The Trades Union Congress (TUC) is a national trade union centre, a federation of trade unions in the United Kingdom, representing the majority of trade unions. There are fifty-eight affiliated unions with a total of about 6.5 million members, around half of whom are represented by Unite or UNISON.
The TUC's decision-making body is the Annual Congress, which takes place in September. Between congresses decisions are made by the General Council, which meets every two months. An Executive Committee is elected by the Council from its members. The senior paid official of the TUC is the General Secretary, currently Brendan Barber. It was announced in July 2012 that Frances O'Grady will be the next General Secretary.
Famous quotes containing the words trades, union and/or congress:
“It is the best of all trades to make songs, and the second best to sing them.”
—Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953)
“We must choose. Be a child of the past with all its crudities and imperfections, its failures and defeats, or a child of the future, the future of symmetry and ultimate success.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)
“What have Massachusetts and the North sent a few sane representatives to Congress for, of late years?... All their speeches put together and boiled down ... do not match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of crazy John Brown on the floor of the Harper’s Ferry engine-house,—that man whom you are about to hang, to send to the other world, though not to represent you there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)