By Bernie McAdam Labour movement solidarity can stop Hunt imposing unsafe contract AS the Tories continue their slashing of NHS funding, junior doctors have quite rightly responded with a massively popular strike. Tens of thousands struck for 24 hours on 12 January, with picket-lines all over the country drawing large numbers of doctors and other […]
LONDON Underground workers are set to open up a second front in defence of workers’ right to a family life, demanding guarantees against night shifts and weekend working destroying their work-life balance. Like the junior doctors, Tube drivers, maintenance and station staff fear that the introduction of a 24-hour transport service will mean increased hours, […]
By Bernie McAdam 14 September 2015 Britain’s anti union laws are already the most repressive in the European Union. Thanks to the new Tory Trade Union Bill, they are now set to get much worse. Liberty, Amnesty International and the British Institute of Human Rights are the latest organisations to condemn the Bill as ‘a […]
July 15 witnessed the first reading of the Tories’ new anti-union bill – effectively a series of amendments to the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act (1992). The Trade Union Bill aims to make what Tony Blair once called “the most draconian anti-union laws in Europe”, harsher still. David Cameron’s “slip of the tongue,” […]
By Jeremy Dewar 28 May 2015 Tory Business Secretary Sajid Javid’s anti-democratic measures to restrict strikes and legalise scabbing have the aim of breaking resistance to austerity. As TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady warned, they want to “make legal strikes close to impossible”. The new law’s aim is to weaken the trade unions ability to […]
By Bernie McAdam On 13 January over 20,000 London striking bus drivers in Unite paralysed services. Pickets were held outside every bus garage in the capital. Boris Johnson’s claim that a third of the service was running is rubbish. Only one in 10 routes were active, if you can call one bus every 20 minutes […]
Union leaders across the public services have called off many of their planned strikes in the run-up to the TUC’s “Britain needs a pay rise” demo. In a matter of just a few days, the union leaders managed to tear up their own flawed battleplan for smashing the pay freeze. First to tear up their […]
Union leaders complain that their hands are tied by the anti-union laws, but where is the campaign to abolish them? Jeremy Dewar outlines how we could launch one When the TUC voted to “consider the practicalities of a general strike” a few years back, union leaders’ response was to send some lawyers away to see […]
By Jeremy Dewar As union leaders prepare to wind down strikes and settle for a pro-austerity Labour government, workers need to fight for a pay rise now and demand Miliband reverses the cuts Hundreds of thousands of workers will walk off the job and take to the streets this month in pursuit of a pay rise. […]
By Dave Stockton More than one million workers across England, Wales and Northern Ireland struck on Thursday 10 July against the government freeze on pay and the 20% decline in real wages since the Tory-LibDem coalition came to power in 2010. Workers from several unions – the National Union of Teachers (NUT) Unison, Unite, the Public and […]
Millions of us have suffered a huge drop in our living standards as the bankers, bosses and Tories have made us pay for their crisis. Jeremy Dewar explains why we need to go beyond one-day protests if we want to stop the government’s attacks Over the past five years workers across Britain have witnessed their […]
Thousands of teachers thronged Markham Street in Westminster between the Home Office and Department for Education, writes Bernie McAdam, NUT. Some started jumping up and down as loud calls rang out for “Gove to go”. You could feel the frisson in the air as the police did not quite know what was going to happen […]
Postal workers should vote yes to fight not just cuts but privatisation too By a CWU rep In late August rumours from government sources surfaced in the press that the Coalition could announce the float of Royal Mail on the stock market in September, aiming to start selling shares to investors in October. In response, […]
The struggle for a living wage has gone national, hitting 1,000 shops in nearly 58 cities across the USA. KD Tait reports On 29 August thousands of workers walked out in the biggest wave of strikes to hit the US fast food industry. Workers are fighting for $15 an hour and the right to unionise […]
By a CWU postal rep
A strike by 220 machine operatives and cleaners at the Hovis factory in Wigan shows that determined action backed by militant tactics and labour movement solidarity can beat the bosses. Members of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) voted for three weeks of discontinuous action to stop bosses using agency staff to undermine […]
In 1913 Dublin workers waged a heroic battle against their employers, the church and the police. Despite being defeated, argues Bernie McAdam, the lockout lives on as the most inspirational act of working class resistance in Irish history.
By Jeremy Dewar / 02 September 2013 David Cameron broke off his fourth summer holiday in an attempt to stampede parliament into supporting military action against Syria. But Ed Miliband, whom the Tories had taunted with being “weak”, turned on him and soon it was the Bullingdon boy who looked weak. So will Ed Miliband’s […]
By KD Tait / Saturday 10 August, 2013 Last week retail workers’ campaign for $15 an hour and the right to unionise took another step forward with thousands joining strikes in seven cities. What began as a one-day strike by 200 fast food workers in New York last November has spread to several states and […]
Unite and GMB members employed in highways, grounds and maintenance work will stage a 24 hour strike on Friday 9 August after rejecting a below-inflation pay rise. They will strike each Friday until they get a better offer. The escalation comes after a work-to-rule and overtime ban observed by up to 600 workers since 29 […]
Postal workers at Bridgwater Delivery Office in Somerset are on strike against imposed “summer savings” (workload hikes) and management bullying. Royal Mail are refusing to suspend a senior manager while allegations of stealing a postman’s mail are investigated, something that would see a worker suspended immediately. This strike is about issues facing workers in every […]
By a Unite member Leeds Pathology staff took strike action for 24 hrs from 8.30am 16th July 2013 at three acute hospitals: Leeds General Inirmary, St James’ Hospital and Bradford Royal Infirmary which contracts its pathology services with Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust. The strike was very successful, calling out all Unite members in Biochemistry, Blood […]
The lessons for our national strike: rank and file initiative and control
Pathology staff in one large NHS hospital trust, mainly Unite members, have voted for industrial action against the imposition of new shift patterns to replace long standing Out-of-Hours (OOH) working arrangements. The staff balloted, mainly Biomedical Scientists and Biomedical Support Workers, voted 63% for Strike action and 84% for Action short of Strike. Pathology Management […]
Since April, workers campaigning for better wages and the right to unionise have shut down hundreds of restaurants in one-day strikes across five cities. The low paid workers, many earning state minimums as low as $7.25 (£4.26) an hour are demanding a wage increase to $15 an hour and the right to set up […]
2013 may not be the year the world ends but it certainly could prove a bad one for anyone who relies on Royal Mail, once again threatened with privatisation. Now plans by the postal Communication Workers Union (CWU) to boycott privatised mail in the coming months could kickstart the struggle against a sell-off. It will […]
Post Office workers have taken strike action twice, on Easter Saturday and again on 19 April. They’re angry at plans to close or franchise 76 big high street or “crown” post offices – over twenty per cent. And that’s just the start of what the Coalition calls the “transformation” of Post Office Ltd (POL), aka […]
The BBC was hit by strike action yesterday as NUJ members across the country staged a 24-hour walkout in their campaign against compulsory redundancies. Radio and TV schedules were disrupted as many presenters, including Lauren Laverne and John Humphrys refused to cross picket lines. The day of action was kicked off by mass walkouts of […]
Admin and clerical workers at Mid Yorkshire NHS Trust recently staged five days of strike action against attempts to cut wages and jobs. With action expected to escalate, Mike Black sent in this report from Leeds. To start by backtracking a bit – Unite Leeds Teaching Hospitals Branch invited Dave, a Unison Steward from Mid Yorkshire to […]
Read issue 369 here THE COALITION government is determined to start 2013 as it means to go on: by making workers, benefit claimants, pensioners and young people pay for the ongoing economic crisis. Austerity is now set to last till 2018 at least. A decade of pain. Not for themselves of course. This government has […]