GMB’s Ken Lowe and Neil Holden came to Salford Labour students this week to enlighten us on the prospect of a GMB group at Salford.
Ken Lowe, Political Officer for the Union started off with explaining how GMB stretched out into CLP’s to show how the union is affiliated with Labour itself.
GMB aims to attract more young members to the union and to the socialist movement – as Ken believes, at the moment, that it has lost momentum and if no one does anything about then a generation of potential activists could be lost and is being left behind.
Without this momentum of young members, society and socialism will end up like in the time of Thatcher, where the youth will be oppressed.
Ken added that if GMB were able to get a great number of GMB youth branches, they would definitely organise conferences for us, where in fact we would be able to elect a delegate and then they would suggest policy for the GMB to act upon.
Ken stressed the importance of students needing to be protected whilst they’re at uni with part time jobs. GMB represents all its members, no matter what age in times of need and when their rights are breached.
Membership with GMB only costs 10p a week for phone advice line and 80p a week for the additional health support in the workplace.
GMB are not there for financial profit, they are purely there for support in return for activism in the union.
Neil Holden, Membership Development Officer at GMB, would like to build as many GMB branches possible, including Salford University.
Like Ken, Neil believes that socialism is on the decline and it needs to be reassured by members physically getting active and showing that the current state of government is not right.
However, GMB needs more in its youth sector, as out of the 3,000 members which it has in the north-west and Ireland less than 70 are under 27.
Neil also added that he would be more than happy to come back and help Salford University set up its own GMB branch, with a university status, so the official member minimum could be lower. This would be greatly beneficial to the students at Salford as they would now know their rights in the work place.
GMB covers all areas in the work place as it is a general union and therefore can appeal to everyone.
So, keep the lookout for GMB @ Salford hopefully appearing in the near future in the Union’s society list!
Also, we would all like to take this opportunity to congratulate our chair, Joe Kirwin, on his success at being elected as a NUS delegate for Salford University! A great thank you to all that voted and all those who campaigned for Joe’s sake. We all knew you could do it, Joe.
