Bob Crow

[User removed 4]

Isn't that because you are a goat herder in Northumbria?

very good.

 

[Perry Milkins]

very good.

Oh you are/were a very good goat herder.

 

[User removed 4]

Oh you are/were a very good goat herder.

im good at whatever i do.

 

[Perry Milkins]

im good at whatever i do.

Punctuation?

 

[User removed 4]

Punctuation?

i dont do punctuation

 

[cunning fergus]

Bob Crow a self confessed communist earning £80k before expenses.

Wasn't he quoted as saying that the British jobs for British workers row was bullshit as there is just workers. I'm sure that was a great comfort to many of his members.

 

[Tony Meolas Loan Spell]

To be honest, I would want to be a member of a union where if I was being sacked for, say, driving a train drunk as a skunk, they would all go on strike to back my "unfair" dismissal - even tho I was in the wrong.

 

[Southover Street Seagull]

What I don't understand - on a wider point is why the unions continue to blindly pump so much money into the Labour Party (they founded it, they pay for it, they staff huge swathes of it) yet have not yet demanded what they really want. Where are the general strikes? Where are the work to rule? Where are the votes of no confidence in Mandelson, Brown et al?

The TUC should have stamped on the Post Office privatisation before Mandelson started running with it. Apart from the dodgy grant to unions to modernise that this Government has given them I can't see that trade union rights have advanced too far from where they were 12 years ago. What do they get for the Labour Party funding?

Time perhaps for the TUC to withdraw funding and bring forward a new Co-operative party that represent their members. All depends, I think on how badly Labour do in the polls next year. If they get wiped out then that effectively does the job for the unions. They start from their core base and re-build. If Labour finish relatively strongly then that's the time to issue ultimatums. They seem unable to do it right now.

The other thing, I think they ought to do is re-define what a union is and what it represents. Manufacturing is an anomaly in Britain and the traditional workers that filled the unions have all but gone. It's the lower end of the service industries that need union representation. Especially in sectors and geographical areas that aren't traditional union strongholds.

The other thing the unions ought now to recognise is that their language needs to change. Many of us are or aspire to be middle class. Many of us are on the centre or centre right politically. The class warfare of the 70s that Crow espouses may work for his members but more widely just confirms an outdated stereotype.

Well, that's my opinion anyway.

I am at a loss as to why my union, the CWU (postal union) is still supporting New Labour in its capacity as a political party, I would withdraw the funding and just sponsor friendly MPs instead.