This is a crucial time for our movement and our Party, and today we have contacted all the Leadership and Deputy Leadership candidates with the questions below. We look forward to hearing from all the candidates about their plans to help strengthen the link between the Party and the trade union movement.
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1. What is your vision for strengthening the relationship between affiliated trade unions and the Labour Party, and how will you strengthen union members’ involvement in Party activity?
2. Collectivism is in the DNA of the trade union movement and the Labour Party. Unions make decisions through their own democratic decision-making processes, and then each speaks with a collective voice in the Party. How will you ensure that this collective voice of trade unions is respected, encouraged and preserved in democratic decision-making at all levels of our Party?
3. We have some of the most restrictive trade union laws in the developed world and this severely undermines the ability of trade unions to organise, recruit and act to defend the interests of their members, and means the balance of power in the workplace is tipped in the interests of employers and not working people. How would you as part of a Labour Government change this?
4. How would you defend employment and trade union rights, and defend and build the trade union movement under a hostile Tory government?
5. Some of the most popular policies in the Party’s policy platform were core issues for the trade union movement. How would you build on these policies, and how will Labour’s vision for a better, fairer world of work form part of your conversation with the voters we need to win back to Labour?