THE FIRE Brigades Union has called three further major demonstrations and rallies as its 55,000 members move to ballot for strike action over pay. There will be demonstrations in Swansea on Saturday 17 August, in Belfast on 24 August, and a rally in London on 2 September. A final meeting with the employers, who spurned calls for an increase in firefighters' pay to £30,000 a year, will take place at the beginning of September.
PROTESTERS will gather outside the South African embassy on Thursday next week in solidarity with 87 anti-privatisation activists from the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee. The 87, including renowned militant Trevor Ngwane, will be hauled before a court in Johannesburg on that day.
PRESSURE FROM below has pushed the leaders of the Communication Workers Union to call a strike ballot over the privatisation of Romec, the Post Office's cleaning and buildings maintenance section. In just over two weeks time, on 27 August, all 180,000 postal workers will begin a strike vote.
UNION LEADERS called off the strikes of over one million public sector workers on Monday of this week after they struck a deal with council bosses. The leaders of Unison, the TGWU and the GMB called off all strike action for six weeks after bosses were forced to slightly improve their previous offer of a 3 percent pay rise. This is despite the fact that they had previously refused to offer anything to council workers and said anything more than 3 percent was "pie in the sky". But the offer falls far short of what council workers deserve and what could have been won.
"IT COULD not be clearer. George Bush is going ahead with his invasion of Iraq. Tony Blair is his closest ally in this deadly operation. Blair has, according to some newspaper reports, already agreed to back the US. He plans to avoid a vote in parliament and wants to pretend that most people in Britain agree with him.
IMMIGRATION MINISTER Beverley Hughes ordered a police deportation squad to smash down the doors of a West Midlands mosque and snatch two traumatised asylum seekers on Thursday of last week. The abduction of Farid and Feriba Ahmad has created outrage.
LOCK CHILDREN up and throw away the key. That's New Labour's attitude to dealing with the "causes of crime", and it has been criticised again this week. Even the government's own youth crime "tsar" says under-18s awaiting trial, who have not been found guilty of anything, should not be banged up in Britain's overcrowded prisons.
JUST 44 percent of Britain's workers take their full holiday entitlement, a new report revealed this week. One in five people take less than a quarter of what they are owed, according to the internet jobs site reed.co.uk.
HEALTH EXPERTS have slammed Labour's new scheme for the NHS. The government has given star awards to hospitals. Health secretary Alan Milburn bragged about the "dog eat dog" ethic he wants to enforce on the health service through such schemes:
Lords a-leaping onto the board ONE THIRD of members of the House of Lords are company directors. Some 217 lords have 618 directorships between them. Nearly half of Tory lords are directors, almost 40 percent of Labour lords are directors, and 20 percent of Liberal Democrat lords sit on the boards of firms. The real figure is even higher. Some lords failed to register all their business interests.
STRIKING RAIL workers in the north of England are continuing their action over pay. The station staff and conductors on Arriva Trains have now been in dispute for seven months.
MOST PEOPLE know that Labour's national executive voted by 17 votes to 13 last week to block Ken Livingstone's return to the Labour Party. But few realise the full details of who voted which way. The breakdown shows that Blair relied heavily on the ministers and officials he appoints to the committee, but that a handful of union votes also played a key role.
