We will use everything in our armoury to defend working people

This week, Unite gathers in Brighton.  From steel plants to farms, building sites to bus depots, banks to shipyards, car factories to oil refineries and public sector workers in all their shapes and forms – this is Unite.

And this is the working class. The people the elite want to forget.

We meet at a critical moment for our countries, gripped as they are by the greatest economic crisis any of us can remember.

That gives our union a profound sense of responsibility as our members and their families, but also all those who look to the labour movement , for a lead out of this crisis.

We are up to the challenge. Employers know that Unite is a union that stands its ground, and means what it says when we say we back our members

The construction employers who tried to drive down pay and conditions on building sites know it.  Honda knows it after we defeated an attempt to drive our union out of their factory.

Meyr Meinhoff found it out when we stopped them throwing our members  on the scrapheap with little or nothing.  And, of course, British Airways knows it, with an honourable agreement to the marathon cabin crew dispute.

The government should know it too. We will continue to stand firm in resisting the millionaire ministers’ determination to take the cost of their crisis out of public servants’ pay and pensions.

Even in these chronic economic circumstances, we are determined to fight and win for our members.

We have set aside twenty-five million pounds to jump-start a dispute fund, while our new leverage strategy hits bad employers up and down their supply chain, bringing to the table bosses who would have shrugged us off just a few years ago – and panic to the CBI.

Our 100% strategy, building strength in Unite-organised workplaces, is getting results; 25,000 new members in the six months since the strategy was launched.

But we also have a broader mission in society – representing working people across the board.  If trade unions don’t reach out to the wider working-class community, who will?  Scarred by unemployment, battered by recession and cuts, thrust to the margins of society, these are our communities.

The first generation who grew up not really understanding what trade unions are about – Thatcher’s children – are now parents of young people themselves.  They need to be brought into real, living contact with our movement and the voice in society that only we can offer.

That is why Unite is organising to send our tutors into every secondary school in the country to explain what unions are about.

It is why our community membership programme extends Unite to those not in work, be they students, unemployed or pensioners – all those who need support but would not normally find their way into a trade union.

But we also know that industrial relations is not and cannot be about confrontation alone.  Where employers want to work with our members to build a secure, sustainable future for their industries, they will find in Unite a willing partner.

That approach helped secure the future of steel-making on Teeside and car-making atEllesmerePort.  It’s strong and purposeful trade unionism in action – guaranteeing jobs while unemployment soars around us.

We speak for people who want to live in a peaceful world which looks after its young and its old, which has values that go beyond profit.

If you wanted to make the case for the importance of trade unionism today, I would point to just one image, that of unemployed young people forced to sleep underLondonBridgebefore getting up to work for nothing on the day of the Jubilee celebrations.

Even in the 1980s, even when Mrs Thatcher was at her worst, I do not recall such naked slave labour being used.

That is the world you get if business, the rich, have all the power and if trade unionism is attacked and reduced.

This government will never lift a finger against that system, in fact they want to go further.

If they do, and put the basic freedoms which are normal across the rest ofEuropebeyond the law then we are not going to submit to that.  Unite will take whatever prudent steps are necessary to support our members come what may.  We will no longer lie down before injustice.

As Bob Dylan once sang “to live outside the law you must be honest”.  I will be honest and tell anyone in government thinking of putting unions effectively outside the law – be careful what you wish for.

I hope ministers listen.  At times, when it comes to working together to save British manufacturing, they do.  But most of the time this is a government at war with much of the British people.

A cobbled-together coalition government united on only one thing – that the poor must pay for the bankers’ crisis.  It sits and watches as another forgotten generation of young people proceed straight from school to the dole queue.  More than a million of our kids facing a future without hope is shameful.

It’s a government that stamps on the hopes and aspirations of ordinary people with the politics of fear, that threatens to cut the benefits of vulnerable low paid workers who stand up for their rights, that will cut for the next decade and will cause the services we value to disappear.

This is a government forfeiting the right to rule.

Cameron and Osborne be warned: we will not stand by and let the hopes of ordinary men and women be crushed.

We will use everything in our armoury to defend working people.  And we will give hope to men and women across the country.

Len McCluskey is the General Secretary of Unite. This post forms part of our coverage of Unite Conference 2012.