Trademark Belfast Cooperative

Established in 2001, Trademark is the anti-sectarian unit of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) dedicated to challenging inequality through community and workplace interventions, education and research on a range of themes including peace-building, community relations and political economy.

For almost three decades Trademark and its predecessor, Counteract, have been at the forefront of efforts to provide a trade-union based analysis of and response to the constitutional, political, economic and conflict-related challenges facing Northern Ireland. From our base on the Falls/Shankill interface in West Belfast, Trademark operates on an all-island basis and is proactive in encouraging various constituencies – public agencies, political parties, trade unions, interface communities, migrant workers and minority ethnic communities, ex-prisoners – to engage in dialogue around the constitutional question and the possibilities for building a better social and economic future in Ireland.

From its inception Trademark has functioned as a roving community and workers’ college, delivering core trade union education in addition to bespoke political economy programmes developed in the wake of the 2007/08 financial crisis. We have been working consistently to embed radical political education in the Irish and British trade union movements, with the aim of ‘growing’ a cohort of trade union activists that are equipped with the tools to understand, analyse and critique the system as well as advance progressive alternatives. We see education linked to organising and

We also work closely with trade union, grassroots civil society and left political actors across Europe to promote alternative economic and political strategies.

Worker and community-owned co-operative enterprises can offer a practical alternative means to create employment, tackle economic inequality and also build a class consciousness by bringing workers together daily to work democratically for joint benefit in which values of trust and democracy replace the dynamics of suspicion and mistrust, building permanent structures with real relationships.

Trademark assists in the development of community- and worker-owned co-operatives by engaging with those who have yet not participated in what can often be short term impermanent peace building activities, in developing successful business ventures they can contribute to economic security and community regeneration leaving a genuine legacy of sustainability and social justice.

Trademark is a member of the Worker Cooperative Network which brings together worker cooperative from across the island of Ireland to promote worker cooperatives and inter-cooperation.

Trademark is also a supporter of the Belfast Cleaning Society and were founding members of a Co-operative Development body, Co-operative Alternatives