TUBE DRIVERS in the RMT union at Edgware Road, London, will ballot for strike action over the sacking of a colleague.
THREE WEEKS into a work to rule, the Edinburgh Cleansing Department dispute remains unresolved.
SUPPORT IS growing for the anti-war activists arrested under Egypt's notorious security laws. Egypt is a key Western ally in the Middle East. It also saw the region's most significant anti-war movement-where activists braved riot police and threats of arrest to take to the streets.
NEW FIGURES from the government's Office for National Statistics show that an incredible 10,000 factory jobs are being lost every week. Some 130,000 workers have lost their jobs in the last three months alone. James Dyson, vacuum cleaner maker, was slammed last year for throwing 800 workers at his Wiltshire plant on the scrap heap. Last week, Dyson added insult to injury by shifting a further 65 jobs to Malaysia.
"We're fed up with rubbish money and getting driven like slaves. Let's take the smile off those bloody managers' faces," says Mike, a Royal Mail delivery worker from Newcastle. The strike ballot among 160,000 postal workers has started, and there is a great determination to win the vote and hit Royal Mail hard.
AN NHS hospital in Birmingham was handed over to private management last week. The NHS trust's board signed a £1.3 million agreement with health service consultants Secta. The management of Good Hope Hospital was put out to franchise after it dropped from a three-star rating to zero because of mistakes in waiting list figures. Secta has appointed a former senior official from the NHS, Anne Heast, to take over as chief executive. She will be seconded to the hospital on a salary of £122,500.
A WORKER has been killed at a South Wales steel plant after becoming trapped in a piece of machinery. David Price, aged 54, from Newport, was carrying out maintenance work at the Alpha Steel plant on Saturday when he was killed.
DAVID KAY heads the Iraq Survey Group, which will soon produce another report on weapons of mass destruction. Kay's background shows how "impartial" that report will be. Under President Reagan, Kay was a chief scientist for the Pentagon, as well as serving as a section chief for the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Administration of the UN) from 1983 until 1991.
OVER TWO hundred bus drivers in York were set to strike on Wednesday of this week. Last week their first planned strike was called off while management negotiated a deal with the union.
