Trade union issues

Issues for workers and our trade unions - opposing victimisation, fighting for better pay and conditions, health & safety, rank-and-file organising, and more.

Private sector pensions fight

The ongoing pensions battle in the public sector has now spilt over into the private sector. The Association of Consulting Actuaries (ACA) has reported that pensions in the private sector face “seismic collapse”. Nine out of ten private sector defined benefit schemes are close to new entrants, and four out of ten schemes do not allow existing staff to build up further benefits. Last week, Shell closed its final salary pension scheme to new workers, despite the pension pot being in surplus and Shell reporting profits over £4.5 billion in the last quarter of 2011. Unilever is attempting to...

Pensions fight: plan now for the New Year

The government has dramatically raised the stakes in its class war assault against public sector trade unions. George Osborne wants to see national pay rates for public sector workers abolished, and has written to the heads of pay review boards for teachers, nurses, civil servants and prison officers giving them until April 2013 to find ways of cutting workers’ pay. The government claims it will achieve the cuts by slowing down pay increases rather than directly cutting wages, but the plans amount to a massive attack on workers in poorer areas as Osborne wants localised pay reviews to be tied...

New assault on workers' rights

On 23 November the Tory-Lib-Dem government announced an assault on employment rights. • You won’t be able to claim unfair dismissal until you’ve been in a job two years (present limit: one year) • You’ll have to pay to go to an employment tribunal • The law may allow workers to be sacked without redress in places with fewer than ten employees, and everywhere allow employers to threaten workers, and push them halfway out of the door, in a “protected conversation”, without any comeback. • The compulsory consultation time for redundancies may be reduced from 90 days to 30 days. The Government is...

Next steps after 30 November

The immediate impact of the mass public sector strike on 30 November was to demonstrate the potential social power of the working class to a generation of workers who had not experienced it before. It gave a glimpse of the mass labour movement as a vital social force. But if the strike is to play a role in actually defeating the government, rank-and-file trade unionists need to fight for a different strategy from the one on offer from their leaders. In meetings and conversations on 30 November, strikers were clear that one day is not enough, and that they want further action and a faster-paced...

N30 reports

The 30 November public sector strike was the biggest single piece of industrial action in Britain for a generation. Millions of workers from 25 different trade unions took part, organising lively picket lines, marches, and rallies across the UK. Despite Prime Minister David Cameron characterising the strike as “a damp squib”, the government’s own figures admit that the strike shut or partially closed over 16,000 schools (nearly 75% of all state schools in the country) and led to the cancellation of 7,000 routine (non-emergency) NHS procedures. In Scotland, only 30 schools out of thousands...

After N30: build rank-and-file power. Fight to win!

To orient the pensions battle after N30 around clear demands and to launch a programme of rolling, selective and escalating action that can win those demands, we have to create spaces where grassroots union members — the “rank-and-file” — can discuss, coordinate and organise together. Those spaces can be levers of resistance against any attempt by union bureaucracies to derail or sell out the dispute. At a workplace level that could be something as simple as having regular, cross-union workplace meetings. Without such forums, participation in a strike can become a passive experience. With...

Where next after N30?

On picket lines on N30 and in meetings on the day and after, strikers should be developing plans of action for extending and escalating the dispute, and deepening it beyond isolated single days of strike action. The pensions dispute will be won if, and only if, the government is convinced that the unions will escalate action and will hold out longer than the government will. Workers should not be left to wait until union leaders decide it’s time for another one-off “day of action”. As well as all-out days of action, we need rolling and selective action across different sectors — teachers...

Rank-and-file control on N30

By Patrick Murphy, Leeds National Union of Teachers (pc), and Ira Berkovic It now looks as if events in Leeds on 30 November will be lively and big, but only after local trade unions decided they had to take control of organising for themselves in the face of an attempt by the regional TUC to shape the day without consulting us. The Yorkshire Region TUC set up a small sub-committee which planned four rallies across the region (in Bradford, Sheffield, Leeds and Hull). The plan is for each of the ’bigwig’ speakers to be followed by a couple of ‘ordinary workers’, and to have the whole thing...

Rank-and-file must control pensions battle

Activists in “N30” unions — the unions that are set to participate in the mass public sector strike over pensions reform — are working hard to build for 30 November. Most of the best work is being driven locally by reps and activists on the ground. The unions nationally are punching well below their weight; in some areas, activists are having to rely on link-ups with neighbouring branches (rather than their national union) for materials and support. There's an effective radio silence on what's going on in the behind-the-scenes negotiations. The Financial Times reported on 25 October that the...

30 November: the biggest strike since 1926

Not since the General Strike of 1926 has there been any comparable move by so many unions to strike together on the same day. 30 November is shaping up to be one of the biggest strikes in the history of the British labour movement, drawing in many workers who have never struck before. The big local government and health union Unison will send out ballot papers from 11 October, to be returned by 3 November. The teachers’ union EIS and the head teachers’ organisation NAHT have already sent out ballot papers for strike action against pension cuts on 30 November. Six other unions hold live ballot...

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