Solidarity 294, 28 August 2013

Workers at the Curzon cinema chain have launched a campaign to win living wages. The hourly rate for most workers is £6.62, well below the £8.55 "London Living Wage" figure most official bodies, including Boris Johnson's GLA, agree is needed to get by in the capital (most of the chain's locations are in London). According to the workers' petition, "On a current wage of £6.62 an hour, it would take workers two days to afford a bottle of one of the wines sold at the cinemas." Workers also face a reduction in their hours. On 9 August, a Guardian article exposed that 150 Curzon workers were on...

On Wednesday 14 August, RWE the troubled German owner of energy company NPower, announced a 60% fall in revenue, mainly to do with power generation in Germany. Buried beneath this was a plan to shut unspecified 16 out of 26 sites in the profitable British section. (See a Daily Mirror report here .) Although details are unspecified, they are talking about 3,000 job losses, or a third of the workforce. There have already been announcements of offshoring and redundancies, but mainly of management or the generally well-paid but unorganised consultant and IT-type grades. These staff are on...

Workers employed by the Serco Barclays cycle hire scheme (“Boris Bikes”) struck on 12 August and 13 August in a dispute about pay, bullying and harassment, shift patterns, and travel allowances. They are members of the Rail, Maritime, and Transport workers union (RMT). Two RMT reps spoke to Solidarity about the dispute. We had a meeting with Serco about two weeks ago. We had four main issues that we wanted to talk about. The first one was the 2.3% pay increase we received in April, which actually works out at about 1.3% when you take away some of the strings. That’s not good enough. Everyone’s...