Assemble 12noon, West gate of Dudhope Park (postcode DD1 5RE for satnav / GoogleMap). March off at 12:30pm. Route; Lochee Road, Marketgait, West Marketgait, Nethergate to rally in City Square (postcode DD1 3BA) commencing at approx 1pm. Provisionally, feeder marches are being investigated from Dundee University (via Hawkhill to join up at Marketgait Circle) and Abertay University (via Bell Street to join up at Marketgait).

TUs are asked to check & advise on speakers (Dundee or national officers). STUC speaker has been requested.

Further details; dundeetuc@ymail.com, 07951 443656.

Low paid canteen and cleaning staff at Glasgow’s STOW college are staging a series of strikes.
These UNISON members are winning massive support from teaching staff (EIS members) and students, as well as the wider public. Queues form daily to buy their sizzling solidarity sausages, at the elaborately decorated ‘tent’ the pickets have mounted outside the college gates!

In a petty act of intimidation – which entirely backfired and only served to harden the strikers’ resolve – college top management called out the police and then council environmental services, to check if the food was up to hygiene standards! Of course it is; these are catering staff, who know what they’re doing – and are collecting generous donations to sustain their strike, which is what management really object to.
At the heart of the dispute is the struggle for the extremely modest Scottish Living Wage (£7.20 an hour) and against privatisation of cleaning and catering.

As one of the pickets told me, We are taking the selective strike action because the union can afford to pay us on strike days – which goes to show just how low paid we are!

I spoke to a steward about the issues behind the strike, and what fellow-trade unionists can do to help them win a speedy victory.

The context of this is last year’s Budget announcement by John Swinney that low paid workers, as a minimum, should be protected against the worst excesses of the recession. He asked for this to be done by the unions showing pay restraint but with workers employed by public bodies earning under £21,000 being given £250, and the Scottish Living Wage being guarateed, which is now £7.20 an hour.

We have at least 20 members on about £6.63.

Last year STOW college management said they would give the Scottish Living Wage this year and in return we took another below-inflation wage settlement.

UNISON and the EIS jointly proposed a package of savings for the college, including the £80,000 hospitality budget; overseas travel not linked to income (including Board meetings and management taking their families abroad for awards events); bringing the graduation in-house instead of sumptuous affairs at the Royal Concert Hall; contractors and consultants being replaced by our own workers doing the jobs; and an end to Board of management events, with overnight stays, at expensive hotels.

Management’s reply was ‘No’ to all that.

STOW is a college that lost significant numbers of staff. We have faced cuts to courses, carried out under the radar, such as Special Needs Provision being cut by half; fewer part-time student places for people seeking asylum; an end to the part-time photography course.

In this year’s pay round we asked for three things: the Scottish Living Wage immediately; a pay rise for the rest of our members; and guarantees against privatisation of any areas of the service.
‘No’ was the management reply!

They said they don’t have the money now to implement the Scottish Living Wage – which we calculate would cost only £7,000 to £8,000. They also imposed a pay freeze and privatisation of the remainder of cleaning and the canteen.

We showed that this is a nonsense, that it would cost the college money as private companies would take money out of the college, rather than make savings.

For two years UNISON led the Hands Off STOW campaign, to save the college from potential closure, saving the necks of senior management in the process. This is our reward: pay cuts, low pay and privatisation of the people who helped save the place.

So we balloted for industrial action in June, with an overwhelming vote to strike. Management did nothing over the whole summer to find a settlement, so here we are taking strike action.

Last week, after the first day of strike action, management promised a meeting this week to discuss our alternatives to out-sourcing and to seek a resolution to the dispute. But instead of meeting with us, they hit us with the announcement that the cleaners will be out-sourced on 1st November and Catering on 1st January.

Their reasons are cynical. They want to out-source jobs to avoid paying the Scottish Living Wage, as private companies are under no obligation to pay it, and to downgrade and slim down the workforce in preparation for the future. And that is something other colleges will probably try to repeat, with worsened services, terms and conditions eroded … your starter for ten!

We have written an open letter to John Swinney and Mike Russell to intervene.

We have full strike action on 25th and 26th October where we hope supporters will call at our picket lines.
Write to MSPs, MPs and councillors backing our claim, against management who are neither consulting nor negotiating with us, just informing us of their decisions – because nobody is putting the brakes on them.

Two further strike days planned by NUJ members at the BBC (15th and 16th November) in defence of their pensions have been suspended, as a result of major breakthroughs in their ongoing battle.

The dispute is far from over, but the impact of united action has put BBC bosses on the back foot.

BBC Director Mark Thompson infamously emailed staff prior to the initial 48-hour strike pompously declaring “there will be no further talks, no further offers”. On the contrary, the impact of the strike action led to Thompson and other BBC bosses offering new talks.

After the first strikes, they had victimised three NUJ members based with BBC World Service – giving two of them final warnings, a third being effectively sacked – for taking part in the strike overseas! The NUJ held a UK-wide meeting of Mothers/Fathers of Chapels (shop stewards) which agreed to suspend the strikes on 15/16th, in favour of negotiations, provided the victimisations were withdrawn – which they subsequently have been.

A couple of real life examples illustrate what has fuelled the burning sense of injustice which has driven BBC workers into strikes and a work-to-rule. Andy, a senior broadcast journalist, stood to get a pension of £14,900 at 60 under the existing scheme; under the BBC bosses’ new proposals he would lose £3,900 a year, a 26% cut. Even if Andy worked on ‘til 65, paying in thousands extra in contributions, he would still have his pension slashed by 13%.

Joe, a TV centre worker, stands to lose £5,000 a year – a 30% reduction. And south west of England broadcast journalist Laura would have her pension slashed from £15,500 to £13,200 a year.

Meantime, in the same BBBC but on a different planet, BBC boss Mark Byford is to get a golden handshake of £1million plus an annual pension of £400,000!

Dave Eyre, NUJ Father of the Chapel at the BBC in Glasgow and Edinburgh told me about the issues behind this trade union struggle, and the impact of workers’ initial action.

The existing BBC pension schemes are a mixture of Final Salary and Career Average. These are to be closed off to new members and the amount of any salary increases that folk who remain in the current schemes are allowed to put towards their pension will be pegged at 1 per cent. So for instance if we got a 3per cent pay rise, only 1 per cent of that would contribute to our pension.

The new offer from the BBC – called CAB 2011 – is a career average scheme that is much worse. Folk will have to pay a lot more to get back much less, losing 20% and more in the value of their pension.

The BBC suddenly seems very concerned about the deficit in the Pension Scheme. They weren’t so concerned when a surplus in the scheme in the 1990s allowed them to take a payment holiday.

There is no doubt there is a deficit. But when the BBC first came forward with their proposed cuts to our pensions they claimed the deficit is about £2bn. Since then they backtracked to claims of £1.5bn – and in figures produced for the BBC which have leaked to the NUJ, the estimates are lower still – possibly down to £1bn.
The NUJ and other BBC unions are not trying to ignore the existence of a deficit in the scheme, and we recognise it may mean people having to pay more in contributions to defend their pension levels. We are prepared to talk and negotiate on this. But we first need to know what the actual figures are. By next April the BBC Trustees will carry out their legally required formal assessment of the figures. We say wait ‘til we get the figures then. And we say the BBC must talk to the unions and the Trustees, who have been totally ignored by BBC senior managers so far. Right now we are being asked to buy a pig in a poke – and we’re not buying!

We have serious questions to put to the BBC. Why act now? Why have they decided to cut pensions in the midst of the wider financial crisis – when reports just out this week suggest Final Salary Pension Schemes are bouncing back, recovering from the earlier levels of deficit alongside the mild economic recovery – challenging the argument that the economic downturn means the death of FSPS?

If the BBC’s only concern is to address the deficit in our pension scheme, why not wait until they find out what it is!? Some NUJ members – and I am one of them – are asking if this is being done for other reasons. Are we being used as the thin end of a wedge to implement widespread pension ‘reform’ across the entire public sector, to the detriment of all who work in the public sector?

Many people look at the salary levels of Jonathan Ross and imagine BBC staff are all multi-millionaires, with gold-plated pensions. Well, we’re not! The average BBC pension is about £12,000. That’s not a poverty pension, but it’s also not a millionaire’s pension. However, that average includes massive pensions of £hundreds of thousands that a select group of senior managers do receive and will receive. A big chunk of people get much less than £12,000.
So we’re not fighting for gold-plated pensions, but for fairness in pensions.

The initial strikes had a huge impact, as anyone who regularly watches the news will have noticed. Flagship programmes like Good Morning Scotland, Newsdrive and major Gaelic service programmes were all off the air – as were Today and Newsnight UK-wide. We had an evening bulletin read by someone who normally does a jazz programme, and radio bulletins read by the Head of News.

In the aftermath of the strike, senior managers met with Mark Thompson, where they told him they got programmes out by the skin of their teeth, and they urged him to sit down and talk with the NUJ.
Today (Thurs 11th), after three previous ‘final’ offers, it now appears Mark Thompson is offering further talks if we postpone the industrial action planned for Mon 15th/Tues 16th November.

We really welcomed the support we got last week from the trade union movement and across the political spectrum. We especially welcomed support from members of other BBC unions who took the decision as a matter of conscience not to cross our pickets.

Utterly despicable.

What are the chances these events will get the same level of coverage as the whining about the fire-fighters striking to defend services?

To join the SSP go to the site and fill out a form, email, phone etc.

The Scottish Socialist Party offers unqualified support to CWU members forced to strike against bully-boy bosses and their Labour government backers. They are out to crush the union, crucify jobs and rights at work – in the hope they can sell off Royal Mail to greedy profiteers at Jumble Sale prices.

Every worker, trade unionist and community needs to stand by their posties in a potentially vicious battle to defend the very survival of a public service under assault from Royal Mail bosses, the Labour government and large sections of the media.

Over-paid butchers knife jobs, services and rights

Over-paid Royal Mail bosses, with absolutely no history in the postal service, have prepared for this showdown since the 2007 strike settlement. The key phrase in the Pay & Modernisation Agreement was change will be introduced by agreement. The exact opposite has happened. Bullying, intimidation, threats of disciplinary action, workers taken off pay, have become the standard methods of imposing new conditions that have meant catastrophic job losses and unbearable workloads.

With this reign of terror, Royal Mail bosses have slashed 60,000 jobs since 2003 – and they aim to shed another 60,000 in the next 2 years. Record profits (£900,000 a day last year!) have resulted from vastly increased productivity and heavier workloads from drastically fewer workers. The workers’ reward? Zero pay rise; abolition of the Final Salary Pension Scheme; ‘absorption’ of extra work into existing workloads with no extra pay; not a penny reward for increased productivity … and 60,000 job losses!

Crozier’s 35,000 scabs

Crozier and his cronies are hiring 30,000 temps as an army of scabs – recruited from people desperate for a few weeks’ work in the midst of recession – in addition to 5,000 Royal Mail managers being deployed to scab on the actual strike days. Royal Mail bosses are spending a fortune (of the public’s money) to break the strike, break the union, break the backs of the workforce, to usher in later privatisation.

They have no interest in reaching a resolution that protects workers’ conditions and jobs whilst improving the public service. They only belatedly offer to go to ACAS to get the pre-Xmas strikes cancelled, so as to come back with a vengeance in January. They must not succeed!

Bosses launch war

Instead, they have prepared for war. The secret document, exposed by BBC Newsnight, shows they plan to remove union facilities to help prosecute their war on postal workers. That is already the local experience in many areas. And they are in collusion with the Labour government on this! Lord Mandelson, whose scheme to privatise Royal Mail was shelved in the face of public uproar and the threat of strikes, is out for revenge. He has publicly denounced strikes – legally balloted for according to his Labour government’s vicious anti-union laws – as suicidal.

Interviewed on TV, he showed an incriminatingly detailed knowledge of the secret Royal Mail document, homing in on how much union facility time costs Royal Mail, which suggests he either wrote it – or at the very least has been in cahoots with Crozier and his crew.

Labour government collusion

Labour government ministers have been quoted saying this could be our miners’ strike. They egg on Royal Mail bosses to confront the union, to casualise the workforce with floods of part-timers, in their anti-working class mission to create armies of cheap labour in a de-regulated labour market that maximises profits.

As sole shareholder in Royal Mail, the Labour government have the power to settle this dispute in defence of workers and the public, but instead they encourage vicious hysteria in the press against the CWU – such as reports of riot cops preparing for battles between strikers and scabs. They let Royal Mail bosses enjoy a 13-year pension fund holiday, creating a record pension fund deficit, which workers are being punished for.

Don’t feed the hand that bites you!

New Labour has never been innocent by-standers in this long-running conflict, contrary to their protestations – and in stark contrast to the mind-boggling continuation of funding of New Labour by the CWU. Last year alone the CWU gave their arch enemies over £1million.

The national union should unreservedly declare an end to this crazy support for the party that is butchering CWU members, as one strand to the current war for survival. As we first wrote in SSP workplace bulletins in January 1999: make the break from New Labour’s New Tories – don’t feed the hand that bites you!

Members of the Scottish Socialist Party inside the CWU played their full part in winning the landslide majority for unified national strikes. The SSP does not hesitate in giving full-blooded support to CWU members on strike. We will build public support, until you win a deal that defends jobs, services, conditions and workplace rights.

UNITE – stop scabs!

SSP members in UNITE will press the UNITE leadership to call on their members not to be used as organised scabs. Royal Mail regularly jets managers into local offices on strike, taking care to deploy them from far-flung places, to reduce the likelihood of them taking sympathy action with CWU members they already know.

Leaders of UNITE should instruct their members to do their normal duties, not other people’s jobs, and not to manage Crozier’s scabs – and start a campaign for a strike ballot of their members in Royal Mail – whose jobs are on an extremely shaky nail.

Other unions, and the TUC/STUC, should call and build mass solidarity marches – and appeal to the unemployed not to scab.

If Royal Mail and the Labour government raise the stakes even higher, for example by taking court action against the CWU, other unions should call members out in defiant days of solidarity strike action to help win this critical battle.

• No suspension of strikes – pre-Xmas is the best time to hammer
• Royal Mail bosses – it makes up two-thirds of their annual profits.
• Stand firm and united – victory to the CWU!

The Diageo bosses have booted their workforces at Kilmarnock and Glasgow right in the teeth. These profit-hungry capitalists have spat in the face of mass public opinion – expressed through 20,000 marching in Kilmarnock, and 500,000 email protests to Diageo shareholders – by confirming closure of the 200-year-old plants. And they didn’t even pretend to consult; they announced this on day 71 of a 90-day consultation period.

The Scottish Socialist Party has from day one warned that multi-nationals like Diageo have only one care in the world: profit! They don’t give a toss about chucking 900 workers and their families on the scrapheap, virtually closing down the town of Kilmarnock in the process. And we have equally warned that any belief that such greedy profiteers can be persuaded by arguments into saving the plants was dangerously delusional – that the only language they will listen to is decisive action that wallops their wallets.

With this callous, arrogant announcement that they are forging ahead regardless, the time is rotten ripe for the unions to lead workers in a campaign of industrial action, to hit Diageo’s profit margins.

This could be accompanied by a truly international appeal for a mass consumer boycott, which would potentially have a devastating impact on a company that relies overwhelmingly on overseas markets, and its overseas image.

Already the campaign of protest emails and online petitions has garnered widespread support in the likes of the USA, one of Diageo’s prime markets, and the Teamsters’ Union has offered to support action by UNITE the union.

A tremendous publicity campaign has been conducted over the summer, on the streets, at football matches, and at golf and other sporting events sponsored by the world’s biggest drinks company. But unless the national union leaderships give confidence to workers to hit back with action that damages the production of profits for Paul Walsh and his cronies in the boardroom, there will soon be nothing left to fight back with.

Diageo’s chief executive Paul Walsh has just had another obscene boost to his wealth, at precisely the time he struts the world stage handing out redundancy notices to families who face a future of not knowing where the next meal will come from.

His ‘wage’ actually went down last year compared to 2008 – when he took home £5.1m. That previous income should help cushion him from having to exist on £3.5m in the year up to 30 June 2009 … the very day before the closure announcements!

That means a ‘salary’ of £67,300 a week! And if that is not vomit-inducing enough, his pension pot more than compensated for the fall in salary: it rose by £3.4m to £11.7m during the past year. So if this arrogant prat decides to retire, he stands to draw a pension of £637,000.

Walsh assured the SNP government-led Task Force – in an interview on BBC Scotland – that, I will be very open-minded when I look at the content of their alternative business plan. But in real life he didn’t wait even the derisory six days that elapsed between receiving the governments’ proposals and publicly shattering the fate of these workers who have given a lifetime to creating his obnoxious levels of wealth.

Within a couple of hours of declaring his open mind, Walsh was in the midst of a conference call to his cohorts in the USA, where he boasted:

A lot of the restructuring we’ve announced over time will help gross margin. They may invoke some letters to our shareholders, as we close plants in Scotland. But it’s the right thing to do for the future, and we have firmly grasped that nettle in order that we do not see gross margin slippage.

This arrogant contempt buries all the hopes of the SNP government, Ayrshire and Glasgow councils, and some in the leadership of the unions that – as Alex Salmond put it – we are looking for something that reconciles Diageo’s financial objectives with Scotland’s social objectives.

They are irreconcilable! Diageo has just announced another 4 per cent rise in their profits, to £2.6billion. But that is still not enough for these greedy parasites, so they want to cut back from three to two bottling and packaging plants in Scotland, chucking 900 families into despair, to save themselves £42m a year.

And if they get away with this butchery without a real shot being fired, how long will it be before they try to ship whisky across the high seas to be bottled in India or China by slave labour, closer to one of their huge markets?

Whilst the unions need to build members’ confidence for swift industrial action, and appeal for supportive consumer boycotts internationally, the government should drop it’s grovelling pleas for Diageo to accept public money and save maybe half of the 900 jobs; it’s not going to happen! Instead, they should seize the assets that have been built up by two centuries of workers’ skills and labour, supplemented by public subsidies to Diageo in the past, and turn them into public property, sustaining all jobs, embracing the know-how of workers in creating a genuine alternative plan for a publicly-owned drinks and food industry.

The time for action has arrived. Vast public support exists for the Diageo workforce in their plight. That could easily be channelled into a movement to halt the closures, with calls on the governments of Edinburgh and London to step in and bail out these workers, the way they were both so keen to do for the bankers who wrecked the economy in the first place.

6th August 2009

One of the most perverse contradictions in a system riddled with cruel absurdities is that of the working week.
Whilst unemployment leaps upwards, with a scourge of redundancies and closures, the length of the working week for vast hordes of workers increases.

Whilst employers lay off workers, cutting their hours and pay, others demand overtime of their workers – and obscene proportions of this is unpaid overtime.

Long Hours Culture

The UK suffers a notorious ‘Long Hours Culture’. And after a few years of decline (in the years 1998-2006), the hours worked is rising rapidly again.

Figures from December 2008 show that full-time workers in the UK put in an average of 42.1 hours a week – although that is acknowledged to be an under-estimate, not including undeclared hours on second jobs.

Beneath this average lies appalling levels of drudgery for a big minority: one in eight works over 48 hours a week!

And for male workers, the figure is 19.7 per cent exceeding the 48 hour week.

Put another way, in Scotland alone, 260,000 workers are on over 48 hours; 3.3 million across the UK. The latter figure is an increase of 180,000 compared with 2007.
A breath-taking 460,000 workers clock up over 60 hours work a week (54,000 of these in Scotland) – leaving little else time for family or social life after travel to work time and sleep is accounted for!

Long hours at work lead to increased illness, including stress.

It also lowers productivity levels, and reduces Health and Safety for the workforce, as tired people are a risk to others as well as themselves in many jobs.

21st Century Drudgery

So why do workers in Scotland and the UK put in such back-breaking, mind-boggling hours at work in the 21st century?

One of the most obvious causes is low hourly rates of pay. This country is one of the lowest-waged economies in the advanced world. Workers are frequently compelled to clock up the hours to get a half-decent income for themselves and their families – through hours that lead to neglect of family life and increased family break-ups.

But there is also a more naked form of exploitation that explains the Long Hours Culture: unpaid overtime. An absolute majority of the workers on long hours get no extra pay for their overtime.  Last year, 5.24 million workers in the UK (425,000 in Scotland) worked unpaid overtime, to a total value of £27billion.

That is the highest toll of unpaid labour since records began in 1992.

It is the equivalent of working for absolutely nothing from 1st January to 27th February last year.
It means these workers gave their bosses an average of £5,139 worth of work without getting a single penny in pay.

Unpaid Labour

As socialists as far back as Karl Marx in the 1840s have explained, profit is the unpaid labour of the working class.

Two of the several means by which the capitalist class boost their profits are by intensifying the amount of production a worker provides during the hours of work, and by lengthening the working week.

Certainly in recent decades bosses have extracted more work out of fewer workers as a means of piling up their profits. But the growing trend of unpaid overtime is one of the most glaring forms of profiteering. And it is likely to rise, as the recession bites deeper; fear of being made unemployed gives the employers a powerful weapon to pressure people into unpaid hours of extra work.

All this, whilst the number of people with no hours of work – the unemployed – rockets to levels not seen in years.

And meantime many employers – including in sectors as varied as the car industry, steel, the finance sector – are putting workers on reduced hours with equivalent cuts in pay; prolonged shut-downs with savage pay cuts; ‘sabbaticals’ as an alternative to outright redundancies – all to preserve profit margins at cost to workers’ pay packets.

Open Secret Company Accounts

Instead of feeding the philosophy that there is nothing can be done about all this – and specifically about job losses – it is high time the leaderships of the trade union movement spearheaded an aggressive campaign to ‘cut hours – not jobs’, to ‘cut hours – not pay’.

Every time some employer demands layoffs, redundancies or outright closures, the first demands of the trade union movement and its allies should be for public inspection of all the secret company accounts, to expose where all the profits have gone – and in many cases where all the public grants and subsidies have gone. And this should not just look at the current year’s accounts, where bosses may be able to demonstrate loss-making during the recession – but also the accounts for previous years of piling up profits.

Such an exercise would provide plenty of ammunition to challenge the employers’ ‘justification’ for job losses or closures.

Cut Hours – not Jobs or Pay

But regardless of whether companies and public sector employers are announcing job losses, they should be challenged by a generalised campaign for a shorter working week – without a penny being lost in pay.

As an immediate initial step, the battle-cry for a 35 hour maximum working week across the board, but crucially without loss of earnings, would rally workers and their families around an eminently rational measure in this crazed, profit-motivated system.

Such a shorter working week would vastly reduce stress levels and other illnesses, help improve health and safety at work, and actually boost productivity from less tired, more motivated workers.

It would greatly improve the family and social lives of working people – a real measure to enhance the much talked about ‘work/life balance’.

And crucially, it would create at least a couple of million jobs across the UK!

Challenging the Profit System

The demands to ‘cut hours – not jobs’ and ‘cut hours – not pay’ would of course challenge the central motive of capitalist employers: profit.

They impose long hours; unpaid overtime; pay cuts through prolonged shut-downs and reduced hours; closures and redundancies…. all to secure the maximum profit levels at the expense of workers’ lives being made a misery.

By cutting the working week, but protecting the level of income of workers, a greater share of national wealth would be distributed in wages, a lesser percentage in profit.

This fight to share out the work, without loss of earnings, needs to run in tandem with the campaign for a living minimum wage, a safety net of at least £8 to £9 an hour, based on the formula of two-thirds median male earnings.

Many who work day and night at risk to their own health are on dirt cheap wages – a system encouraged rather than eliminated by the pathetic level of Labour’s current minimum wages.

There are alternatives to long hours of work alongside no work for millions, a rational alternative to the slaughter of jobs in pursuit of profit margins.

The potential power of the unions and the communities they are rooted in needs to be combined with the sharp weapon of fighting demands that would share out the work rather than share out the misery.

6th August 2009

A rash of factory and workplace occupations is spreading across the globe as workers defy the brutal consequences of the recession.

Instead of surrendering to mass redundancies and outright closures – sometimes at a few minutes’ notice, often without even redundancy packages – workers are occupying their workplaces as a central method of struggling for justice.

Every example that wins concessions is boosting the belief of other workforces that there is an alternative to just resigning to the butchery in the boardrooms – that belligerent, militant class action can win at least something where workers have nothing to lose.

Socialists have a duty to assist fellow-workers in deploying the best methods of struggle to save jobs – as well as uniting workers around fighting socialist policies that would challenge and eliminate the need for redundancies.

Victory to Vestas

The sit-in at Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight has created a storm of international publicity and sympathy for the 600 workers who face the dole, at the very time the Labour government pledges to create 400,000 new green jobs over 5 years.

The 25 Vestas workers who staged this factory occupation, supported by a mass rally outside every night, displayed tremendous courage in the face of numerous attempts by the bully-boy, anti-union Vestas bosses to evict them.

They tried to starve them out, blocking food supplies being sent in by supporters. They threatened the sack and removal of redundancy payments from the workers staging the sit-in. They took out an injunction to gain re-possession of the factory – in order to close it and move production to the USA and China!

Vestas had no union recognition. Some workers joined a union and started organizing others. A group of them established a campaign committee and organised the sit-in from 20th July. This bold action won the active support of hundreds others – Vestas workers, other trade unionists, environmentalists, the local community – on an island where there are no other jobs to go to.

Vestas workers have gone further than any of the other recent factory sit-ins in terms of the demands they are making from their ‘campaign headquarters’ inside the factory: “Gordon Brown – Nationalise this!” declared the banner from day one.

A statement from the workers’ occupation declared, If the government can spend billions bailing out the banks – and even nationalize them – then surely they can do the same at Vestas.

Every victory encourages action

As well as organizing solidarity for these heroic fighters for jobs and the protection of the environment, we have a duty to learn from workers’ experiences of sit-ins as a method of struggle, particularly as redundancies and closures sweep the land like a pandemic.

Vestas is only the latest in a series of workplace occupations in the UK. And Thomas Cook workers in Dublin, members of the TSSA union, on 31st July occupied in defiance of closure of 100 offices.

The recent outbreak of factory take-overs in Britain and Ireland began with Waterford Glass workers occupying the plant on 30th January, when the employers announced an immediate end to production and 480 job losses.
After 8 weeks’ struggle, they reluctantly accepted a deal that saved 176 of the 480 jobs.

Visteon occupations

But their example fed the appetite of other workers facing savage closures under brutal terms and conditions. On 31st March, over 600 workers at three Visteon (ex Fords) plants in Belfast, Enfield and Basildon occupied and picketed when they were declared redundant at a few minutes’ notice, without any redundancy pay and with their pensions frozen.

A month later, appropriately on May Day, the workers won enhanced redundancy terms, payments in lieu of notice, and holiday pay.

As Kevin Nolan, UNITE union convener at the Enfield factory put it,

People ended up with a year and a half’s worth of salary. That’s a victory when you consider Visteon were hiding behind the recession as a way of completely abandoning all responsibility for 600 UK workers and just dumping them.

Prior to that high-profile sit-in, a small group of non-unionised workers at Prisme in Dundee occupied their workplace, encouraged by Waterford Glass workers, (who subsequently visited the Dundee sit-in). They had been sacked without notice and without any redundancy pay Fifty-one days later, the sit-in beat off the redundancies by establishing a cooperative.

Vital part of history

Workplace occupations are not a new form of struggle, of course, but this new wave of sit-ins follows many years of the method receding into the background.

Italian car workers seized their factories in northern Italy in the 1920s. What were dubbed ‘sit-won strikes’ swept countries like France and the USA in the mid-1930s. Closer to home and to the present, the most famous workplace occupation was the 1971-2 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) ‘work-in’ – in reply to the Tory government’s closure of the yards with at least 6,000 redundancies. This triggered a mass movement, saved many of the jobs after the Tories were forced into a U-turn, and was the impetus to at least 200 sit-ins across the UK in the first half of the 1970s.

For a time such audacious actions receded, although Lee Jeans (mostly women) workers in Greenock occupied in 1981; Caterpillar workers in Uddingston in 1986; and Glacier Metal workers in Glasgow won an outright victory after their seven-week occupation in November-December 1996.

Now, as the global capitalist crisis bites, with even more catastrophic closures and cut-backs on jobs looming, this form of struggle could come back into its own.

Powerful weapons of struggle

Sit-ins are a powerful weapon, paralysing production; psychologically bringing the battle into the bosses’ ‘own territory’; preventing them from stripping the factory of machinery and equipment that they may want to shift to other production sites, including abroad, in their hunt for subsidies and cheaper labour; preventing bosses from bussing in scabs past picket lines that are hamstrung by anti-union laws and deployment of the police (as seen, for example, at Timex in 1993).

But a sit-in ‘with folded arms’ can still be defeated, or at best win shoddy concessions far short of the potential victories on the agenda, if workers’ occupations are not accompanied by concerted campaigning outside the sit-in.

When workers facing closures consider a sit-in they should also try to prepare for a campaign of seeking solidarity from fellow workers and local communities – or at least put that into action as soon as they occupy. Such outgoing, concerted campaigning is critical, firstly to help prevent employers evicting them, secondly to enhance the prospects of outright victory for their demands. That was the advice we put into action from day one of the Glacier Metal occupation in 1996. It is clearly what the Vestas workers are ably applying.

Touring other workplaces; taking to the streets with leaflets, bucket collections and megaphones to explain the case behind the sit-ins; organizing solidarity mass pickets, rallies and demonstrations – all this and more was done in conquering outright victory for the 1996 Glacier Metal workers sit-in, and is the method being applied at other recent occupations to one extent or another.

Demands from the sit-ins

The other key question that remains is: what do workers demand whilst they occupy their workplace?

Of course that depends on what they are fighting against! In the case of Glacier Metal it was mass dismissal of the entire workforce in the drive to smash the union and rip up hard-won conditions. Full re-instatement of every worker, with continuity of terms and conditions, and continued union recognition, were the demands of the sit-in. And that was what was won!

In the case of Visteon, workers occupied to win redundancy payments and protection of their pensions. They won substantial concessions, though they still lost their jobs.

Vestas workers have made the most far-reaching demands – and absolutely appropriate ones to the situation, occupying in support of nationalization of the factory. With the need to save jobs and simultaneously save the planet from catastrophic climate change, the best route is public ownership of the UK’s only wind turbine factory, as part of the call for public ownership of the energy industry as a means of democratically planning clean, green energy production.

Most occupations arise from closures or mass redundancies. So defence of every job is the starting point. And instead of pouring a fortune from the public purse down the throats of profiteering bosses who are hell-bent on racing across the globe in pursuit of super-profits, workers and their unions should champion the demand for public ownership of the assets, under democratic working class control, to sustain jobs.

Alternative plans of production

In situations where a workers’ inspection of the company accounts and the industry concludes that continued production of their pervious products are either unviable or undesirable, alternative plans of socially useful and environmentally friendly output comes into its own.

Way back in the 1970s, workers at Lucas aerospace plants constructed such workers’ alternative plans of production. In subsequent years, several other examples were produced by workers in struggle, with the help of sympathetic experts. And the unions and peace movement have published well-researched proposals for jobs diversification in the defence industry that would actually increase employment.

In the 21st century, this is especially important, with vast scope for job protection and job creation to match the need for green social production, such as energy-efficient housing, a vastly expanded, integrated public transport network, and production and distribution of clean green energy. 

Reverse the tide of closures

Workplace occupations are not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ method of struggle, applicable on every single occasion.

They should not be turned into a fetish. But they are an enormously powerful weapon of struggle that should be utilized far more widely in the teeth of closures and mass redundancies, and in the vast majority of cases have won huge concessions or outright victories.

Strikes are another indispensable means of fighting to defend jobs. Often they are the most viable method of resistance in workforces spread around scattered workplaces – as in the Royal Mail currently, the civil service – and places that provide services rather than being centres of industrial production. On the other hand, in some conditions, strikes against closures can sometimes allow the employers to just walk away, leaving whole communities wrecked. Strikes can sometimes be more akin to a boss’s lock-out, and less effective in stopping asset-stripping by employers shifting production to richer pastures for profiteering.

In stark contrast to both, appeals to the employers’ good nature to ‘change their minds’ about closures are a pitifully weak response to the boardroom boot-boys, who will only ever ‘change their minds’ when they know the alternative is carnage for their reputation and profit levels.

Many workers will increasingly see they have nothing to lose in the teeth of mass redundancies, and a lot to win by taking up the cudgels. As Visteon’s UNITE convener Kevin Nolan recently told Labour Research magazine,

We just thought: ‘What do we have to lose?’ So we just went for it. If anyone else is in the same position I’d say weigh everything up and if you think there’s a chance of winning something back or improving your situation by occupying the place, then go for it.

By seizing control of the company assets, including valuable machinery, plus halting production, whilst using the workplace as a huge campaign headquarters, occupations provide workers with an unprecedented platform to take on the bosses who want to heap the crisis they have created on the shoulders of working people.

We have a duty to concretely assist every group of workers who take such action; every victory won is a boost to the generalized struggle to save jobs, not profits, to reverse the tide of closures and cut-backs endured for far too long. The national unions, TUC and STUC should urgently call rallies and demonstrations in solidarity with all who have the courage to stand up for jobs, and give courage to those cowed by the Juggernaut of closures and redundancies.

The Scottish Socialist Party is in full support of the thousands of postal workers who are staging strike action and other protests on Friday 17th July, in anger at arbitrary cuts to staffing levels and service levels to the public.

These cuts are being imposed by Royal Mail bosses in flagrant breach of the 2007 Pay and Modernisation Agreement, signed after strike action that year.

Delivery Ofices and Mail Centres in Edinburgh and East/Central Scotland will walk out, as will Irvine posties the next day. This is part of a growing groundswell of strikes across the UK , with 400 other offices requesting ballots for strike action.

High-and-mighty Royal Mail bosses are imposing cuts to staff and services; managers are using bully-boy tactics to impose the cuts, and ever-increasing workloads are being heaped on the shoulders of a shrinking workforce. Pressure and stress is at breaking point for postal workers, who are hitting back with escalating strike action.

John Brown, Scottish Regional Secretary of the Communications Workers’ Union (CWU) told me what lies behind the rolling anger and action by posties.

Royal Mail is trying to impose cuts way beyond levels acceptable to either staff or the public who rely on the service we deliver. They are totally intransigent, refusing to negotiate and abide by the 2007 Pay and Modernisation Agreement, which stated that the union would be fully involved at all levels at all stages of modernization.

They want 10 per cent savings across the board and insist that this must mean 10 per cuts to duties. There are not compulsory job losses as such, but they are sneaking through job losses. For instance, Royal Mail are forcing people to leave the industry; alongside their ‘savings’, a redundancy package is on offer, so when people who are fed up and want to get out of the job leave, they are not being replaced.

The press is trying to play up the idea this strike action is about pay. Well, in reducing the numbers in Delivery Offices, Royal Mail is offering full-time workers part-time jobs – which obviously involve big pay cuts.

But this is primarily strike action against the attack on the public service provided through arbitrary reductions in staffing levels.

And these are not cuts due to the introduction of new machinery. The national Agreement means any new technology can only be introduced with the full agreement of the union and its members. So far only 4 or 5 pilot offices have had the new machinery tried out, and as we expected, they have not led to the savings Royal Mail predicted.

But the cuts members are striking against are before the job cuts that new machinery will involve. By striking, members are effectively saying we cannot provide the level of service to the public expected of us because of the arbitrary cuts being imposed through executive action by the employers.

There have been little or no local negotiations. Senior management of Royal Mail has failed to even turn up to the previous talks with the national union. Today (15th July), they are supposed to meet the union in London . Maybe the strike action in London will have concentrated the minds of the Neanderthal men in senior management and force them to make concessions!

With the Royal Mail making £900,000 a day in profits, there is even less excuse for these cuts to jobs and services.

The New Labour government has been dealt a bloody nose on their plans to part-privatise Royal Mail. Now is the time for this wounded beast to be pursued through united, national strike action against their cuts.

These attacks are partly motivated by a desire for revenge for the defeat of privatisation on the part of Royal Mail bosses and Lord Mandelson, the Prince of Darkness and Dirty Deeds, who has announced his desire to accustom workers to a full decade of austerity, so as to enrich his friends in industry and the banks.

The growing revolt, through spreading strikes, could now be escalated into national strikes – accompanied by withdrawal of funding of New Labour by the CWU – which is an increasingly abusive relationship, akin to voluntary payouts to an arsonist to buy the fuel to torch your home!

The SSP stands unashamedly on the side of workers striking to preserve a vital public service.

Prisme Packaging Occupation

Statement by the occupying workforce.

After 51 days in occupation the Dundee Prisme workers have decided to end their occupation. The reason we have taken this decision is that it looks like we have secured funding to take our co-op venture forward and save the jobs that we thought had gone.

Our occupation began to secure our redundancy payments and other monies that were denied to us by our employer when we were sacked. However, during the occupation we also decided to fight to safeguard our jobs because we believed there was a viable business, even if our predecessors did not. It looks like we have achieved this aim. A new company Discovery Packaging and Design Ltd is going to be launched on 1st May 2009.

This victory would not have been possible if it had not been for the support we have had from the general public, trade unionists, socialists and many others. This support and solidarity has been overwhelming and has helped give us the energy and determination to carry on for more than 7 weeks.

We said at the beginning of this that we were little people who had refused to be little anymore. We are proud of what we have achieved and our dignity is intact. We showed we would not be walked over by an uncaring employer.

We want to thank all those who have supported our struggle over the last 51 days, your support has been invaluable. Thanks once again to you all.

The Prisme workers will be leaving the factory together and united at 5pm on Friday 24th April.

NUJ Industrial Action at Trinity Mirror – Boycott of the Sunday Mail

On Saturday 4 April, journalists working at Trinity Mirror newspapers (Scottish Daily Record and Sunday Mail) will take strike action over management’s decision to cut 70 jobs. The edition of the Sunday Mail which appears on Sunday 5 April will be produced by non-union labour using copy from agencies. It would be of tremendous benefit to the NUJ and striking workers if the sales collapsed as a result.

Therefore, the STUC is calling on all its affiliated organisations and their members to boycott the Sunday Mail this weekend.

Stephen Boyd

Assistant Secretary

Scottish Trades Union Congress

by Simon Basketter

Some 200 workers have occupied the Visteon car parts plant in Belfast, Northern Ireland, against job cuts.

The workers went into occupation on Tuesday after the bosses summarily announced the closure of the plant with the loss of all jobs.

Davy MacMurray, from the Unite union, said the way the job cuts were announced was brutal. He said, The administrator came in, held a meeting and told the workforce their employment was terminated. These people were going to be put out on the street tonight.

Visteon took over the plant from Ford in 2000. All the parts the plant makes were for Ford.
One occupying worker told Socialist Worker, Ford have a commitment and agreement with the unions that there would never be compulsory redundancies. At the very least we should get the same redundancy package as Ford workers.

In the early evening the 200-strong workforce was holding protests both inside and outside the plant. Supporters were bringing supplies and sleeping bags. The furious workers are fighting to be treated with decency by the company and the administrators. They are planning protests tomorrow at Ford dealerships across the city.

Jon Macquire the Unite union convenor at the plant, spoke to Socialist Worker from the occupation. Ford and Visteon have manipulated this situation together, he said.

We have been treated disgracefully. We are occupying the factory to save our jobs. There was no consultation whatsoever – they simply announced the closure.

They have put the pension scheme into administration. To make it clear – we are in for the long haul and are committed to get proper redundancy packages and pensions.

We are determined to continue our occupation and we appeal on workers throughout Ireland, Britain and internationally to support our fight to defend jobs.

Visteon has also announced the closure of is plants in Basildon and Enfield – threatening another 400 jobs.

Among them were members of the SSP and of Solidarity working together to highlight the Prisme occupation and raise funds for them.

The police, prompted by a complaint by a member of the public (most likely some Labour Party loyalist, approached each of these in turn to threaten them with further action should they not desist from their activities. The Palestine Solidarity Stall were spoken to for a while. The fatcat banker was warned over his possession of clearly fake money – something companies and churches use all the time for advertising and prosthletising respectively.

Most outrageously was the police action over the solidarity with Prisme workers. Those collecting were told that they must immediately stop collecting money. Their names, addresses and work details were taken. They were further informed that if they continued to collect money in a bucket they would be charged and that the money would be seized.

The rest is nonsense and worth fighting for a day in court, but the threat to seize donations raised for workers in struggle was believed to be most serious. The SSP unreservedly condemn the police decision in this case. Surely for one Tayside Police have better things to do such as continually and habitually break the speed limit without penalty, such as their 140MPH+ chief constable. Secondly the money is being raised for workers who have been treated appallingly by their employer.

We will continue to work with the striking workers and to raise money for them. Currently they have no mechanism for receiving donations other than directly in cash, so we will publicise any other ways to do so if and when they are available.

They have resorted to indefinite strike action since 6 January after months of fighting the council’s review of their jobs, which proposes increased hours of work, vastly increased responsibilities, but a pay cut of over £1,000 for many of them!

These workers deal with offenders in groups of five, carrying out community services as an alternative to prison. After the first week of their strike, the Labour council – which refuses to even speak to them let alone protect their pay through proper grading – has been forced to shut down the service to offenders for at least two weeks.

The strikers have toured round major council buildings, picketing them, winning warm moral and financial support from fellow-UNISON members, and they have lobbied the Labour councillors’ meetings. They have been boosted by support from other UNISON branches in Scotland, as well as the PCS civil service union national leadership.

Donald McNaughton, Community Service Superviser, told me the background and the strikers’ modest demands:

It goes back to the Council’s Pay & Benefits Review, where they promised that anyone losing out financially would get training and be promoted, that there’d be a Review and nobody would lose money.

UNISON and Community Service Workers fully participated in this Review, only to be told before Xmas that we would have an increased working week, with compulsory Sundays, and increased duties and responsibilities.

Up to now we worked four days over seven, a 32 hour week; got enhancements for working Saturdays and Sundays; and got £1,400 for driving council vehicles.

Now they want us to drive as part of our normal duties (without the payment), work compulsory Sundays, find placements for offenders, train them, assess their employability – all on top of our normal duties. For that we are to go on Grade PCS4, which still leaves us in detriment on pay.

For months we protested by sticking to our job roles, refusing to drive council vehicles or train offenders. The council hired black hackneys to ship the boys round the city, and simply refused to negotiate with us. So we had no alternative but to withdraw our labour.

We’re disgusted at the council, and its leader Stephen Purcell, for breaking their promises, and refusing to talk to us, when there are only 21 of us.

We work with squads of offenders. The separate workers who deal with individual placements of offenders have been upgraded to PCS5. That’s all we are asking for, the same grade 5 to prevent pay cuts.

We demand that the Council recognise we do a decent job, to respect us and talk to us. It’s not asking much for them to come and explain why they have broken their written promises to the unions in 2007.

An un-named council spokesman has said we are getting paid for what we do. That’s an insult.

They’re finding all this money for the Commonwealth Games. They are asking us to help clean up the city to make it attractive to tourists, yet they won’t pay us a fair rate or even negotiate.

We’re getting great support from colleagues in UNISON and other unions, moral and financial, and want to thank them for their support.

The SSP supports the free movement of Labour and vehemently opposes racist immigration controls introduced by New Labour. At the same time however we unequivocally support the demand that UK workers should enjoy equal consideration for work on these contracts. We reject efforts by organisations such as the BNP to divide workers up on the basis of race or nationality.

This is fundamentally a dispute to defend jobs, wages and working conditions and it requires the unity of all workers, of all nationalities, in rejecting multi national employers’ attempts to slash jobs, wages and conditions and trades union rights.

We urge UK unions to support those defending their right to work and to urgently meet with unions in Italy and Portugal to build a unified approach capable of halting employers efforts to divide and exploit workers across Europe.

Public sector Unions, Rally City Square, tomorrow.
Assemble: Hilltown Park, 11.00 a.m. march to City Square.

Dundee, the 8th of February 2008,
We, members of the Dundee SSP branch, fight for freedom, in particular union freedom, justice, dignity, decent housing and work conditions and for the equitable sharing of the product of this work.

As we have been fighting and keep on fighting with the women and men of Dundee in their fight for their rights, we assure our fellows from the Intersyndicale Autonome de la Fonction Publique algérienne of our solidarity and full support in their legitimate action and in particular in their actions during this month of February.

We join their movement, their demands and denounce with them the injustices suffered by the Algerian people. We commit ourselves to spread the information regarding their fight and to support it by actions in Scotland.

Fraternally
The SSP Dundee branch

After several months of suspension, fourteen days of strike action and a six day disciplinary Karen Reissmann, chair of the Manchester Mental Health Unison branch has been sacked for the ‘crime’ of opposing mental health cuts.

The 700 strong branch has voted to go on indefinite strike. Urgent financial and other solidarity is needed.

Unison’s national industrial action committee has sanctioned the community mental health team comprising some 160 workers to go on indefinite official strike action from this Thursday. This is a strike Unison must win. Donations need to flood in, with messages of support, invitations for speakers, national publicity and demands of Unison officials that they respect the demand of the branch and that the official strike is spread to cover the whole branch.

Rush donations and messages of support to the Manchester Community and Mental Health Unison branch, 70 Manchester Road, Manchester, M21 9UN. Phone 07972 120 451 or email unison@zen.co.uk

Cheques can be made out to UNISON Manchester Community & Mental Health

Visit the support website at reinstate karen site .

The petition can be downloaded here and printed off to use at work or union meetings.

More background here and here

——————

UNISON STATEMENT ON KAREN REISSMAN

On Monday November 5th Karen Reissmann, CPN and UNISON branch chair was sacked on 4 counts. Firstly that, when she was interviewed in December 2006 criticising the transfer of NHS work to the voluntary sector, she brought the Trust into disrepute. Secondly, for telling people that she was suspended and what for. Thirdly, for protesting her innocence. Fourthly, for allowing the press to print information, some misleading about her case. The fifth charge of misusing time was dropped. All the charges were gross misconduct and all sackable offences.

UNISON believes this is an absolute disgrace. Union reps must have the right to campaign against cuts and victimisation of our trade union reps. The Human Rights Act brought in by the Labour government allows for freedom of expression. Karen works in the NHS, in 2007, in Britain not Burma – she must have the right to speak out without fear of persecution. If she remains sacked it will make all NHS staff and all trade union reps feel much more cautious about saying anything.

UNISON is determined to fight for Karen’s reinstatement. 150 members of her branch who work in community mental health teams and crisis resolution teams will start an indefinite strike from Thursday 8th November as part of that fight. There will be picket lines from 8am to 11am at North Manchester General Hospital, MRI Hathersage Rd, and Chorlton House. On Thursday strikers will then meet at 12noon to organise their next activities and march to the strategic Health Authority at Piccadilly.

In 2 weeks we will have a branch wide one-day strike.

We also hope to have a solidarity rally on Wednesday 14th November in Manchester in the early evening, details to follow.

We also plan a Saturday demonstration in Manchester, probably 24th Nov.

We expect to be able to pay very substantial hardship pay to all strikers and will be sending delegations of strikers around the country to speak to other trade unionists and raise money. Already we have had significant promises of money from a number of branches eg Pennine have promised £2000 a month.

If you want to make a donation please send to “Manchester Community and Mental Health branch UNISON” c/o union office, Chorlton House, 70 Manchester Rd, Manchester M21 9UN. If you want a speaker at your next union meeting please contact us on unison@zen.co.uk or 07972 120 451.