactly the base demand that should be at the forefront of the energy unions approach, as well as every other sector of the economy.

In all, if Congress is more about checking the temperature of individual union commitments to action on different subjects than in placing actions on TUC itself, then this was a hugely successful year, showing that the Year of Trade Union Climate Action has had an effect, and that the now very real urgency of meeting the climate crisis is building the kind of cross sectoral action and solidarity that is desperately needed.