The Usdaw general secretary will also reflect on their successful joint campaigning against retail crime, along with making work better paid and more secure. Highlighting the natural common ground between the trade union and co-operative movements. Both focused on empowerment in workplaces and in communities, while recognising the fundamental threat from Reform and the far right.
Joanne Thomas is expected to say: “The Co-op Party’s Community Britain Campaign is closely aligned with our own campaign, Retail at the Heart of our Communities. We share the belief that empowered communities are better communities, better for the economy and better for our members who live and work in them.
“The Co-op Party has always recognised that retail workers deserve to be respected. They have been a steadfast ally for retail workers, always supporting our members in the fight for stronger protections against violence and abuse. Through our joint campaigning, we have delivered crucial changes in the law, creating a specific offence of assaulting a retail worker.
“We won't stop fighting for our members, because everyone deserves to be secure at work. After 14 years of workers' rights being undermined by the Tories, the Employment Rights Bill is set to make things fairer. Banning exploitative zero-hours contracts, ensuring sick pay from day one of illness and introducing new trade union rights, so that workers can regain their collective strength, are crucial as workers continue to face huge pressures from living costs.
“The Government must stand firm behind its commitment to make work pay, by passing the Bill in full against attempts by Tory and Lib Dem Peers to drive a wrecking ball through it, by getting the details right in secondary legislation and by putting the resources in place to make sure the new rights are enforced. All of us, across the movement, must keep making the case for fairness, security and a better deal for working people. That's a huge focus for Usdaw and my priority as the new chair of TULO, which brings together all the Labour affiliated unions.
“A sense of injustice that so many people feel is being exploited; we see this with the growth of the far and populist right. Reform are no friend of working people: at every turn they have voted against the Employment Rights Bill, they want to cut the minimum wage for young workers, slash public spending and cut our already struggling services to the bone. We must shift power back to our communities and offer positive change, just as the Co-operative Party has been advocating, because the likes of Farage seek to divide us, pitching community against community, neighbour against neighbour, worker against worker.
“We know that the real struggle is between dignity and exploitation, between fairness and greed, between hope and fear. We know that to win that struggle we must stand together, across workplaces, across generations and across our movement, to make every community thrive, to win a better deal for all working people and to build a better Britain for every single one of us.”
Notes for editors:
Usdaw (Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers) is one of the fastest growing unions in the TUC and the UK's fifth biggest trade union with around 360,000 members. Most Usdaw members work in the retail sector, but the union also has many members in transport, distribution, food manufacturing, chemical industry and other trades www.usdaw.org.uk
The Co-operative Party has been a voice for co-operative values and principles in the places where decisions are taken and laws are made for a century. The Party's policy platform draws on the experience of their members, subscribing societies and our wider movement https://party.coop/
For Usdaw press releases visit: www.usdaw.org.uk/news and you can follow us on Bluesky @usdawunion.bsky.social and Twitter/X @UsdawUnion