Unite

A workplace bulletin for Lewisham Hospital workers, by Lewisham Hospital workers. Click here to download the PDF.

Junior doctors in the Republic of Ireland Ireland held a one day strike on 8 October over long working hours. Three thousand doctors took part and fifty-one hospitals were affected. Junior doctors are routinely required to work individual shifts of over 24 hours at a time and up to 100 hours a week. The Irish Government has admitted that the hours worked are in breach of the European Working Time Directive. The doctors' strike follows weeks of failed negotiations with the Irish health service. During the strike doctors carried out a transplant and dialysis service and palliative care.They...

Unite members in the Ineos oil refinery in Grangemouth have voted by 81% for strikes and by 91% for action short of strikes. The turnout was 86%. Unite called the ballot, and recommended a “yes” vote, to defend shop stewards’ convenor Stevie Deans, who has been subject to ongoing investigation by senior management since the summer of this year. Investigations were initially based upon allegations by Labour Party officials that Stevie, who is also chair of the local Labour Party, had been involved in signing up new party members without their knowledge and forging signatures on direct debit...

The 20,000 members of Unite working in Higher Education have joined Unison and the University of College Union in balloting for strikes to win better pay. Unite says its members in HE, who work as technicians, laboratory assistants, facilities management workers, and admin staff, have faced a five-year “pay drought”, and have seen their real pay decline by around 13% since 2008. A Unite statement said: “The employers have shown a callous disregard when it comes to fair pay treatment for their staff — and now strike action is very much on the cards.” Train cleaners strike against poverty...

Unite members in the Ineos oil refinery in Grangemouth are voting on whether to take industrial action in defence of senior shop steward Stevie Deans. Unite is calling for a ‘yes’ vote. Stevie is chairperson of Falkirk Labour Party. He was suspended in June after national party officials raised allegations that Unite in Falkirk had signed up people to be party members without their knowledge and had forged their signatures on direct debit instructions. On Ed Miliband’s instructions, the dossier containing the allegations was handed over to the police. All this was a gift for Ineos management...

Frank Morris, an electrician sacked from his job on a Crossrail construction site in Westbourne Park, London, in September 2012 for raising health and safety concerns in his capacity as a trade union representative, has been reinstated. The deal between Unite and Bam Ferrovial Kier (BFK, the construction consortium operating construction work on Crossrail sites) is the result of a year of relentless campaigning by rank-and-file trade union activists. Frank and his supporters conducted near-daily pickets at the Westbourne Park site, as well as regularly picketing the flagship Crossrail...

In his speech at the TUC (10 September) Ed Miliband said: “I want to make each and every affiliated trade union member a real part of their local party. Making a real choice to be a part of our party. So they can have a real voice in it...We could become a Labour Party not of 200,000 people, but 500,000 or many more”. This is a shift from the 9 July speech about “opting-in”, where he said only that unionists paying the political levy to Labour should have to “opt in” to pay, rather than just not “opting out”. What Miliband seems to propose now is a drive to get affiliated unionists to become...

The Labour Party has officially cleared Unite of attempting to rig Falkirk Labour Party’s selection process for its next general election candidate. Over the summer months Unite had been accused of signing up union members as Labour Party members without their consent and filling in direct debit instructions by forging their signatures. Two Unite members of Falkirk Labour Party, Karie Murphy and Stevie Deans, were suspended from party membership. The former was Unite’s preferred candidate for the selection process. The latter, a deputy convenor in his workplace, was subsequently suspended by...

A workplace bulletin for Lewisham Hospital workers, by Lewisham Hospital workers. Click here to download the bulletin as a PDF.

A workplace bulletin for Lewisham Hospital workers, by Lewisham Hospital workers. Click here to download the PDF.