Our September competition

We’ve got another competition for you, but first some details of where the prizes came from.

Hong Kong

Finsec President, Sue Boraston and General Secretary, Andrew Casidy, have both just returned from Hong Kong. UNI, the global trade union that Finsec belongs to, held a two day long training seminar for Hong Kong unions sharing with them how other unions organise workers. Hong Kong is the only part of China that has unions that are independent, apolitical and unaffiliated to the Chinese Communist Government.

Developing strong, independent and effective trade unions in China will be crucial, not just to Chinese workers, some of whom live in absolute poverty and face life threatening workplace hazards, but also for the rest of the world’s workers, whose wages and working conditions are being driven down by cheap Chinese labour. UNI hopes that Hong Kong unions can be a beacon or launch pad for independent unions to form in the rest of China. Hence the seminar.

The huge United States union SEIU (1.8 million members in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico) ran a session teaching organising skills for the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and the Macau Workers Union. The 230,000 member Australian SDA Union ran a seminar and little old Finsec (6,500 members) was invited to run two seminars – one on organising women and one on organising youth.

Competition

So, we have three UNI polo shirts and a Hong Kong Buildings, Management and Security Workers’ General Union bandanna to give away to Finsec members. We will give them away to any member who writes a comment on a Gossip website between now and the end of September. If you don’t think you have anything to say just leave your name and the company you work for as comment on this story, but otherwise be brave and tell us what you think about any of the stories we have written. Below each story’s title is a bit that either says ‘comments‘ or ‘no comments.’ Click on that and then you can type in your comment. We’ll look forward to hearing from you.

(Thanks to pmorgan for the photo)

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