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Frances O’Grady is listening to a group of underpaid care workers in a supermarket cafe.

“I love my job,” one ­exhausted woman is telling the TUC’s General Secretary.

“But I’ve only had a £3 rise in 21 years. How much more do things cost now?

“I do hours overtime, anyway. I can’t rush visits because these are elderly people, and I don’t get paid travel time. I do 50 visits some days. It’s slave labour, really, but we do it because we care.”

O’Grady, 58, is in Manchester for a speech at the Mechanics Institute – the birthplace of the Trades Union Congress – as part of ­celebrations ahead of its 150th Congress, which starts on Sunday.

But these women are on the front line of modern-day labour – underpaid workers rinsed in the new zero-hour economy run by distant corporations.

With the support of Unison, the care workers have recently won a court case over petrol money and are now fighting over 15-minute visits and travel time.

The General Secretary has just come from the early morning picket line at Wigan Hospital, where NHS cleaners and porters are fighting privatisation.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

Her job – battling hard Tory Brexit, the eighth year of turbo-austerity, and the spectre of automation – is among the toughest public roles in the country but she is rarely short of inspiration.

“Those women on the picket line know we’ve got to stand up for each other,” O’Grady says.

“That’s what trade unionism is.”

The TUC was born in tough times, when working people were being crushed under the wheels of the Industrial Revolution.

At the Mechanics Institute we sit in the room where a “congress of trades councils and other federations of trades societies” came together in 1868. A portrait of George Potter, a joiner and cabinet maker who became the first President of the TUC, hangs on the wall.

O’Grady’s own heroes include Mary Macarthur, the 1903 General Secretary of the Women’s Trades Union League. “I love the way she was cutting edge,” O’Grady says, perhaps thinking of the TUC’s new app aimed at young people.

“She was getting films into cinemas at the turn of the century, she brought the strikes to the people. There was also that little bit of civil disobedience, a bit of cheekiness. She wasn’t brow-beaten.”

(Image: PA)

O’Grady laughs.

“And, Anne ­Scargill,” she says of the founder of Women Against Pit Closures and ex-wife of miners’ leader Arthur.

“She’s still going for it at 80. No flashy ego and a twinkle in her eye. I remember when she occupied that mine. It’s ‘what are we going to do about it?’ Not the big I Am.”

O’Grady’s day in Manchester is all “what are we going to do about it?” – not the Big I Am. She would rather not talk about herself, or the great founders of the movement.

Instead, she meets the brilliant Rusholme bus drivers from Unite. They took strike action against First Manchester last winter after realising they were being paid nearly £5,000 a year less than colleagues at a depot just five miles away.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

“We knew they weren’t just going to give it to us,” Unite’s Neil Clarke tells O’Grady. “We knew we were going to have to stand outside for it. But the support we had was amazing. We just wanted the same pay for the same conditions in the same city for the same job. And in the end, we won.”

At St Peter’s Square, O’Grady meets the inspirational TGI Fridays strikers, some as young as 18.

“We were suddenly told that 40% of service charge payments were now going to top up kitchen wages,” a waitress tells her. “We understand kitchen staff are underpaid, but why is their pay rise coming out of our pockets? This isn’t a struggling family business.”

The 150th Congress, which O’Grady will address on Monday, takes place within hours of the 10th anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which former staff are celebrating with a party.

“I don’t have a problem with reunions,” says O’Grady, dryly. “But I feel sick nothing’s really changed. Those bankers got off scot-free.

(Image: Daily Mirror TUC)

“Yet there are one million more children in relative poverty since 2010. And for the majority of poor children, their mums and dads are in work. So the Tory idea that work is the best route out of poverty is one big fat lie. They work all the hours God sends and yet they are no better off. We have to do something about the greed at the top. It’s not about resenting someone’s success but about being made a fool of, taking people for mugs.

“A lot of people heard Theresa May talking about the Just About Managings and thought maybe she would do something about it. Apparently not.”

The youngest of five children in an Irish, working-class household, O’Grady grew up in family that was often just about managing. As we talk about a free uniform scheme in Manchester, she nods.

“I remember we couldn’t afford the school skirt, which was box-pleated. I had to have one with pleats all around it. It was amazing how conscious I was of it.” She shakes her head. “We’ve got to get wages rising. We need a bloody big lift to the minimum wage.”

O’Grady grew up the youngest daughter of James, a chrome fitter and shop steward at the British Leyland carworks in Cowley, Oxford, and Rita, a shopworker who later worked for the NHS.

In 2014, she went to visit her dad’s former workplace as General Secretary. She says: “I was so moved when the shop stewards proudly told me how they were helping outsourced cleaners get the living wage.”

She said recently she had met Angela Merkel more times than Theresa May. “I’ve met the President of Ireland more times too,” she says. “I don’t care for me, but six million workers and 50 unions deserve a bit of common courtesy, don’t you think? We might have one or two ideas about how to make things better.

“We are facing a second crash, that economists say could be harder and faster than the first.

“Has the Government taken steps to protect people against that? It’s like the last days of the Roman Empire – they’re swanning round the world making trade agreements while back at home no one’s minding the shop.”

But while Rome burns, workers are getting organised.

O’Grady sees the spark of a new mass movement in recent union action against companies as diverse as Uber, McDonald’s, Sports Direct and Picturehouse Cinemas. Since our visit to Manchester, the women and men of the Wigan Hospital dispute won a resounding victory against privatisation.

I think of something one of the women on the picket line said to O’Grady: “They’ve messed with the wrong women.” When there’s a big painting of Frances O’Grady up in the Mechanics Institute, that’s what it should say underneath.