Organising at work: "we have to take action ourselves"
I’m an electrician and work for an electrical company in the North West. There are 40 of us working here and we travel all over the area. Three years ago we had no union rep and only a handful of people in the union; this was down to the way the previous shop steward was treated. He eventually left the company. With no rep or any kind of organising it became a workplace were everybody just looked out for themselves, laughing at the managers’ unfunny jokes but turning a blind eye when people seemed to lose their jobs with no good explanation. People in the workplace were those who had been...