Sarah Woolley is general secretary of the Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU). And on 8 October, she spoke at a Your Party rally in Leeds alongside Zarah Sultana. But while she praised the excitement surrounding the party, she insisted that:
While this new formation is coming together, while the ideas and the structures are being worked out, we can’t afford to sit still and wait for politics to be sorted for us. Real change doesn’t start in Westminster and won’t come from any political party as it starts. It starts in our workplaces. It starts in our communities, in the everyday organising that builds confidence, power and solidarity.
With this in mind, she called for enthusiastic engagement in Your Party whilst at the same time “building power from below”, asserting that:
No political party, no matter how radical, can deliver the change on its own. Parties follow movements, not the other way around. And we, my friends, are a great big movement. So our job right now is to be organising…
It’s not about waiting for something to represent us. It’s about representing ourselves.
Sarah Woolley: use the hope and energy to rebuild unions and communities
Sarah Woolley railed against right-wing austerity politics, but highlighted that people haven’t given up hope:
After years of austerity, broken promises, and the hollowing out of democracy, people are ready to believe that something better is possible… despite 15 plus years of austerity and the crap that we’ve had to deal with, people haven’t given up. We haven’t given up despite everything that we’ve endured: stagnant wages, insecure work, public services on their knees, food banks.
There’s more food banks than there are McDonald’s stores. That’s shameful. They’ve become normal, not something that we should only be having in times of crisis.
The fact that political elites have told us for decades that there’s no alternative to all this, she said, has:
led to despair and disengagement and has allowed the likes of Reform to step into that gap with this poisonous message that blames migrants, workers and the vulnerable instead of the powerful and the rich.
But we need to be clear that:
their real mission, and we know this, is to keep workers divided and the rich protected.
To fight back, she asserted:
We’ve got to be rebuilding our unions, growing them, strengthening them and making them fine organisations again. Every time a worker joins a trade union, stands up to their boss, wins a pay rise or secures safer conditions, that’s politics in action. That is working class power.
She also stressed:
The system that exploits us at work is the same system that’s bleeding our communities dry. So we’ve got to organise across both. Unions linking up with tenants’ campaigns, food solidarity groups, climate activists, building that collective strength wherever we are.
Sarah Woolley is right. Because the big achievements of the working class have always come as a result of organisation and pressure from below. And that’s what we need to build again going forwards.
Featured image via the Canary
