Postal workers in Bridgewater, Somerset struck on Saturday 6 July in a dispute over job cuts and management bullying.

Communication Workers Union (CWU) rep Dave Chapple said the strike was “one of the best we’ve ever had”, with over 100 workers taking part.

Union reps have promised escalation if the dispute is not resolved.

In Peterborough, 170 postal workers held a wildcat strike following the suspension of a union rep.

Over 100 jobs on the London Overground network could be lost, as London Overground Rail Operations Ltd. (LOROL) seeks to move to “driver-only operation” (DOO).

The immediate impulse for cut is a 12.5% cut in central government funding for Transport for London, announced in George Osborne’s 26 June spending review. Moving towards DOO is also key recommendation of the McNulty Review into railway industry reform.

The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) will ballot members from 18 July for national strike action after the government issued an ultimatum over changes to firefighters’ pensions.

The ballot, which lasts until the end of August, is expected to produce a large yes vote, with strikes likely in September if a settlement is not reached before then.

For the congress on 10-14 July which transformed Syriza from a coalition into a single party, there was a programmatic proposal from the majority leadership (“mainstream”), which won 68% of the vote, an amendment from the Left Platform which won 30%, and a counter-proposal from another minority.

In a letter to the Evening Standard on Tuesday 9 July, Jerry Hicks, Len McCluskey’s challenger in the 2013 Unite general secretary election, set out his view for how trade unions should seek political representation.

Matt Merrigan (1921-2000) was a socialist, trade unionist and one of very few Third Camp Trotskyists in Ireland.

Born into poverty in Dolphin’s Barn, Dublin, Merrigan left school at 13 and worked for twenty years at the Rowntree-Mackintosh chocolate factory. He became a shop steward with the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union (ATGWU), rising to be its national secretary in 1960, a post he held until 1986.

Let’s be clear — the shift from opt-out to opt-in is what the Tories have long wanted, and what [Labour’s right-wing faction] Progress have campaigned for inside the party. The Tories wanted it because it will damage the party’s finances, and weaken the party.

And Progress want it because they want to eliminate union influence on the party, and they have no interest in challenging class-based inequalities of wealth and power. Whatever took place in Falkirk doesn’t begin to justify it.

On 9 July Labour leader Ed Miliband proposed that the link between unions and the Labour Party be reorganised so that individual union members must “opt in” to Labour affiliation.

“Opting-in” seems speciously democratic. But really it enlists pressures from the billionaire press, and all the built-in biases of capitalist society, against collective working-class intervention in politics; and immediately it threatens to break up unions’ political action.

In the February edition of Socialist Review Alex Callinicos took on the internal and external criticism which followed the SWP’s mishandling of a complaint of rape within their organisation.

On the edges of the SWP’s annual “Marxism” weekend (11-15 July), oppositionists who had remained in the SWP talked with Workers’ Liberty activists.

The opposition had held a hundred-strong caucus shortly before the festival. They decided not to walk until a second lot of charges of sexual harassment, against formerly leading SWP organiser Martin Smith, by another SWP woman, is heard.