Trade Unions |
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Fremantle – slashing pay and gagging trade unionistsOn 1 April 2007 Fremantle Trust cut 196 low paid care workers’ pay by up to 30%. The workers were told – “accept these terms or be sacked”! The union members involved in the dispute provide residential and day care to the elderly and vulnerable residents in Barnet’s old peoples’ homes, in north London. Fremantle Trust is a not-for-profit company that took over care home contracts five years ago. The cuts include lower wages, increased hours, no sick pay, shorter holidays and reduced payment for working unsocial hours. Even pensions to which contributions have been made during the workers’ service are to be dramatically cut by more than one third. In response to these attacks UNISON members voted to take strike action and have taken one day’s action while sustaining a high profile campaign. This is an all too familiar story of privatisation, where companies pledge to keep delivering the same service but under-cut the in-house provision by attacking the conditions of the workforce. UNISON is asking for the widest possible support for the Fremantle workers. Fremantle didn’t draw the line at attacking its own employees. In an unprecedented move, they contacted the internet service provider which hosts LabourStart. This pro-union website had been supporting the UNISON strikers and publicising their case. Fremantle’s lawyers demanded that the internet provider shut down the campaign or else face a lawsuit themselves. LabourStart were contacted by the legal department of the internet service provider and told that they had one day to close down the web campaign or else the entire LabourStart site would be shut down. The strikers are now running a site with LabourStart’s support www.wewillnotbesilenced.org.
Bob Crow of the Rail Maritime Transport union (above), fresh from its victory against Metronet, was removed from the TUC’s General Council. Meanwhile UNISON’s Dave Prentis, who had just presided over 400,000 health workers settling for a pay cut because of lack of leadership from the union, took over as TUC President. What a way to run a railroad! POA: militancy in unexpected quarters!Piers Mostyn The recent militant Prison Officers Association strike was hailed by the left. Yet the union had virtually pariah status not so many years ago. Go back a decade or two and it was an organising ground for racists and fascists within the labour movement. Its members are involved in the ugliest, most brutal and racist hard end of the strong state. And the union seemed to be unashamedly enthusiastic about this role. Has that all now changed? Over the past decade or so the union’s members have radicalised in the face of privatisation and a relentless assault on wages and conditions, eroding their status as well paid enforcers lording it over the rest of the working class. In addition, like in other areas of low-skilled public sector employment there has been a demographic shift. The uniformly white male organisation of the 1980s and before – heavily staffed by ex-army and ex-police officers who made a career choice out of joining the front ranks of the “hang ‘em and flog em’ brigade” – has been slowly transformed. There has been an influx of female and black workers driven into the job primarily by the dynamics of the low wage economy and stringent unemployment benefit rules. Parallel to these changes the prisons have been in a permanent state of crisis – with soaring inmate numbers leading to overcrowding and a chronic shortage of resources for basic rehabilitation and welfare. The POA – renowned in the Thatcher era for its annual calls for capital punishment is now more likely to be denouncing a system that warehouses the mentally ill and fails to provide drug rehabilitation and education welfare services for deprived youth. This doesn’t mean that everything has changed. Far from it. Racism and fascism among prison staff is a major problem. Brute violence and corruption is widespread – creating a regime in which murder, suicide and beatings have flourished. But the old days in which the union saw its job as being to defend such a regime and scapegoat those raising these issues are gone. Perhaps this is why some inmates clapped and cheered the screws as they came off the strike – despite the resulting loss of their highly-valued visits and association.
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The mettle of the trade union leadership in the face of Gordon Brown’s clear statement that his assault on working people’s conditions will be even more ferocious than that of his predecessor Tony Blair is sorely wanting. The stance of the Trade Union Congress is summed up in its treatment of two men.
Postal strikes back on!