Lizzie Woods

Who is Lizzie Woods?

Lizzie Woods is a socialist and trade unionist born in Wales, living in London. Woods is the national organiser of the Labour Representation Committee. She is an officer for the Public and Commercial Services Union and is best known for leading the cleaners dispute in Buckingham Palace where she won workers a 16% pay rise after a long, high profile campaign.

Woods is the daughter of Marxist theorist and author Alan Woods and trade unionist and local government worker Pamela Woods. She believes strongly in non-sectarianism, declaring in her speech to LRC national conference 2011 that 'too many good people have fallen by the wayside.The left needs to unite in a non-sectarian way, within and without of the Labour Party, in order to defeat these attacks on our class - there will always be much more that unites us than can ever divide us'.

Woods spent her early years in Francisco Franco's Madrid, where her family participated in the struggle against the Franco regime, before moving to the Welsh mining village of her family in Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen near Ammanford in Carmarthenshire.

She became active in politics at a very young age, attending early morning picket lines at her local pit Abernant, during the miners strike. Her family were forced to move to Hackney, London for economic reasons following the Thatcher government's decimation of the mining community. Then known as Leisa Woods Woods became a youth organiser for the Militant tendency but left following the open turn, refusing to join either of the two groups founded following the split, preferring to stay neutral. She led a delegation of school students out on strike in 1988, to protest against the introduction of student loans, and was dubbed 'Firebrand Leisa' by the national press as a result of this and her work in the Anti-Poll tax campaign, where she mobilised youngsters and helped set up Militant Anti-Poll Tax Feds. Woods left school at 17 working at a timber merchants, then in refuse collection. She became a NUPE shop steward, organising young workers in local government and leading disputes against budget cuts to services in Islington the early nineties. Woods later worked for the Open University where she was Equalities convenor and Unison rep at their London Headquarters. She is a regular contributor to socialist journal Labour Briefing, formerly known as Voice of the Unions.