- Conference
- 2025 National Black Members' Conference
- Date
- 7 September 2024
- Decision
- Carried
Conference acknowledges the importance of the ‘Lucas Plan’ formulated 47 years ago by trade unionists at Lucas Aerospace. It proposed an alternative corporate plan, protecting jobs, demanding fair wages, working conditions, and addressing social inequalities. The 2015 International Trade Union Conference (ITUC) agreement developed this, calling for a unified campaign, promoting workers’ rights, eradicating social inequalities and addressing environmental issues.
Campaigning on climate change is especially urgent for the Black communities who are more likely to experience poverty, discrimination, homelessness, and the effects of extreme weather conditions. These factors are more likely to place Black communities at risk as the growing climate crisis impacts disproportionately on economically deprived communities.
Conference, Black communities disproportionately face the impact of extreme weather patterns, worsening health inequalities and increasing job insecurity linked with the effects of climate change impacting on work environments that are dominated by the greed principle.
For UNISON Black workers, climate change campaigning, in solidarity with Black communities throughout the world, including the Southern Hemisphere, is a priority. Many of us are recent immigrants from or have diasporic roots extending deep into the history of the Southern Hemisphere. We carry in our bodies, in our lives, the living imprint of historical Transatlantic slavery and colonialism. We bear testament to the historical violent, capitalist domination of the Southern Hemisphere by the Northern hemisphere.
We are engaged in a struggle for decoloniality. That is, the struggle to challenge and dismantle economic, political, social and cultural structures that persist after decolonisation. Structures that are embedded in racist prejudice and discrimination and which continue the drain of wealth from Black communities across the world to Western elites and that minoritises Black community in the UK.
The climate consequences of a profligate, capitalist Northern hemisphere are visited disproportionately on Black communities in the South, who currently face catastrophic environmental pollution and severe weather events. This is exacerbated by climate change-related social global instability and conflict engendering the rolling back of all human rights.
Conference asks the National Black Members Committee to:
1)To seek to ensure that the impact of climate change for all Black communities and workers is at the heart of continued climate change awareness raising work
2) In line with UNISON’s ‘Just Transition’ campaign, founded on a motion adopted by NDC in 2017, seek to develop alliances with other trade unions sharing our objectives, highlighting the specific risks for Black communities and workers inclusive of all aspects of intersectional identities: for women, people living with disabilities, LGBT+ people, young people and retired people. To seek a Just Transition based on social justice and labour rights.
3) Participate in UNISON’s continued work on disinvestment from fossil fuel extraction for pension funds, with emphasis on the impact on people made particularly vulnerable due to their intersectional identities.
4) To seek to ensure Black members, across all self-organisation structures – women, disabled workers, LGBT+, Young members and Retired members – are prioritised in the UNISON Green campaign. That Black members are part of the Environment Reps recruitment as part of the Green Bargaining and Negotiating in the workplace campaign
