Trades Councils

In Birkenhead in September 1932 there was a demonstration demanding an increase in unemployment relief. More than 10,000 people attended. Several people were arrested and another demonstration organised. For two days there was fighting with the police. On day four they won some of their demands. This was a result of the work of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), set up in 1921 by members of the Communist Party. The NUWM aimed to highlight the situation facing the unemployed and in particular to fight the means test, which forced workers into almost pauperised conditions before...

Despite a lively campaign against the plans, Barnet’s Conservative Cabinet voted on 8 June to axe the borough’s sheltered housing wardens. They will be replaced with ‘floating support’ — a much reduced number of wardens operating out of a handful of local ‘hubs’. In theory the floating supporters will also serve elderly residents not in sheltered housing schemes. Since the budget for all of this has been cut from £1.4 million to £950,000 it’s clear that services to elderly people in the borough have been reduced. Cuts like these are happening around the country; it’s a shame that there has...

Just as the boards were going up on the first of eleven libraries due to be axed by Wirral Council, we were told that the closures would be halted pending a Government enquiry. This enquiry has come directly as a result of the campaigning that has taken place across the Wirral and is, despite problems will we face in the future, a big step forward. As council cuts begin to be made across the country, it is important activists pool information about what we are doing locally. 50,000 people responded to the council consultation on the cuts, yet Wirral council voted to go ahead with their...

When a trade union body is unable to hold its AGM because of disorderly conduct, you might ordinarily suspect that organisations like the BNP are to blame. Persistent heckling, the chanting of animal noises, refusal to respect the chair, the intimidatory unapproved filming of unions delegates is indeed behaviour usually of fascists. You might not expect that the government-supporting, right wing of the trade union movement were to blame. But that is precisely what happened at the Derby Area TUC AGM meeting of March 11th. Derby Trades Council has been the scene of very sharp exchanges ever...

The second meeting of the “Checks and Raids” strategy group of the Campaign Against Immigration Controls was on Sunday 7 September. Activists, many new, discussed the situation facing migrant workers in London, with 150 workplace raids happening a week, where hundreds of workers are harassed by immigration officers and the police. Many have been detained and deported. Thousands more are now fearful of these raids. This is the outcome of the introduction in February of employer fines of up to £10,000 for every “illegal worker”, and a concerted campaign by government and the media to scapegoat...

Just over fifty people attended the launch meeting of the local Labour Representation Committee in Hackney, East London, on Wednesday 27 February. The meeting was the latest in a string of successful meetings in Hackney, with packed events over the privatisation of the East London Line, John McDonnell’s challenge for the Labour leadership, and opposition to the war in Iraq, and more recently over 100 wishing to oppose the Councils so-called Estate Regeneration Programme. All of them expressions of the potential strength and possibilities for working class resistance to New Labour. The speakers...

In a shocking example of its free-market savagery, the Government is closing 28 of the 83 Remploy factories, which employ disabled workers to make work-wear products in a unionised workplace with union-agreed terms and conditions and rates of pay. Meanwhile, it is outsourcing more and more work, putting up “for sale” signs at factories not yet closed and using “modernisation” funds to push for voluntary redundancies at the factories that are remaining open. On 6 and 7 February, workers at the Remploy factories in Birkenhead and Aintree went on strike against the redundancies; on 13 and 14...