THERE WILL now be a series of local attacks brigade by brigade after the end of the firefighters' dispute. The national agreement is clear that money for promised pay increases beyond 4 percent is dependent on achieving "savings" locally, to be assessed by the audit commission.
SOME 1,000 lift engineers in the Amicus union working for Otis struck from Friday of last week until Tuesday of this week. The workers are protesting against an imposed pay settlement of 1.7 percent.
ACTIVISTS IN the PCS civil servants' union are campaigning to ensure that the right wing Moderates group which has dominated the union is defeated in national executive elections.
Video footage shows Guy Smallman, a freelance photographer who has taken pictures for Socialist Worker, being hit by a stun grenade fired by the Swiss police. Guy was covering the recent protests against the G8 summit in Evian when he was caught with crowds of people peacefully leaving Geneva.
OVER 300 people attended the West Country premiere of the film Jeremy Hardy Versus the Israeli Army in Exeter last Saturday. People came to see the film made by Leila Sansour about the journey broadcaster Hardy takes when he agrees to become a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and join them in their work in Palestine.
THE NATIONAL conference of Britain's biggest union got under way on Tuesday as Socialist Worker went to press. Delegates representing 1.3 million members of the Unison public sector workers' union faced a series of key debates.
AROUND 500 council workers met last week in one of the biggest union meetings in Sandwell in the West Midlands for many years. They voted unanimously to campaign against the New Labour council's plans to privatise their jobs through the setting up of an Arms Length Management Organisation (ALMO) to run housing.
OVER 170 people packed into St Alfege school hall in Whitstable in Kent to hear George Galloway speak on Wednesday of last week. He received warm applause after describing the witch-hunt against him by Blair and the Daily Telegraph. Other speakers included Lindsey German from the Stop the War Coalition and Aram, an Iraqi refugee.
THE FIGHT against low pay by journalists reached a critical stage this week. National Union of Journalists (NUJ) union members at Bradford Newsquest were due to meet on Tuesday to decide whether to reballot for more strike action. They had been on all-out strike until Wednesday of last week.
"IT'S ABOUT time the low paid stood up and gave the politicians and the fat cats a good shaking," says Annie, a striking nursery nurse from Edinburgh. She is one of thousands of workers across Britain who are fighting to end poverty pay and stop bosses treating them like second class citizens.
MILLIONS OF words have been written about the euro this week. But there is one currency question that neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown will confront - the scandalous poverty wages that millions of workers in Britain are forced to exist on.
THE US claimed that Iraq's restrictions on United Nations inspectors was the reason it had to go to war. Now it occupies Iraq it has placed more limits on UN-appointed nuclear experts than Saddam Hussein did. The US has only allowed seven members of the International Atomic Energy Agency into Iraq.
