THE breadth of motions at our annual conference of Yorkshire and the Humber TUC illustrates the severity of Tory attacks on the trade union movement in the Yorkshire and Humber region and nationwide and the way the movement will respond.

Workers and their unions face the forced labour laws contained in the government’s minimum services level legislation, where workers will be forced to break their own strikes or face the sack.

Our NHS is in crisis due to government underfunding and the creeping infection of privatisation. There are more than 40,000 nurse vacancies nationwide, including many hundreds in Yorkshire and the Humber, as staff are driven out by years of below-inflation pay rises — or no rises at all — which amount to real-terms pay cuts as inflation eats away at the value of wages, year after year.

Disabled and unemployed workers face renewed attacks on their benefit payments and the government is persecuting overseas workers by denying their families the right to join them.

Yorkshire and the Humber has some of the highest levels of child poverty in Britain, including in working families.

The steel industry faces destruction, with the government paying Tata Steel hundreds of millions of pounds in taxpayers’ cash to help them do it.

There is the issue of the growth of employment models based on artificial intelligence and the threats that brings to working people, working practices and their health. 

Workers in our publicly owned media are under attack as cuts to BBC funding force swingeing job cuts among journalists both nationally, in our region, and here in Leeds where members of the National Union of Journalists have had our support when they took strike action in defence of their jobs.

And when workers are unfairly sacked they will face forking out fees for the right to take a case to the employment tribunal — a second attempt by the government to deny workers the right to justice at work by this means.

And let us not forget the people of Gaza. A motion from the South Yorkshire County Association of Trade Union Councils proposes plans on how we can pay our part. 

All these issues will be debated at our conference this weekend.

The conference will look back at victories trade union members have won, regionally and nationally. The attempts by the Tories and their friends, the private rail operators, to shut almost 1,000 ticket offices was defeated by the campaign led by rail union RMT, with the backing of hundreds of thousands of members of the public who supported the union’s demonstrations and rallies.

More than 700,000 signed the petition opposing the closures whose effects would have included the end of access to rail travel for many disabled people.

And more recently, just this week, here in West Yorkshire we have taken our bus services back under public control after a long-running campaign. West Yorkshire’s Labour Mayor Tracy Brabin made the announcement just two days ago.

It means an end to the cuts in bus services imposed by private operators whose first priority is profit, with passengers’ needs trailing far behind. The public’s elected representatives will decide the level of services, not the profit-hungry operators.

But while we can briefly enjoy these victories many more struggles lay ahead.
More than 100 delegates representing half a million workers in our region will decide the best way to tackle them.

Our thriving Trades Union Councils will be fully participating in our debates whose subjects will include international solidarity, increasing the engagement of young people in trade unions and what a just transition to green energy is looking like in 2024.

The debates will take place against the backdrop of the Tory-imposed cost-of-living crisis imposing ever-increasing burdens on workers and their families.

And our decisions come just weeks before local elections, including those of regional mayors, and perhaps six months before a general election in which we all want to see the Tories swept from power.

We have a region which still has heart despite the non-appearance of the improvements that “levelling up” was supposed to win for the local economy and working people — a region which is changing its TUC boundaries to join forces with the northern region during this coming year. 

Across the country, including here in Yorkshire and the Humber, workers are fighting back, often successfully, with industrial action. Consultative ballots are taking place on more action. For improvements to work and fighting to oppose the MSLs.

This conference will decide how we can take up the struggles both as part of our movement’s national struggle and here in our region.