This project is currently a collaboration between the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (UK) and the Trades Union Congress Library at London Metropolitan University (it is expected more will join).

Purpose of the Project

The Project will explore the experiences and contributions of African, African-Caribbean and Asian trade unionists to the labour movement and broader society through oral history interviews. Hereafter we refer to these trades unionists as ‘black’ – a term we use in the broad political sense as is widely used in the trade union movement.

Many initiatives have been developed during the last thirty years in employment practice and by trade unions to promote equality and address discriminatory attitudes, structures, cultures and practices in the workplace and beyond. Much of this activity has resulted from the self-organisation of Black trade unionists fighting for space within the formal structures of the trade union movement but self-organising to achieve this on the margins.

Documenting and disseminating this history will help broaden understanding and highlight the role of black trade unionists, activists, and full-time officers. This will help to counter the tendency to view black people as victims or outsiders rather than as conscious agents for social change and people who helped shape the British trade union.

Although significant, black trade union activists’ contribution to the labour movement is mainly undocumented, and today this history risks being lost. Using oral history interviews, we will fill a gap in historical evidence and guard against losing more of our recent past. We will create and promote a digital archive of voices and testimonies that captures and acknowledges the history of Black trade union activism in the UK for future generations.

Interviews will be published on the Britain at Work website http://unionhistory.info/britainatwork/

Recruiting Volunteers – are you available?

The Project is recruiting volunteers to collect oral histories. The volunteers will be drawn from black trade unionists who are interested in documenting black trade union history and students who are interested in this area of study.

The volunteers will
• Help identify potential interviewees
• Assist in providing access to interviews and, where necessary, use relevant language skills
• Assist in the preparation of interview schedules
• Assist in providing local historical and industrial knowledge.

The volunteers will be provided with oral history training to gain practical knowledge of the techniques and practices of conducting interviews, recording these to a professional standard and an understanding of cataloguing and archiving.

The outreach process to identify potential interviewees will be undertaken by promoting the project through the TUC Race Relations Committee at the TUC Black Workers’ Conference, through the TUC’s regional equality structures and higher education. It is anticipated that the process of recruiting volunteers will stimulate debate within black communities about historical memory and heritage.

If you are interested in participating either as a volunteer interviewer or interviewee please contact Wilf Sullivan at wilf.sullivan@gmail.com

Project Aims and Priorities

The Project aims to:

• Establish the TUC Library as a leading centre for the history of Black trade unionists in Britain
• Provide a central archive of histories of Black Trade unionist involvement in the British trade union movement
• Create an accessible digital archive of the histories collected.
• Provide recruitment and training of interviewers in oral history techniques and trade union history
• Publicise and promote the histories and establish arrangements for continued access.

The Project aims to strengthen the link between the trade union movement and the Black communities and increase knowledge within all communities about the involvement of black trade unionists in the British trade union movement and civil society.

Given that the contribution of black trade unionists to our heritage is largely unknown, this Project will redress this by opening an area hitherto hidden from history. We will be seeking and recording the silent voices of those who contributed to important aspects of British labour history.

The Project will concentrate on six areas based on the settlement of communities in England and Wales. These are specifically:
• London and the South East
• The East and West Midlands
• North West
• Yorkshire and Humberside
• South West
• South Wales

The Project will also seek to collect the stories of black activists’ trade union involvement across the following sectors
• Manufacturing
• Transport
• Construction
• Health and Social Care
• Hospitalist
• Retail
• local and national government

Conservation

The oral history interviews will record the life histories of the informants with a particular focus on their union activism. They will solicit from the interviewees any visual material (pictures and documents) the latter thinks illustrates their narrative. Interviews will be undertaken by both the project team and volunteers, who will be trained and supervised by the project team.

The digitally recorded interviews and visual material will be conserved, catalogued, transcribed in line with Oral History Society guidelines and deposited in the  TUC Library, creating an open-access primary source.

The material will also be made available through the TUC’s ‘The Union Makes Us Strong’ website at www.unionhistory.info which will include separate and searchable web pages for the interview transcriptions, audio clips, images, etc., produced by this Project.