While I agree with much of John Harris’s article (Adapt or die: a new breed of union can save the fossils of old, 19 March), I want to add that over the past 20 or so years at Unite there has been a growing concern that young people simply don’t know what trade unions are. Consequently we are actively looking at new ways of organising young workers by encouraging young people of all colours, genders and abilities into our union – to lead the way in creative organising, using social media, seeking out injustice etc.

Our national Unite in Schools programme is centred on the next generation who will inherit and inhabit the unions. We tell them we want them to run “their” unions. At Unite, we are well aware that we need to change and that many of these astute young people are very capable of running more flexible and representative trade unions for the future. Our students have much more of a sense of injustice, sexism, racism and homophobia than those running the show – we always comment on this in our classes.

Our membership and our general secretary are passionate and vocal about our pioneering work in schools and know this new generation don’t have the “lumbering ways” Harris accuses us of. We have teams of young workplace representatives going into schools to encourage young people into unions. In the north-west our young members’ committee is leading a campaign for a living wage for young people aged 18-plus.

We discuss with young people that while they are now going into a zero-hours contract culture, by getting together with other workers they can change things. They always respond well to this, they rarely let us down, and we ignore them at our peril.

Mary Sayer

National coordinator, Unite in Schools

• While John Harris is right to argue that unions need to adapt to survive, those working as union officials are only too aware of this need. The question is how to bring that about. Britain has the most draconian anti-trade union legislation in Europe, making it exceedingly difficult to take effective union action and to be able to demonstrate through successful struggle just how vital union organisation is. In Unison, the union in which I worked as a national official, women have been playing an increasingly important role at all levels for some time, even if the general secretary is still a man. The other big union, Unite, has an extremely capable female assistant general secretary in Gail Cartmail, but Harris doesn’t mention her.

The big problem for all unions is to find enough individuals with the dedication and commitment, willing to put in the long hours necessary to build the unions and place themselves in the firing line when it comes to job cuts and redundancies. For unions to once again gain the strength they need, we have to overturn legislation that discriminates against trade unions and working people as a whole.

John Green

London

• Brenda Dean (Obituary, 19 March) was both a champion and role model for the women members and activists in her union Sogat. It was women who made up the majority of those who lost their jobs when Murdoch took his paper to “fortress Wapping” in 1986. A couple of years earlier she had seen off a demand by her mainly male national executive to close down the women’s pages of the Sogat Journal after we published a short news report of a hefty fine imposed on the men’s chapel at the Scottish Daily Record for sex discrimination against their union sisters. The executive claimed that in carrying the story, I was bringing the union into disrepute!

Brenda was also instrumental in supporting a research study, Women in Sogat, that I led at the then Polytechnic of North London. Together with the union’s women activists – and some supportive brothers – she set up what was effectively a women’s committee, courses for women about their employment rights, and later, a women’s conference. All of these were subsequently carried – in different ways – into the successor union, the Graphical, Paper and Media Union, when Sogat amalgamated with the National Graphical Association.

Sue Ledwith

Oxford

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