AROUND 700 bus workers in Exeter and south and east Devon struck for two days last week. This followed a 93 percent vote in favour of industrial action. Strikers, members of the RMT union, want £6.50 per hour minimum and one hour off the 41-hour week. Stagecoach bosses are offering £7 per hour but that's tied to the loss of paid meal breaks, reduction of holiday entitlement from five to four weeks per year and unpaid work time for daily vehicle checks, walking time from the depot and cashing up.
LEADERS OF the Communication Workers Union (CWU) faced a key test this week. On Tuesday the union's postal executive was to vote on its response to demands for a strike ballot over London weighting. A press report in advance of the meeting suggested that the union's national leaders were opposed to a ballot because the annual pay negotiations with Royal Mail were "only just beginning".
SOME 1,000 lift engineers working for Otis were set to strike on Friday of this week and Monday of next week. The workers, members of the Amicus union, are continuing their long-running dispute over pay.
THE CRISIS over pensions has provoked another group of workers into strike action to defend their final salary pension scheme. Some 600 workers at the Rhodia chemical firm in Oldbury and Widnes were set to strike on Friday this week. The workers are members of the GMB and Amicus unions. The multinational wants to close their pension scheme to new entrants.
SOME 1,500 council workers across London walked out on strike on Monday. Most will be out for the next four weeks, in the latest phase of their battle to win an increase in their London weighting allowance. They are demanding a rise to £4,000 a year in the allowance which is meant to cover the extra costs of living and working in the capital. Other groups of public sector workers in London - from teachers to postal workers, firefighters to university workers - face similar fights.
REFUGEES WHO hoped to find peace and justice in Britain have been grilled by prosecution lawyers in the Yarls Wood trial taking place at Harrow Crown Court. Yarls Wood is New Labour's refugee detention centre in Bedfordshire. After a fire destroyed most of the centre on 14 February last year the refugees were arrested and faced charges including violent disorder. They could be sent to prison.
GEORGE BUSH'S visit to Africa last week was a grotesque spectacle. Nowhere else on earth has suffered so much from the policies he and those he represents push across the world. His visit came as a United Nations (UN) report showed how in over 50 countries, many in Africa, society has been plunged backwards in the last decade.
LEAVE ASIDE all the technicalities, exactly who said what and who knew what. The message that should have come out in this week's report from a Commons committee was that the war was for oil and US power and it was launched by lies. It is a lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that could be ready in 45 minutes. It is a lie that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger. It is a lie that Iraq had rebuilt factories capable of producing biological weapons.
ONE MILLION of Britain's poorest families are to lose money the government says they are entitled to. The government could snatch back up to half a billion pounds it had pledged would go to the poor. Chancellor Gordon Brown promised his new tax credit system would lift millions of people with children out of poverty.
WHEN MEMBERS of the TGWU union gathered for their conference they brought with them many bitter experiences of life under Labour. The union organises shop workers, security guards, bus drivers and factory workers. Many who spoke in the conference debates described living at the sharp end of Labour's neo-liberal policies.
THE CONFERENCE of the TGWU manual workers' union in Brighton last week provided further evidence of the shift to the left amongst rank and file trade unionists. Many delegates spoke about the reality of their working lives (see page 7). Almost every motion at the biannual conference was critical of New Labour, whether it was foundation hospitals, privatisation, the war, anti trade union laws or low pay.
