NEW DISPUTES are brewing among British Airways workers at Heathrow. Some 4,500 BA engineers moved a step closer to an industrial dispute when their union negotiators failed to reach an agreement with BA management last week. The engineers are represented by the Amicus and GMB unions. They are potentially an extremely powerful group of workers.
TALKS BETWEEN the RMT union and management of the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry company over pay were taking place as Socialist Worker went to press. The company had been refusing to meet the union and had launched a campaign in the Scottish press directed at RMT general secretary Bob Crow.
"What do we want? Shift pay! When do we want it? Now!" These chants echoed round a small North Wales town last Sunday as workers from Ifor Williams Trailers continued their battle for night shift pay and other improvements.
CONSTRUCTION workers at Heathrow's new Terminal Five complex have won significant gains over working hours that will enable them to have something approaching a family life. Bosses of construction firm Laing O'Rourke caved in at the end of last week under the pressure of a strike ballot planned by the GMB union and of threatened wildcat walkouts by the 1,500 workers on the site.
AROUND 450 workers at luxury car maker Aston Martin struck for three hours last week. It was the first strike in the company's history. Workers at the company's two plants are angry over the introduction of what they call "Martini" shifts-a reference to an advertisement for the drink which could be enjoyed "any time, any place, anywhere".
HUNDREDS OF Scottish nursery nurses struck for three days across East and West Dunbartonshire last week. Support for the strike was solid and it closed about 60 nurseries.
Blair lied to start war on Iraq... Dossiers were fiction... No weapons of mass destruction found... Iraq did not try to buy uranium... Huge global movement against the war... 7,500 Iraqi civilians killed during the war...
THE TORIES sank further into the gutter last week with a new attack on migrants coming to Britain. Liam Fox, Tory health spokesman, said a Tory government would force immigrants to pay to be screened for illnesses like TB and HIV in their own country before they could get travel visas.
THE JURY was still out in the trial against the Yarls Wood refugees as Socialist Worker went to press on Tuesday. The five defendants left at the end of the three-month trial faced prison terms if found guilty. They were charged after the fire that swept through Yarls Wood centre in Bedfordshire on 14 February last year.
NEW RESEARCH shows the widening gap between the incomes of people at the top and those at the bottom. It also exposes how "average" figures hide the truth. "If Mr Brown's aim was to create a more equal society, he has failed," said the Financial Times.
A REPORT this week confirmed that US military casualties from the occupation of Iraq have been more than twice the number most Americans have been led to believe. The high number of accidents, suicides and other non-combat deaths have gone largely unreported in the media. Since 1 May, when President Bush declared the end of major combat operations, 52 US soldiers have been killed by hostile fire, according to Pentagon figures quoted in almost all the war coverage.
POSTAL WORKERS across Britain will start voting in a strike ballot over pay in two weeks time. At the same time a separate ballot begins in the capital over London weighting. The Communication Workers Union (CWU) postal executive voted to call the ballots last week. Their decision is the result of huge pressure from below. Postal workers are fed up with grafting harder and harder for a pathetically small pay packet and they have told their union they want action.
