BWTUC General Council meets on the second Monday of most months at 7pm. @6 the PCS Office, Falcon Road, Clapham Junction. So the next meeting is on Monday 11th June. All trade union members are welcome. Union members from GMB, RMT, UCU, USDAW, NUJ and UNITE attended the May meeting.
BWTUC members will join the survivors and families of the bereaved at a memorial gathering of the to mark the second anniversary of the Grenfell fire disaster on 15th June.
We would like to invite you to our annual John Burns Day Annual celebration at 4pm. On 3rd August in our pub the Bread and Roses Pub which is in Clapham Manor Street a short walk from Clapham North tube, Clapham High Street overground and many bus routes. John Burns, founded our still functioning, local Battersea and Wandsworth Trades Union Council in 1894. He was a giant in the emerging labour political and trades union movement in London and Battersea in those late Victorian times.
His legacy still stands today across the borough where he together with other local councillors provided the basic needs to the local people.
He was the second Labour Party MP to be elected to the House of Commons. He was the first working class member of the UK Cabinet Government. In 1907 he got legislation on the statute books that allowed councils to build houses for rent that housed millions of workers families.
He was a leader of the new unions that in 1889 won the eight hour day and spread like wildfire across the UK. This led to the formation of the Labour Party. This in turn led to votes for women and all men, the NHS and the modern welfare state.
John Burns forseeing the pointless slaughtet refused to vote for the first world war and resigned from the Government. His portrait is in the National Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar Square. There is a copy in the John Burns Room at the BWTUC owned Bread and Roses pub in Clapham. There are other places in Battersea named after John Burns. There are also 12 John Burns Cottages in Pilton in Somerset for rent in perpetuity to mark his role in housing the working class from which he came.
BWTUC has a 123 years of history of achievements and struggles since set up by John Burns.
