Opinion

Bimpe Archer: More unites workers than divides them

Shop workers, including Emma Cunningham, from the trade union Usdaw protested in Belfast last year against extending Sunday trading hours - another example of how more unites workers than divides them. Picture by Mal McCann
Shop workers, including Emma Cunningham, from the trade union Usdaw protested in Belfast last year against extending Sunday trading hours - another example of how more unites workers than divides them. Picture by Mal McCann Shop workers, including Emma Cunningham, from the trade union Usdaw protested in Belfast last year against extending Sunday trading hours - another example of how more unites workers than divides them. Picture by Mal McCann

IT takes something special to drag me out of my warm house and into an austere lecture theatre on a wet and windy February night.

And I didn't regret a second of my evening listening to four doughty civil rights veterans share their war stories and thoughtful insights into the state of today's world.

I had been lucky enough to meet 'Freedom Rider' Rip Patton before, when I was generously hosted in Nashville by the publisher of the city's African American newspaper The Tennessee Tribune and I'm notoriously impatient of hearing the same story twice.

But the sometime jazz musician manages to weave fresh magic every time he speaks and he was joined by Dr Sybil Hampton, who was part of the second group of African-American students to integrate Little Rock High School, after Brown vs Board of Education ruled school segregation unconstitutional.

Giving voice to Northern Ireland's own civil rights struggle were Professor Paul Arthur and Eileen Weir.

Ms Weir was an unlikely civil rights campaigner in the deeply divided Northern Ireland of her youth. Indeed, shortly after turning 16, she briefly joined the UDA.

That association ended quickly, but a later one, joining a trade union while working on the shop floor in her first job at Gallaher's tobacco factory, is what she credits with shaping the activism that defined the rest of her life.

"I didn't know the other community. The Troubles started and (Catholic relatives) went up the Falls and that was the last I saw them. We were told by unionist politicians we would be all right, we would be looked after.

"Well," she said dryly, "it was some looking after."

Her fight for women's rights saw her secretly campaign against strip searching at Armagh Gaol - secret because it was on behalf of Republican prisoners and she was still living on the loyalist Shankill Road.

For me Eileen Weir's story epitomises what HeartUnions week - which this is - is all about.

Focusing on promoting the work done by unions in offering everyone a voice at work, much of the support and work goes under the radar.

Most people, even those who are members of a union only hear about them during periods of industrial action.

This gives an inevitable but false impression - stoked it must be said by vested interest groups - that unions and their members are all troublemakers, wreckers rather than builders.

When things have come to the point of industrial action, relations have broken down. There is lots of heat and noise because that is what happens when things are broken.

Most of the work of union reps, officials and members is sorting out in the workplace.

Fairness is the cornerstone of harmony and conversely unfairness stirs discord, and it's easier to demand fairness with a collective voice.

It is also easier to respond to a cohesive negotiating block rather than playing whack-a-mole with a cascade of competing complaints.

But, beyond that, it is a movement which brings all sorts of people together in a society where traditional sectarian politics have divided us for more than 100 years.

Workers rights are human rights and standing up for a colleague is an admirable step being taken every day in workplaces across Northern Ireland by people who don't even realise the power of what they are doing.

It doesn't matter what church that colleague does or doesn't go to, or what sport they like to play or watch at the weekend. Nor should it.

Ms Weir and Prof Arthur noted that working class unionists were also affected by the lack of 'one man, one vote' and, despite the assurances of the Protestant gentry, deep poverty existed within that community then and it still does to this day.

If votes were bought with promises of otherwise, they were sold cheap.

More unites workers than divides them, and realising that could be the key to freeing this society from the shackles wrought by decades of 'divide and rule' politics.