Over half a million council and school employees are currently balloting for strike action to win a real pay rise. If successful, this would be the biggest strike yet in the wave of action over the cost of living crisis. But the task is huge.

Dave Stocking Radical Lambeth: 1978-1991 by Simon Hannah

By Rebecca Anderson THERE IS a real opportunity for coordinated strike action between two of Britain’s largest workforces: council workers, including school support staff, and hospital employees. If successful, it could bust the public sector pay freeze and build momentum in private sector struggles for substantial pay rises. Local government and school staff have been […]

170,000 private tenants have been threatened with eviction.

The Unison branch at Tower Hamlets Council organised a solid three day strike against the unilateral mass sacking of the entire work force.

By Jeremy Dewar LOCAL GOVERNMENT officers, health workers and school support staff will gather in Brighton in mid-June ostensibly to discuss and debate the way forward for Unison, the principle public sector union. In reality it will be a frustrating week, listening to endless and highly inappropriate self-congratulation from the top table. Motions or amendments […]

By Jeremy Dewar, Unison rep, pc Another year, another pay cut. Or so it seems. As we go to press, Britain’s biggest local government union, Unison, is about to close its second consultative ballot (we didn’t give the right answer first time) on the employers’ 2018-19 pay offer. The offer is atrocious: a real pay […]

By a Unison schools convenor There are 1.3 million local government and school support workers – 78 per cent of them women. We are the housing officers, youth workers, social workers, teaching assistants, caterers and cleaners that keep hard-up families together and services running. Austerity budgets, year after year, have wiped out over 700,000 jobs […]

WITH COUNCIL elections looming in London, the Tory press is full of increasingly worried articles about a Labour landslide. Pollsters are predicting a big increase in Labour votes, Labour councillors and even the possible capture of Tory strongholds like Wandsworth (Thatcher’s favourite council in the 1980s) and Barnet. As Sadiq Khan recently said at the […]

By Bernie McAdam AFTER SEVEN weeks of strike action and an apparent agreement with council chiefs, it seemed sense had prevailed; Birmingham’s Grade Three bin workers would not be sacked and a suspended union rep would be reinstated. Instead the Labour run council has completely gone back on its word and issued redundancy notices to […]