Solidarity 554, 1 July 2020

Schools: recovery, not catch-up

According to the Daily Mail on 27 June, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson used a speech to Tory backbenchers to describe the largest and most vocal schools union, the National Education Union (NEU), as “the No Education Union”. This follows attempts by Boris Johnson to blame the NEU for the low numbers of children returning to school after 1 June, the date announced as the start of wider reopening. The government know there is huge frustration at the lengthy closure of schools and the lack of any clear idea as to when that might change. They understand the risk that, if parents blame them...

Oppose the Immigration Bill!

As we go to press, the Tories are ramming their Immigration Bill through both its Report and Third Reading session in Parliament on 30 June. The Bill will go to the House of Lords, and then come back to Parliament. The Tories want to rush it because they want to rush Brexit — despite the pandemic meaning that the Brexit negotiations are like trying to draft a big legal document while riding a bike along a potholed road during an earthquake. As it stands, the Bill is essentially a blank cheque to the Tories to write whatever immigration rules they want to replace EU free movement. MPs have...

Support cleaners' fight for dignity and fair pay

On 4-5 June 17 cleaners at Ark’s Globe Academy, just south of the Elephant and Castle in Southwark, South London, walked out over unpaid and underpaid wages. The workers are members of the small, radical, United Voices of the World (UVW) union. Their employer, the cleaning company Ridgecrest, seems to have now addressed some of the issues of money owed. Nevertheless some of these badly paid workers had faced the threat of eviction for non-payment of rent as a result of not being paid properly and on time. The workers are now fighting for the London Living Wage, which would represent a...

Tube unions plan funding campaign

Unions organising across Transport for London and London Underground will hold a joint online rally on 15 July, to launch a campaign for increased funding for TfL and against cuts. At the time of going to press, RMT, Aslef, and Unite were backing the rally, with TSSA also expected to come on board. Exact details, including the time, had yet to be confirmed. Since the Tories abolished the central government subsidy to TfL, it has been almost wholly reliant on funding from fares and commercial revenue streams, meaning it was plunged into a profound financial crisis when passenger levels dropped...

Jobcentre workers and Covid-19: Unsafe, unworkable, unacceptable

The Secretary of the State for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has announced that she wants job centres to open from 4 July, with mass opening to the public on Monday 6 July. This is unsafe, and unworkable — there is no means to safely distance in an interview with a claimant in a small job centre, and no mitigations and additional safety measures have been installed, such as perspex screens or additional hand sanitising facilities. The government also plans to introduce stricter conditionality on claims, meaning claimants will face more stringent checks on how much job searching...

Support the Tower Hamlets strikers

Tower Hamlets Labour council intends to implement a plan, “Tower Rewards”, to sack its entire 4,000-strong workforce — carers, caretakers, children’s centre workers, housing and homelessness workers, refuse workers, cleaners, social workers, teaching assistants and many, many others — and re-employ only those who will accept substantially worse terms and conditions.

Racism: what Labour should do

We don’t know to what extent the Black Lives Matter protests will continue; but for sure Labour and union activists need, to a far greater extent, to join them and engage with the mainly young people taking part.

NEU and the Tower Hamlets dispute

Tower Hamlets council has re-started the process of imposing a cut in workers' conditions, and Unison has declared strikes on 3, 6, and 7 July. Shamefully, the leadership of Tower Hamlets NEU have demobilised their membership.

AIDS, and how it was fought

The BBC radio documentary mini-series “A big disease with a little name” , released June 2020, is an incredibly moving and informative look at HIV/AIDS from its appearance to the modern day. AIDS, caused by HIV, was first written about in 1981, in the USA. The virus — initially “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, GRID” — disproportionally impacted gay men, and was associated with homosexuality. Hitting a particularly persecuted and in many ways invisible set of people — even more so then than now — worsened its impacts in many ways. “Straight America” mostly responded with indifference. For many...

New Covid plans

Doctors and scientists want a shift in virus-control policy. An open letter to all the political parties, on 23 June, by leading medical figures, called for an urgent effort to map new policies because "the available evidence indicates that local flare-ups are increasingly likely and a second wave a real risk".

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