GMB

General, Municipal and Boilermakers' Union

Amazon living wage petition launched

Campaigners have launched a petition calling on online retail giant Amazon to pay its staff the Living Wage. Numerous media exposés have found Amazon's warehouse staff are subject to hyper exploitation at work, which intensifies over the Christmas period. As we recently reported in Solidarity , one worker compared the conditions to "a slave camp". Staff are constantly monitored and face disciplinary sanction if their productivity levels drop, and their 15-minute breaks begin wherever they are in the giant warehouse, meaning that their break could be over by the time they've made it to the...

Job cuts at Npower. Expropriate the energy industry!

Energy giant Npower has said it will make 1,460 staff redundant. Their jobs will be outsourced overseas. Offices in Stoke, Peterlee, Thornaby in Teesside, and Oldbury in the West Midlands are being shut. Other affected sites are in the north east and Leeds. 540 office workers will be transferred to Capita. Workers being made redundant are back office workers; the workers being transferred are call centre staff. There may be more redundancies, sell offs and outsourcing, which will effect thousands more staff. Despite Npower’s Gernman parent group RWE being in trouble, profits are still being...

Resist jobs massacre

Thousands of jobs are on the line as bosses in the shipbuilding, manufacturing and aviation industries plan huge layoffs. BAE Systems plans to axe nearly 2,000 jobs by closing, or significantly reducing, sites in Glasgow and Portsmouth, ending shipbuilding entirely in the southern English city. The Polimeri chemical refinery in Southampton plans to close, threatening 300 jobs, and the Flybe airline, based in Exeter, plans to cut 500 jobs. Unions organising workers at the BAE shipyards and the Polimeri plant, plan a demonstration outside the filming of BBC’s “Question Time”, which takes place...

Cleaners in Britain's richest borough strike for living wages

Cleaning workers in Britain’s richest borough struck for two days on 16 and 17 September. The cleaners, employed by contractor OCS on behalf of Kensington & Chelsea Tenants’ Management Organisation, are paid £7.18 per hour. They are striking to win a pay increase to the London Living Wage of £8.55. The average income for residents of Kensington and Chelsea is over £100,000, according to recent surveys. It would take a cleaner, working a 40-hour week for 52 weeks of the year, nearly seven years to earn what the average Kensington and Chelsea resident earns in just one. To buy a house in the...

Two “red lines” in union link fight

In his speech at the TUC (10 September) Ed Miliband said: “I want to make each and every affiliated trade union member a real part of their local party. Making a real choice to be a part of our party. So they can have a real voice in it...We could become a Labour Party not of 200,000 people, but 500,000 or many more”. This is a shift from the 9 July speech about “opting-in”, where he said only that unionists paying the political levy to Labour should have to “opt in” to pay, rather than just not “opting out”. What Miliband seems to propose now is a drive to get affiliated unionists to become...

Job cuts threatened at Npower

On Wednesday 14 August, RWE the troubled German owner of energy company NPower, announced a 60% fall in revenue, mainly to do with power generation in Germany. Buried beneath this was a plan to shut unspecified 16 out of 26 sites in the profitable British section. (See a Daily Mirror report here .) Although details are unspecified, they are talking about 3,000 job losses, or a third of the workforce. There have already been announcements of offshoring and redundancies, but mainly of management or the generally well-paid but unorganised consultant and IT-type grades. These staff are on...

Industrial news in brief

Workers on council run golf courses in Brighton were due to strike on Wednesday 3 July against pay cuts of up to £4,000. The workers are employed by Mytime Active, who manage the Hollingbury Park and Waterhall golf courses for Brighton and Hove City Council. Members of both GMB and Unison will take part in the strike, which would be the second in the dispute so far. Meanwhile, CityClean refuse workers suspended their action on 21 June following further negotiations with the council. They had previously struck for five days against cuts. FE workers face job cuts Workers at LeSoCo (Lewisham...

Industrial news in brief

Refuse workers at Brighton Council have announced more strikes in their fight against pay cuts. Drivers will strike for five days from Monday 24. A five-day strike of all workers employed by the CityClean service came to an end on Thursday 20 June. A work-to-rule, which has been in effect since the end of a sit-down strike on Friday 10 May, will remain in place for all workers. The strike has enjoyed a high level of support, with many residents attaching posters and messages of support to their bins. Strikers organised daily mass pickets of the main CityClean depot, as well as smaller...

Unions must demand Labour commit against cuts

Draft skeleton text for motions for Labour-affiliated union branches and Labour Party branches and committees. We note that in speeches on 3 and 6 June Ed Balls and Ed Miliband said that Labour, if elected, would stick with Tory spending plans for 2015-6. They also talked of “a cap on social security spending” which would start from levels set by Tory cuts. We condemn this stance because it effectively gives George Osborne a blank cheque for the new cuts which he will announce on 26 June, and which even Tory ministers are resisting as excessive, and those he will announce in 2014. We note that...

Industrial news in brief

Teachers at Bishop Challoner School in East London have voted by a 95% majority to strike against management practises described by many teachers as “bullying”, and the victimisation of a National Union of Teachers rep, with a strike due on 19 June. The victimisation is the latest episode in a string of attacks by management, which have accelerated since a successful action by the NUT group in the school to scupper a “mock Ofsted” inspection, planned by management without consultation and against the wishes of staff. One young teacher said: “We’ve got to go out. I’ve been waiting so long for...

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