Pay, hours, conditions

Tube unions remain in negotiations with the company over how to distribute the £30 million of additional funding secured thanks to RMT’s threatened week of action from 5-11 January. Various proposals are in circulation, some involving a higher percentage pay rise, others increasing the base percentage rise only slightly whilst adding an additional flat-rate, tiered by grade. RMT is rightly pushing for a final settlement based on the latter model, to ensure the lower-paid grades — i.e., the people who need a pay rise most — benefit more. Tubeworker has argued that we should name additional...

At 1pm on 4 January, CEOs of the FTSE 100 top firms had already pocketed more than the middling (median) UK wage for the whole year. According to the High Pay Centre those CEOs are now on an average of £3.81 million a year, and their year-on-year rise at 9.5%, while the middling wage has gone up 6%. Broadening out to bosses at smaller firms, and near-top managers at big firms, the top 1% of UK full-timers are on £145,000 or upwards, and will have overtaken the annual pay of the median full-time worker by 29 March. This inequality is increasing, despite sizeable recent increases in the minimum...

The country’s second largest fire service has approved maternity leave of 52 weeks on full pay. West Midlands Fire Service, the second largest in the country, has approved 52 weeks full pay for employees on maternity and adoption leave. Paternity leave was increased from one to two weeks with full pay. “This is a fantastic result for members in the West Midlands, for which we applaud the efforts of the brigade representatives and the local women’s committee,” said FBU assistant general secretary Ben Selby. “We are seeing other services move significantly too, which again is positive — but our...

Members of the PCS civil service union appear to be heading for another tough pay year. National talks with the Cabinet Office (CO) are going nowhere fast following the PCS leadership’s June derailment of our 2022-23 national pay campaign. On the 10 January the Government published its “Civil Service People Plan 2024-2027”. Despite the national pay talks the People Plan does not address: • The fifteen year historic decline in the value of civil service pay, even though it acknowledges that “Civil Service average pay within grades has shown a general downward trend in real terms since 2008, due...

There is a persistent wage penalty for working-age women living with obesity. The size or weight of women is one of many categories under which their bodies are subjected to relentless scrutiny. A major review carried out for the UK government by Carol Black in 2016 found that women living with obesity experience a 9 per cent wage penalty compared with working age women of “normal” weight — and that no such gap exists for men. This gap in earnings appears to be down to stigma and discrimination, with differences (though smaller) even when educational attainment, health inequalities and...

It is almost six months since the Left Unity leadership of the civil service union PCS decided to “pause” PCS’s national pay, jobs, and pensions dispute, at the heart of which was a 2022/23 civil service wide pay claim for a consolidated 10% pay increase and a £15 per hour national underpin. They claimed that a “pause” — the cessation of all industrial action and the lapsing of all legal mandates to take strike action — would allow PCS nationally to engage with the government in talks about job security, low pay and pay coherence and allow PCS representatives in the huge number of civil...

Bar workers in Sheffield are getting organised. A local campaign aims to achieve paid transport home after the end of our shifts. Recently Sheffield Council passed policy that stipulates as a condition of new licences that employers must provide transport home for workers at the end of their shifts. Currently, workers in hospitality find ourselves paying up to two hours pay for taxis, or waking home at night across the city. Sheffield is the low pay capital of Britain, according to researchers from Sheffield Hallam and other universities. It is not right that workers face an additional penalty...

Amazon workers at the BHX4 facility in Coventry resume strikes on 7 November, walking out for three days, with a further strike planned on 24 November, the so-called “Black Friday” which is a major trading day for Amazon and other retailers. 24 November will also see strikes and other protests against Amazon in over 30 other countries. Speaking to a recent conference of the “Make Amazon Pay” campaign coalition, US senator Bernie Sanders said: “No company is a better poster child for the corporate greed and arrogance that we are seeing in the US, the UK and throughout the world than Amazon.”...

Members of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) in Merseyside are involved in two industrial disputes over terms and conditions. FBU Merseyside secretary Ian Hibbert and chair Lee Hunter spoke to Solidarity about the issues involved. Q: Can you give an overview of your local disputes? A: We have two parallel disputes in Merseyside. One, where we have a ballot for industrial action short-of-strike, is over imposed changes to firefighters' terms and conditions. The employer, Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service (MFRS), has unilaterally altered conditions from the point of entry. This has been done...

Having killed the national campaign for cost of living pay awards backdated to 2022, the Left Unity (LU) faction leadership in the civil service union PCS is now presiding over below-inflation civil service pay awards for 2023. Yet they are keeping up the pretence that they have merely “paused” the campaign. It is a tactic they hope will help them win the elections for General Secretary (GS) and Assistant General Secretary (AGS) later this year: facing both ways to win the support of members who wanted the campaign to continue and members who did not want to strike. In doing so, LU is leaning...