Video here of a speech given by Bob Crow, General Secretary of the RMT, outside the Vestas factory in the Isle of Wight. The RMT, who are not affiliated to the Labour Party, are one of the most campaiging and radical trade unions in this country. The Vestas workers were not unionised, indeed at a public meeting last week in London we were told that they were intimidated from joining a union by the company and given a workers' council instead, which is a pale shadow of a real union - and that was only because the company had to under EU labour laws.
The RMT are now paying the legal costs of the Vestas workers and have ensured the support of many transport workers in the area. RMT workers are themselves threatened with job losses on the railways where the private rail companies are intending to introduce thousands of redundancies because of the downturn.
It is good to see a major union supporting green jobs and the fight for workers rights. Could be something to do with the fact that they broke the link with Labour and are fighting for their own members rather than following the dictates of the Labour Party, who could not even deliver on the two Warwick Agreements reached with the trade unions in recent years.
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