Words matter. These are the best Frances O’Grady Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The UK has a poor investment record. According to IMF data, we have come seventh out of the top seven industrialised countries since 1999.
Voting to go on strike is not a decision working people take lightly and is always accompanied by a strong sense of injustice at work. The impact of losing a day’s pay is significant, not least for those in the lowest paid jobs who are already on the tightest budgets.
I suspect there are people in all walks of life who need to be dragged into the 21st century in terms of attitudes towards women.
I want a society that provides decent jobs for those who can work and decent security for those can’t.
I like independent films… European films. I do go and see popular films as well because my kids force me.
Governments of all stripes want to deliver growth and rebalance their economies now that they have learned the hard way that, left to their own devices, markets pick expensive banking losers.
There is this sense of David Cameron leading a Government that’s badly out of touch with ordinary people’s lives. I’d absolutely welcome the opportunity to show all political leaders what life is like for most people.
Britain is a textbook case of how growing inequality leads to economic crisis. The years before the crash were marked by a sharp rise in remortgaging and the growth of 0 percent balance transfer credit cards. By 2008 the UK had the highest ratio of household debt to GDP of any major economy.
The TUC’s new slogan ‘a future that works’ sets a profound challenge. Austerity and rapid deficit reduction is failing in its own terms, but even at its best it is short-sighted, muddle-through politics with no vision of a new economic model.
In the U.S. the powerful critics of austerity such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich rightly identify the decline of ‘labor’ as a problem, and renewing trade unionism part of the solution. Our opportunity is to make the same case in the UK.
Ordinary people who have lots of good ideas want more than a suggestion box, and they need a union to represent that thinking.
The backwoodsmen are muttering about making Britain’s draconian union laws – already among the toughest in Europe – harsher still. And parts of the media will continue to attack public service pensions, as if school meals staff, refuse collectors and healthcare workers have no right to a decent retirement.
I came from a family where joining a union was the expected thing to do. I’ve always believed that the relationship between an employer and an individual worker is fundamentally unequal.
There is nothing that says unions have a God-given right to be there. We have to work at it and make ourselves relevant to every section of the workforce.
Washing dishes as a 17-year-old in an Oxford college and seeing the privileged lifestyles of the undergraduates there convinced me that a system that allowed luxury for the few at the expense of the many needed to be challenged.
You just wish sometimes that people would treat you like a human being rather than seeing your gender first and who you are second.
The difficulty for the Government is there’s this ideological straitjacket of the market will provide, let the market rip and everything will work out… It’s back to trickle-down economics, which, it’s plain to see, have not delivered.
All the evidence shows very clearly that if you are a member of a trade union you are likely to get better pay, more equal pay, better health and safety, more chance to get training, more chance to have conditions of work that help if you have caring responsibilities… the list goes on!
I am a feminist and I have no problems being called that.
As long as the number one worry for people, keeping them up at nights, is whether they’re going to have a job in the morning, then they are less likely to resist unfair changes, or unfair treatment, or cuts in real pay at work.
Each day more coalition MPs in seats outside the South East come out against George Osborne’s regional pay cut plans, and Vince Cable now claims they are dead.
It is not natural or inevitable that half the world goes hungry; that the freedom of markets trumps protection of the planet; or that citizens’ rights come second to those of corporations.
I cherish the creation of public space and services, especially health, housing and the comprehensive education system which dared to give so many of us ideas ‘above our station.’
My first hero, as a teenager, was James Connolly. I remember discovering that he was a feminist, and that was an eye-opener, coming from a man of such poverty.
From the ashes of a financial crash, there is a chance to create a new economic settlement that is more equal, sustainable and democratic.
