150 YEARS OF TH

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 tomorrow.

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.

Her job – battling hard Tory Brexit, the eighth year of turboausterity, 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.”

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