STRONGER UNIONS

Over the next few months unions will understandably focused on the General Election. Labour Party affiliates will be busy mobilising people and resources to try and deliver a Labour victory; and unions more broadly will be working hard to ensure that the priorities of union members and their families are reflected in Party manifestos.
Whatever the [...]

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Just read the sad news that Howard Zinn, the author of the seminal ‘A People’s History of the United States’ has passed away.
I met Howard Zinn briefly five years ago, when he gave he led a seminar at the HTUP, and he was a genuine, inspiring bloke – a working class intellectual, who worked in a [...]

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Good article in last Friday’s Times, where  Stephen Bevan of the Work Foundation warns against politicians trying to make political capital with simplistic arguments about public sector productivity.
He makes 3 key points: Firstly, that existing measures of public sector productivity are inadequate; secondly, that the nature of public sector reform will make trying to get [...]

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Gregor Gall has an article in the Morning Star today, following up the TUC’s Union Advantage report (and linked ‘Union Adventage’ pieces we’ve been running on this blog).
As usual with Gregor’s articles I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with him in equal measure (!),  but he makes the very valid point  that we need to ensure that we don’t ’sell’ trade [...]

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According to its web-site, Reform is ‘non-party think tank whose mission is to set out a better way to deliver public services and economic prosperity’. Which all seems rather benign, until you twig that  its Director is the former  Head of the Political Section in the Conservative Research Department, and its Advisory Council includes such renowned [...]

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Here’s the TUC’s response to David Cameron’s pledge to cut Britain’s ‘health and safety ‘neurosis’.
The dictionary definition of ‘neurosis’ is a mental disorder, ‘characterised by symptoms such as hysteria, anxiety, depression, or obsessive behaviour’. This seems a strange way to reference 246,000 workplace injuries a year. Perhaps these aren’t ‘real’ injuries at all – maybe those [...]

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 Great idea by UNITE members under pressure at Fujitsu. In advance of their industrial action ballot, they decided to hold a ‘practice picket’. You can see the pics here.

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Excellent article in the Times by Janice Turner on the rise of ‘casual sexism’.
The whole article is worth a read but here are some highlights:
“Does casual sexism matter any more? Aren’t we all too cool and liberated to care? It is always crass and reductive to draw up cause and effect. But there are certain [...]

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The political debate about health-care in the US, has sparked  a well deserved outpouring of support for the NHS here in the UK. But even as everyone from the PM to the genius behind Father Ted that is Graham Linehan are proclaiming their love for the NHS,  those lovely people at McKinsey’s are dreaming up plans to [...]

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As most readers of this blog will be aware the US trade union movement is in the midst of an ongoing struggle to secure the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.
The TUC has prepared a briefing for UK trade unionists on what you can do to help. This is vital stuff as the union-busters [...]

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