Tom Mann Memorial Lecture. Speaker Len McCluskey, Unite.
Plus there will also be a major photographic exhibition which Coventry Keep Our NHS Public has borrowed from Hackney NHS campaigners. The exhibition by Marion Macalpine, which has been touring since 2014 (recently updated), explores the diverse forms that NHS privatisation takes, including so-called Integrated Care Systems and Integrated Care Organisations, and Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contracts.
Tom Mann was born in 1856 in Grange Road in Longford, Coventry and was a leading trade union figure of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: co-leader of the great London dock strike in 1889, and subsequently President of the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers’ Union; co-founder of the National Transport Workers’ Federation; and, until retirement, general secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. All unions which found their final home in what today is ‘Unite’.
Mann formed the Eight Hour League and in 1889, with Keir Hardie, successfully campaigned for the Trades Union Congress to adopt the eight-hour day as a key goal.
Today, 130 years later, with robotics, automation and artificial intelligence threatening millions of jobs, what should be the aim of the trade union movement to ensure workers and their families share the benefits of modernisation, not becoming its victims?
This will be a major trade union event organised by Coventry TUC, to which we’re pleased Len McCluskey, General Secretary of Unite will give the keynote address.
Everyone is welcome!
Wednesday, 30 October 2019 from 19:00-21:00
The Methodist Central Hall
Warwick Lane, CV1 2HA, Coventry
https://coventry2021.co.uk/event/tom-mann-memorial-lecture/