Publications Coordinator
Click the candidate name below to see our questions and their responses!
How do you think the party should improve its relationship with trade unions and the labour movement?
This is a question we as a movement must grapple with. The reality is that for many workers, from Polish coal miners to oil rig workers in the North Atlantic, calls to shut down polluting industries leads to feelings of fear. Fear which abstract promises of jobs in as-of-yet non-existent industries will not assuage. One of my favourite Big Green Politics Podcast interviews was with Polish Green Miłka Stępień, who explained that mining communities in regions like Silesia understand that there needs to be a move away from coal: “A lot of them are more knowledgeable than the politicians I’ve met. They just need to know what will happen to their jobs, to their families.”
As a party and individuals, many of us need to move away from a position of feeling like our role is to persuade people and the Labour movement that we ‘get it’. In many ways, we don’t. While many of our policies may be the strongest for workers in practice, it’s not our history or our legacy as it is the Labour party’s or its activists. That’s okay. Our history is a rich and more recent one - emerging out of 1970s anti-nuclear, pacifist, feminist, ecological movements and uniquely suited to addressing today’s problems (hence our policies from GND to UBI slowly becoming mainstream). This is our strength. As Elizabeth May says ‘We’re not a single issue party, but if we had to be, the environment would be a good issue to choose’.
Many groups and unions have done excellent work on worker-led green transitions; the first step is to approach the topic with humility and learn from/work with them.
How do you think your role could help Greens to become more active in and engaged with the labour movement?
The publications coordinator role can be useful in two ways. On the Green World editorial board, they can - through strengthened ties with the Trade Union coordinator and committee - ensure our publication Green World is covering workers’ struggles, strikes, and the Labour movement.
Green World can provide a space to cover the worker movements we must be linking up with and for questions we need to think about as a movement. Such as, how do we engage with a movement which has often been on the other side of our anti-road or anti-nuke campaigning? What can we do at the local level, where we have growing clout, to support workers’ rights? How will we ensure that the production of the resources and products needed for a green transition do not exploit workers around the world? How do we engage with and support deliveroo workers or the UCL cleaners strikes?
On the national executive, the publications coordinator can engage with our trade union reps on how the decisions we make affect staff. We can also work towards a culture that goes beyond our white and middle class echo chambers and is meaningfully inclusive and diverse. I’ve seen brilliant working-class young men leave the party because they were made to feel out of place by our language and in-jokes and whose language was harshly policed by university-educated young people wanting to expand their echo chambers rather than challenge them. To become a movement that is strong, broad, and representative of workers and working class people we need to change how we relate to one another.
How do you think Green Party publications can help to build on and cement good relationships with trade unions and worker organisations? What would your priorities be in this regard?
Concretely, publications can create a space for - and proactively seek to cover - these debates. There are many possibilities: we could continue covering elections of major unions and grill the candidates on green issues to inform party members, as the Green Party Trade Union group did last month; have regular columns from grassroots labour organisers; provide better coverage of strikes and ways for members to support workers’ struggles; have a series of articles that celebrate green achievements by workers. By covering union campaigns on issues like pension divestment we can also encourage party members to take part in their local unions and be a Green voice.
Also in the mix is the fact that work and the Labour movement is - and has always been – changing, with the rise of the gig economy, zero-hour contracts and the return to precarious work (in the sense that secure work has been the anomaly in human history rather than the norm). We need to start thinking differently about work and the labour movement - and to be the allies and supporters of a growing number of precarious and gig economy workers who are not represented in the traditional labour movement. There are also deeper ideological questions to explore around the role of work in our economy and how green political philosophy reshapes it, through policies such as UBI. My priorities would be to work with the Trade Union coordinator and committee towards these goals.
How do you think the party should improve its relationship with trade unions and the labour movement?
The state of the Labour party has left a void, and the party should be taking a proactive lead in workers rights to ensure we are filling that political gap.
We need to get across the message that the Green Party is a sensible alternative to Labour; we don’t only care about the environment, but we also care about people's livelihoods.
Kathryn has been a member of Unite (and Rachel is currently a member) and worked to unionise faer workplace. The one thing that fae was a general dislike for was money going towards the Labour Party.
We don’t believe that the Greens will be in a position to replace Labour anytime soon, but we need to work to show that Greens have better policies on workers’ rights than Labour and can work well with unions.
How do you think your role could help Greens to become more active in and engaged with the labour movement?
As we are very much in late-stage capitalism, we are seeing greater numbers of people recognise that the current economic system is broken. This should mean that trade union membership is rapidly growing. However, the reverse seems to be true.
One source of hope comes from renter unions. These are the product of some of the biggest excesses of capitalism laid bare. Kathryn is a member of ACORN, and the great work the union has done in Bristol can be seen in the eyes of any landlord in the city when you mention it.
We would like to see more messaging on collective action. Both of us have taken a step back from saying that individual action is a solution to climate change in itself. We want the party’s communications to reflect that. In future we would like to showcase what can be done when we work together to change things.
We want to explore ideas for how Green World can bring our members’ union work to the forefront. We’d like to see if it’s feasible to have a regular column for all liberation groups, especially the Green Party Trade Union Group. You already publish regular content that deserves a wider audience - and indeed helped Rachel decide who to vote for in the Unite general secretary election!
How do you think Green Party publications can help to build on and cement good relationships with trade unions and worker organisations? What would your priorities be in this regard?
People respond to people and personal stories. A focus of the party’s publications should be to highlight those. So rather than just saying how we support a union’s campaign or some sort of action, we instead focus on the people taking action and why they are doing so.
We need to show the excellent work that Green members are doing in unions, so there is a sense of pride in being a Green trade unionist. This is the only way we’ll start to change the narrative of Labour being the only party for trade unions.
Of course, in our role, we need to work collaboratively with the Trade Union Liaison on the Green Party Executive, to seek new ways of doing things, so trade unions are seen as an integral part of the green movement and not an afterthought or a side project.