The National Shop Stewards Network conference, which took place on 27 June, brought together fighting trade union activists to draw up a list of demands to address the cost-of-living squeeze. Activists are taking these demands into their trade union branches and other bodies. The NSSN will take these demands to a lobby of the Trades Union Congress in Brighton on 13 September. It will raise the demand for a national union-led demonstration against Labour austerity – a policy agreed at last year’s Congress.
NSSN action programme
- Above-inflation pay rises for workers – automatic rises in pay as inflation increases. In the public sector, for these to be fully funded by central government
- Scrap all age exemptions on pay, including the national minimum wage. For the immediate implementation of the TUC demand of a £15-an-hour minimum wage for all as a step towards a real living wage, without exemptions
- Stop the profiteering: nationalise the energy and water companies
- Freeze rents and energy and utility bills
- Demand that councils refuse to implement cuts, and instead pass no-cuts needs budgets
- Oppose disability benefit cuts and attacks on pensions and campaign for a fully resourced, supportive social security system to meet the needs of working-class people
- Demand that the TUC enact Congress 2025 policy by calling an Autumn national demo against Labour austerity. If not, for a trade union ‘coalition of the willing’ to step in to organise such a demonstration
- Support the NSSN lobby of the TUC Congress in Brighton from 1pm on Sunday 13th September, in the Holiday Inn Hotel
- Strike together: co-ordinate the fight on national public sector pay – unite workers across the public and private sectors
- Repeal all the Tory anti-union laws – immediate scrapping of the undemocratic 50% strike ballot threshold
- Restore the right to strike to the POA
- Workers’ unity to face down Reform and the far-right: for the unions to implement 2018 TUC Congress policy ‘to launch a campaign of Jobs and homes not racism’
- Launch the discussion for a Workers’ Charter, and how we can fight for it, against the attack on our living standards
- Union branches, union reps and shop stewards committees, trades councils and individual union reps, members and activists can sign up to the NSSN Action Programme here.
- NSSN lobby of the TUC Congress in Brighton from 1pm on Sunday 13 September, in the Holiday Inn Hotel
