Unite

Higher education workers will strike over pay on 3 December. Members of UCU, Unite and Unison in higher education who struck on 31 October will be striking again. This time they’ll be joined by Scottish education union EIS and UCU members in further education. The background to the strike is a 13% real-terms pay cut since 2009: the equivalent of working half a day a week for free. Employers have offered just 1% — well below inflation — and have made no concessions either on the living wage or the gender pay gap. On the advice of university employers’ organisation UCEA, some institutions have...

A decade ago the Scottish Sunday Herald had a circulation of over 60,000. But now it has sunk lower than 25,000. A decade ago Paul Hutcheon was an investigative reporter. But now he just hunts with the pack. Could the decline in the paper’s circulation be related to the decline in the quality of its journalism? “Leading Labour MSP Urged to Resign After Taking Part in Unite Demo Outside Director’s House,” read the headline above an article by Hutcheon last Sunday. Over five weeks after the event, the giant inflatable rat used in a Unite protest outside the house of an Ineos director had made a...

The Defend the Link campaign, boosted by a decision from the Labour Representation Committee conference on 23 November to build it “as widely as possible”, is circulating a “model response” to the interim report by Ray Collins on the Labour-union link. Collins was asked to write the report by Labour leader Ed Miliband after Miliband’s 9 July speech calling for a change in union-Labour relations in the wake of lurid allegations about the Unite union’s activities in Falkirk CLP. Both a police and a Labour inquiry have found nothing against Unite, but Miliband is pressing ahead. Responses to...

The People’s Assembly is often suspected of uncritical support for Britain’s trade union leadership. It was outdone, however, by its younger sibling, the Student Assembly Against Austerity (9 November), in its relation to the Unite leadership. On stage with Unite’s Steve Turner, Socialist Action’s Aaron Kiely lavished praised on the union for “saving jobs at the Grangemouth Refinery.” Not joining shrill cries of “sell out!” is one thing; essentially painting up a crushing defeat as a victory is quite another. This is, of course, the same Aaron Kiely who paid tribute to the police during the...

• “Boycott the Tories' review” , Dale Street, Solidarity 304, 20 November • “The role of leverage” , Mark Best, Solidarity 304, 20 November • “The left on Grangemouth” , Dale Street, Solidarity 303, 13 November • “Lessons from the Grangemouth defeat” , by Anne Field, Solidarity 302, 6 November • “More lessons from Grangemouth” , by Mark Best, 30 October • “Understanding the Grangemouth defeat” , by Dale Street, 29 October • “Occupy Grangemouth!” , by Dale Street, Solidarity 301, 25 October

We continue our discussion of the lessons of the Grangemouth defeat. Here, a contribution from Mark Best discusses how Unite’s “Organising and Leverage Department” can help win disputes. Football pundits are fond of pointing out that it is not so much the defeat itself that teaches you anything meaningful about a team, but how they react to it in the matches that follow. Much the same could be said about Unite and the left following Grangemouth. This was a big defeat. Exactly how big remains to be seen, but the workforce at Grangemouth have accepted massive cuts in terms and conditions and the...

A workplace bulletin by Lewisham Hospital workers, for Lewisham Hospital workers. Click here to download the PDF of page 1 of the bulletin, and here to download page 2.

Higher Education workers’ unions UCU, Unison, Unite (and the EIS union in Scotland) have called a strike on Tuesday 3 December. Lecturers’ union UCU has begun a work-to-contract, asking members not to take on any duties not strictly required by their terms of employment. Universities depend on the willingness of staff to work well beyond reasonable hours, and a well-organised campaign will help put management under pressure. Local organisation, down to departmental level, with regular members’ meetings, is the key to making the work-to-contract effective. Already one employer — the University...

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...

Another Sunday, another issue of the Sunday Times, another attack on Unite (on pages 1, 4, 16, 17, and 33). But this time Jerry Hicks — three-time general secretary candidate, founder of “Grass Roots Left” in Unite, and now a leading figure in the new “Unite Grass Roots Rank and File” — has given a helping hand. Hicks later backpedalled, and stressed that he was opposed to any attempt to use the complaint he has made over Unite’s general secretary election in a witch hunt against the union. But that was all too little, too late — and singularly unconvincing. According to the Sunday Times’...