GFTU launches ‘Empowering Workers: A Trade Union Certificate in Labour Law’

Recently the GFTU Educational Trust launched a new educational course alongside the IER and Birkbeck University: ‘Empowering workers: a trade union certificate in labour law and the labour movement’

Mainstream Labour Law courses have tended to focus on charting a way through the complexities of employment law and the discourse of rights. Understanding the current shape of labour law and what rules govern statutory workers’ rights are useful and important tools for any trade unionist seeking to defend workers against violations of their rights. This new course acknowledges that, whilst also looking at the broader present and historical social, political and economic contexts that takes labour law beyond mainstream concerns of legal and political literature.

The course seeks to go beyond these limits, and examine both the present shape of labour law, the movement’s history, new techniques and strategies all in the context of both old and new faces of the struggle between organised labour and capital.

What does the course cover?

This course examines labour law and labour movements as well as their history in the multi-faceted context of the struggle between social justice and market forces, for the improvement of the lives of workers, and seeks to provide insight into how and why the law operates as it does.

This unique approach will equip students with the skills and knowledge they need to make a difference through empowering workers.

Here’s an excerpt from the course’s lead tutor, Oscar Guardiola Rivera, senior lecturer at Birkbeck School of Law and award-winning author, on its aims and purposes:

“[…] everywhere around the world workers and communities continue to challenge unequal and exploitative relations by taking on global corporations, captured institutions, and ideological apparatuses, as well as technologies, on their own terms.

In doing so they face repression on a vast scale – from attacks on hard-won rights, blacklisting and prosecution to assassination and disappearance. Nonetheless, in both so-called developed and developing countries unions and communities are transforming themselves to confront employer power in ways appropriate to contemporary frameworks of surplus labour and value-extraction. These include inventive industrial, legal, and political tactics and strategies. […]

The response has been a radicalisation of the young, inventive forms of protest turning collective shame and suffering into possibilities, a proliferation of campaigns on many fronts from rent and housing to climate change, the invention of new parties or newer forms of political communication and geopolitical transnational solidarity, including, in particular, local and general strikes and horizontal and vertical mobilisation.

This course aims to find what is fullest of possibility in the images, sounds, in reforms, resistance and revolt, and in the new spirit of our movements.”

To read the rest of this piece, you can find the full blog on the IER website by following this link. 

Why should you register?

Who should register?

This course is designed to be accessible to trade union activists and no prior qualifications are necessary to enroll. Whilst some experience of trade union negotiations and campaigning are assumed, there is no expectation of legal understanding or prior legal knowledge in order to undertake this course.

The course is aimed at senior activists and aspiring senior activists in the trade union movement and we hope will provide a firm foundation in the history and politics of labour law and the labour movement for future trade union leaders.

Signing up for the course will require you to:

• Attend the residential session at Quorn Grange Hotel in Leicestershire and the four in-person days at Birkbeck School of Law and Hamilton House, London.
• Commit to group online sessions with programme tutors.
• Complete the “self-study” elements appropriate to the course
• Have the backing of your union in terms of course fees (£2150) and time to complete the course.

Where can I register?

More information about the GFTU’s ‘Empowering Workers: A Trade Union Certificate in Labour Law and the Labour Movement’ course, including key dates and course fees, can be found by following this link.

The Course will take place over various weekend sessions (in-person and online) between October 2025 – July 2026.  Teaching is led by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Professor of Human Rights and Political Philosophy at Birkbeck School of Law, together with:

• Lord John Hendy KC
• Carolyn Jones, IER Senior Vice President
• Prof. Keith Ewing of the Institute of Employment Rights
• Meirian Jump, Director – Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School
• Geoff Shears (former Thompsons CEO)
• Baroness Shami Chakrabarti CBE PC, President of Birkbeck (tbc)
• Yvette Williams MBE, Justice 4 Grenfell (tbc)

Applications for the course must be submitted by 12 September 2025.