The Tolpuddle Martyrs

Christine Kapak
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The Tolpuddle Martyrs' Festival is an annual event celebrating a pivotal moment in trade union history.
For all the family entertainment, comedy, music and stalls on the periphery of the festival, the focus remains very much on six local men who changed the way this country thought about employment rights. That their story takes us back more than 180 years does nothing to diminish its huge repercussions and relevance to this day.

Why are cervical smear tests important?

Gillian Cooper
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When the brown envelope from the GP arrives to say that it’s time to arrange your routine smear test, many of us are tempted to leave it to one side and get round to it later. And then, with the busy lives most of us lead, we may not get round to it at all - in fact 1 in 4 women do not attend for screening.
But there’s a very good reason for arranging that appointment straight away – quite simply, smear tests save lives. NHS cervical screening alone saves as many as 5000 lives in the UK every year. Cervical cancer is one of the few types of cancer which is actually preventable. A smear test works by detecting abnormal cells which are likely to develop into cancer, which means they can be treated BEFORE they ever turn into cancer.

So You’re Going to Be a Father

Gillian Cooper
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2015s Shared Parental Leave laws and greater gender income equality has meant a boom in SAHDs (Stay-at-Home-Dads), but the pressures and challenges of being a man in a parent’s world might be different than you think.
Parenting in 2016. It’s an expensive business. Our local nursery fees are over £16.5k a year (double for two). As a lowly in-house copywriter for a mostly unknown publishing company, this was far more than my annual take-home. Add to that the additional time or expense required to cover inset days, training days, two full weeks over Christmas and all manner of sick days (if a child simply coughs in the vicinity, the shutters come down, gas masks go on and a keyworker paints a red cross on your child’s face).

Mental Health 1 - 0 Stress

Gillian Cooper
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It's hailed as a festival of football, but for many fans the 2016 UEFA European Championship, will herald four weeks of nail-biting, fist-pumping, face-palming, heart-stopping, pulse-racing plain old emotional turmoil as your favourite team battles it out to be crowned top team.
It seems great timing then, that a week raising awareness of male stress should kick off just three days after its opening ceremony. Coincidental? Probably. But quite timely too.

#HeartUnions - Durham Miners' Gala

Gillian Cooper
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We’re looking back on key events in union history. In this blog post, we cover the Durham Miners Gala.
Famed for its rousing colliery bands, bright banners and for being one of the biggest trade union gatherings in the whole of Europe, Durham Miners' Gala occupies a special - and prominent - place in the trade union calendar.

#HeartUnions Week - Burston School Strike

Gillian Cooper
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To commemorate Heart Unions Week, we’re looking back on key events in union history. In this blog post, we cover the Burston School Strike.
What's your most enduring memory from schooldays? Coming second in the 200m sprint on sports day? Taking the lead in the annual drama production? Or how about kicking off the longest strike in history?

#HeartUnions Week - Chainmakers' Festival

Gillian Cooper
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To commemorate Heart Unions Week, we’re looking back on key events in union history. In this blog post, we cover the Chainmakers’ Strike in 1910 and the Chainmakers Festival.
1910: the year Old Trafford was opened, George V succeeded to the British throne, and the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath in the Black Country won minimum wage following a ten-week strike, effectively doubling their pay.

'Women underestimating their financial importance'

Gillian Cooper
Insurance news
21/08/2014
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Failure to take out income protection or life insurance cover means many UK women are inadvertently putting their families' financial futures at risk.
According to a report by insurance group Aegon, working women are not considering the implications of long-term illness or premature death on their nearest and dearest.