Solidarity 177, 8 July 2010

Cuts round-up

The government has cut central grants to local councils by £1.166 billion. The government say that no council would see their grant drop by more than 2%. But at the same time they have imposed a one-year freeze on council tax rises. That may be repeated next year. In Scotland the SNP-led government froze council tax for three years from 2000. In any case huge cuts are being made everywhere. Some of the councils facing the biggest cuts in central funding are Birmingham (£12.6 million), Liverpool (£9 million), Kent (£8.7 million) Essex (£7.5 million) and Durham (£6.3 million). In many places...

Lambeth's "co-op council": defend every job!

In Labour-controlled Lambeth 450 jobs are to go. The biggest cuts are planned in Children and Young Persons’ Services. In addition the council is pressing ahead with plans to invite residents to “run their own services” in return for a council tax rebate. The “cooperative council” idea is one which 115 leaders in Labour-controlled authorities have signed up to. In some areas the idea means nothing more than an extra credit union. In Lambeth the council plans are more radical. Lambeth council unions are predicting large scale privatisation and further job cuts, as firms are brough in to “advise...

BA workers: reject this offer!

British Airways cabin crew are being balloted on a new offer from management. But this latest offer addresses none of the key issues of the dispute and would represent a substantial victory for their union-busting boss, Willie Walsh. They should reject the deal! Since the beginning of the dispute, the union has failed to make clear demands and has consequently ceded ground to management. The strike was originally called over BA unilaterally introducing a two-tier workforce, New Fleet, and attacking pay, terms and conditions. The first wave of strike days was designed to force BA management to...

London Underground: strike to stop job cuts!

Members of the RMT union on London Underground are now balloting to take action to stop job cuts. The company is cutting up to 800 stations jobs, and staff in service control. With 300 drivers more than it needs, the company seems to be sacking drivers for mistakes that would have got a warning a couple of years ago. Leaked documents have revealed plans to cut jobs in engineering and fleet. No job on the Underground is secure. We understand that (the clerical union) TSSA's ballot is not far behind, but have yet to hear what (drivers’ union) ASLEF will be doing. Strikes should not just be one...

CWU cancels ballot for BT strike

On Monday 5 July, the Communications Workers’ Union cancelled a ballot of its members on strike action over pay at British Telecom. The cancellation was made before the counting of the votes had been completed, and on the day the ballot result was due. The CWU has said that it had received legal advice that information provived about workplace addresses had not been properly given to the employer. This made the union vulnerable to an injunction by BT bosses. All that seems to be true and an injunction was quite possible in the current political climate. However it leaves the union needing to...

How to build a trades council

Alex Halligan from Salford Trades Council spoke to Solidarity about building up a trades council. The trades council was defunct but we have been building it back up over the last year. We now have the highest amount of affiliations for a long time. We have held a lot of public meetings in the community. It’s all about reaching out and getting your average worker involved in trade union struggle. We have organised a number of actions — for example, we had a demonstration against the new Budget outside the local government buildings. We’ve organised shop stewards’ committees on a ward-by-ward...

Attacking lowest-paid school staff

Tower Hamlets unions have held their first anti-cuts meeting in preparation for the anticipated driving down of working class jobs, wages and services in the borough. The Labour-controlled council plans to announce £10 million worth of cuts from its budget at the next cabinet meeting. This will have a devastating effect on both service users and providers. At the meeting some mentioned cuts which were already happening, and without any reference to the unions. Labour’s so-called determination to defend “front-line” services were given the lie. One cut mentioned was to school transport, which...

Government scraps school rebuilding

All new school building schemes have been scrapped by Tory education secretary Michael Gove in a move to save billions of pounds. New Labour’s “Building School for the Future” (BSF) initiative promised a total of £55 billion over twenty years to replace a disintegrating building stock. Now, only around half of the 1421 schools in line for new investment will receive necessary funding. These schools had already secured or received the money before the general election. Gove’s decision to scrap new building schemes can only mean one thing: that a large bulk of future generations of children will...

The origin of the Plebs League part 2: two kinds of working-class education

The Workers’ Educational Association was founded in the early 1900s by Albert Mansbridge. Part 1 Mansbridge was exactly what the Christian socialists in the university extension movement hoped to produce: a working-class person who believed in harmony between the employers and the workers, and who thought adult education could bring this about. Mansbridge came up with a solution to the extension movement’s problem of not attracting a sufficient number of workers to its project of preaching class harmony. This solution was the tutorial class. The Education Act passed in 1902 was shaped by the...

Civil servants under attack

Fundamental attacks on civil service workers are coming thick and fast. We are entering a very different period compared to anything that has gone before. A two-year public sector pay freeze for everybody except those earning less than £21,000 has a concession to the latter of a pay rise of “at least” £250. But no-one in our union, the PCS, is expecting many such members, if any, to get more than the stipulated sum and that will represent an increase significantly below the rate of inflation. The pay freeze coincides with large VAT increases, the freezing of child benefits, and other attacks...

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