THE TORY candidate for London mayor, Steven Norris, is taking over as chairman of Jarvis, one of the top firms to benefit from privatisation. Jarvis faces an investigation into its maintenance of the rails at Potters Bar, scene of a fatal crash last year.
THE WAR in Iraq has reached new heights over the last week, six months after George Bush claimed it was over. US planes and helicopters pounded several cities including parts of the capital, Baghdad, with 500 pound bombs. All civilian flights into Baghdad airport were suspended after a surface to air missile hit a German Airbus cargo plane on Saturday.
AN UNOFFICIAL walkout by over 200 postal workers in Oldham, Greater Manchester, won a victory last week. Members of the CWU union walked out at 7am on Tuesday of last week in a dispute over the handling of a backlog of mail that built up during other recent industrial action.
STRIKERS FROM a number of Unison union branches packed out a rally organised in Newham, east London, last week. It was to mark the second week of the latest phase of selective action to win improved London weighting for council workers. The Newham branch has come under attack from the New Labour council.
HUNDREDS OF workers at Lloyds TSB are balloting for industrial action in its central Newcastle call centre in a bid to stop the company shifting its 960 jobs to India. The ballot is scheduled to run from Monday of next week for seven days. It is part of the Unifi union's Stop the Closure campaign. It will also see a petition launched at six other sites.
THE TREASURY has given the clearest signal yet that it wants to introduce regional pay bargaining as a way of depressing workers' earnings. A "guidance note" issued this week from Gordon Brown's department says the policy could produce a few cases of higher pay in a small number of areas in London and the south east to overcome recruitment and retention difficulties. But it could also produce pay reductions "where there is currently too high a premium relative to the rest of the labour market".
VOTING PAPERS for the elections to the new national executive council for the Amicus union are now out. Amicus was created by the merger of the AEEU and MSF unions. The left is standing on a slate for the Amicus Unity Gazette. Election campaigning is well under way. The ballot closes on Friday of next week.
A DETERMINED campaign and the threat of industrial action has defeated an attempted partial privatisation of services at Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive. Unison branch chair Tony Wilson told Socialist Worker that the important campaign had lasted two and a half years.
HUNDREDS OF workers at Sunderland University held a one-day strike last week against compulsory redundancies. Nine lecturers' jobs are under threat. "Lecturers have worked against the odds to keep standards high and deliver good results for students," said one Natfhe union member. "But university management seems to regard cost-cutting as more important that the quality of education provision."
SOLIDARITY WITH workers in Colombia will be the focus of a series of meetings and conferences across Britain. On Saturday the TUC hosts a conference on "Conflict in Colombia: Britain's secret war", jointly sponsored with the Justice for Colombia organisation and the War on Want charity.
TUBE WORKERS across all grades are to begin taking industrial action in a battle to restore safety standards following the imposition of the PPP privatisation scheme. The RMT union last week announced that 81 percent of its members had voted for industrial action and 55 percent for strikes over safety.
