News

The UNI Property Services Global conference met in Liverpool today with delegates from affiliate unions from all over the world. 80 delegates from all parts of the union spent a day discussing presentations from unions in Turkey, Kenya, the Netherlands, USA and others. There were also presentations on airport organising and on International Justice Day for Cleaners and Security Workers.

Tom Balanoff, the UNI Property Services President, opened the conference with a reminder that this was the 25th anniversary of UNI global Union and recalled the days of its creation. Christy Hoffman, the Deputy General Secretary of UNI, also spoke to delegates of teh tremendous progress made in this sector since those days and about the Rena Plaza disaster and UNI`s role in winning the Bangladesh Award.

Steve Turner the Assistant General Secretary of Unite UK welcomed the delegates and astounded them with stastics showing that according to Oxfam there are 85 individual people in the world who owned over 50% of the worlds wealth. He paid tribute to the Fast Food Movement in the US and spoke about the place of leverage strategies in organising campaigns.

Kenyan National Private Security Workers Union won the annual organising award for its Project to organise G4S workers - over 8,000 recruited in a year.

The Conference also expressed its anger that the UK Government had denied a visa for one of its African delegates to speak at the Conference.