Unite

Thousands of NHS workers across East London struck for pay and safer staffing on 13-14 September. The Barts Unite branch has further dates from 16-21 September, coinciding with national walkouts of junior doctors and consultants. On both 13 and 14 September lively rallies made the explicit links between our industrial demands and the fight to save the NHS. The Unite union has a patchy membership across the NHS. It has patchy areas of density for historic reason, either because of past campaigns or because of the way the Unite union formed through mergers with smaller unions and professional...

Unite’s policy on Ukraine is an EC statement passed at this year's policy conference. It is much better than the only motion submitted to that conference. But it takes a wrong and unclear position on the key issues. It remains unpublicised. It is reproduced below. But, for reasons known only to those who labour in the inner sanctum of Unite’s head office in Holborn, the statement has not yet been made public and released to the union’s own membership.

John Keenan, best known for his role in organising a boycott of work on jet engines destined for Chile after the Pinochet coup of 1973, passed away in the early hours of 8 September 2023. John was a lifelong trade unionist, initially a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union and finally, as a result of a succession of mergers over the decades, a member of Unite the Union. Being a trade unionist can be a pretty mundane affair. You attend meetings. You keep your branch functioning. You attend conferences now and again. You go on the odd demonstration. Sometimes, you go out on strike. But...

Unite has announced strikes in four London NHS Trusts over pay and safer staffing

Workers at homelessness charity St. Mungo’s will return to work on 4 September, after they voted to end a three-month strike and accept their employer’s latest pay offer. Unite says the offer is based on a £3,125 flat-rate increase, which St. Mungo’s says is equivalent to an increase of between seven and 15% depending on pay grade. The settlement also includes other concessions from the employer, including three additional annual leave days, the scrapping of renewed probationary periods following internal moves, and a freeze on executive pay for 2023/4. All of these gains are real and...

Workers at homelessness charity St. Mungo's will return to work on 4 September, after they voted to end a three-month strike and accept their employer's latest pay offer. Unite says the offer is based on a £3,125 flat-rate increase, which St. Mungo's says is equivalent to an increase of between seven and 15% depending on pay grade. The settlement also includes other concessions from the employer, including three additional annual leave days, the scrapping of renewed probationary periods following internal moves, and a freeze on executive pay for 2023/4. All of these gains are real and...

The big general union Unite has won a string of disputes in the private sector during the 2022-3 strike wave, and is arguably regenerating parts of its industrial organisation. The 11-14 July 2023 Unite Policy Conference — it’s biennial, so this was the first since the end of the lockdowns and Sharon Graham’s election as general secretary (August 2021) — illustrated how that does not automatically feed through into effective working-class politics. One very positive development is the emergence of the Unite Grassroots Climate Justice Caucus . Although it lacks roots in the crucial high...

A motion submitted to Unite the Union Rules Revision Conference, 9-10 July, which would introduce STV (Single Transferable Vote) for General Secretary elections, has been ruled out-of-order

By and large, the workers who have won inflation-busting pay rises in the 2022-3 wave of strikes are those who have taken sustained action. Security workers at Heathrow Airport (members of Unite) have struck over pay for 18 days since March. Now their union, Unite, has set 31 days over the summer (24 June to 27 August). The strike plan has produced an improved offer - 10% rise backdated to January 2023, a further 1.5% rise from October 2023, and a promise of an inflation-linked rise from January 2024. The union has called off the first two planned strike days, 24 and 25 June, and is balloting...

Workers at the St Mungo’s homeless charity, members of the Unite union, are striking from 30 May to 26 June over pay.