Privatisation

Industrial news in brief

Workers at four Picturehouse branches in London will strike on Saturday 11 February. A new ballot including two new sites — Picturehouse Central and Crouch End Picturehouse — returned a 95% yes vote on a 75% turn out. The Bectu section of Prospect, the Picturehouse workers′ union, had already balloted in January, but the ballot was challenged by bosses on a legal technicality. Individual workers have also been threatened with legal action over unfounded claims of intimidation and secondary picketing. Picturehouse bosses continue to show that they would rather spend money on legal threats and...

Industrial news in brief

Teaching assistants in Derby held a rally, march and picket of the Derby Council meeting on 25 January. 400 TAs surrounded the Council House prior to the Council meeting. As previously reported in Solidarity , TAs are fighting a pay cut that for some is as high as 30% and a complete rewriting of their contract. The dispute so far has consisted of 13 strike days after a 9-1 rejection by the workers of the Council's last offer, as well as a number of rallies and lobbies of the council. Stupidly the Labour Council refuses to budge, using claims that its budget will not allow it. But at the same...

Industrial news in brief

Tube workers’ union RMT has announced its members on stations will strike again from 6 February unless London Underground bosses meet its demands for an increased staffing level. The company’s latest proposal is to reinstate 250 of the jobs it cut under the “Fit for the Future” programme, but RMT has rejected the offer as insufficient. An RMT rep told Solidarity : “There’s no way we’d settle for winning back only a quarter of the jobs lost. We want all cuts reversed. Most of the company’s proposed 250 jobs will come back at the CSA2 grade, which we’re fighting to abolish. “It’s not fair for...

NHS crisis is being used to boost private healthcare

This article was written for Solidarity 427 in January 2017. Next week's Solidarity will feature a piece on the current "winter crisis" Most days there is a new NHS horror story in the news. The BBC documentary Hospital showed the difficulty many hospitals are facing every day to find beds. In some hospitals even emergency surgery — the so called CEPOD lists — have been cancelled. The Mirror’s front page picture of a child being treated on plastic chairs due to a lack of beds was picked up by Corbyn at Prime Minister’s Questions. The Prime Minister’s response, along with Jeremy Hunt, was to...

Keep the guards on the trains!

Workers on Southern Rail are striking on 10-13 and 24-27 January, as they attempt to force Southern bosses to reverse the imposition of “Driver Only Operation” (DOO). Guards on Southern, who are members of the RMT union, also struck from 31 December to 2 January. The 10-13 January strike had originally been scheduled for 9-14 January, but drivers’ union Aslef reduced it to three days, with their General Secretary Mick Whelan saying they had listened to “concerns” which suggested a six-day strike was “disproportionate”. Rail strikes are set to spread, after RMT began balloting its members on...

Industrial news in brief

Workers at Picturehouse Cinema’s flagship “Picturehouse Central” location, near London’s Piccadilly Circus, will shortly begin balloting for new strikes, as part of a growing dispute which also involves workers at Picturehouse’s Brixton, Hackney, and Crouch End sites. The ballot, the timetable for which has yet to be announced, is for further strikes to demand the London Living Wage, decent sick pay, and other improvements to workers’ terms and conditions. Workers at Picturehouse Central, Brixton, and Hackney recently concluded a ballot for joint strikes, which returned huge majorities on a...

Emergency cash for the NHS!

For many healthworkers, the NHS is facing its worst crisis in memory. Small wonder the British Red Cross, called in to provide support with discharging patients from hospitals safely, describes the situation as a humanitarian crisis. Yet Jeremy Hunt and Teresa May deny there is a problem. The deaths at Worcestershire Royal Hospital A&E are tragic, but sadly no surprise to those who work in the NHS. Increased A&E waiting times are now so common enough we don’t care about the four hour target, but only whether we have enough physical space for the extra beds and trolleys. Everybody is terrified...

Industrial news in brief

Members of the train drivers’ union Aslef on Southern began an overtime ban on 6 December, and are preparing to strike alongside RMT guards later in the month. The guards’ latest strikes began on 6 December and will continue until 8 December, with Aslef due to participate in further strikes on 13-14 and 16 December. RMT guards will strike again on 19-20 December and 31 December-2 January, and both guards and drivers will strike on 9-14 January. Southern bosses, who succeeded in having an earlier Aslef ballot declared illegal by the High Court, have again sought an injunction against the...

Industrial news in brief

Guards on Southern Rail struck again from 22-23 November, with further strikes planned for 6-8 December, 22-24 December, and 31 December-2 January. Despite widespread calls to do so, government ministers are refusing to meet with the guards′ union, RMT, directly. Instead, the government has handed Southern bosses a £20 million payment in an attempt to improve their service. For Southern to meet the union’s demand for a second, safety-critical member of staff on board each train would involve filling 20 guard vacancies (which it promised to do in January, and then reneged), with a total cost of...

Fight the HE Bill!

The National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, a free education activist network, writes that the HE reforms “are forcing marketisation on the university sector”, which will lead to universities “raising tuition fees, and allowing private providers further access to education provision.” In brief “(the reforms) constitute a wide-ranging assault on the principles of free, liberated, critical education.” The main mechanism through which this will be achieved is through a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). This will be similar to the Research Excellence Framework, a way of ranking universities...

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