THE FIGHT for the future of council housing is hotting up, and March looks like being a crunch month. Glasgow council is to begin balloting all its tenants on 4 March on a plan to hand their homes to housing associations.
THERE WAS a real taste of anger at New Labour at a conference in Liverpool last weekend. Some 200 people attended Saturday's "Keep public services public" conference organised by the Liverpool joint trade union committee.
Ambulance workers in Liverpool are voting on whether to strike after two paramedics in the Ambulance Service Union were suspended for alleged gross misconduct.
A campaign has been set up at London Guildhall University after management pressurised the student union president and a vice-president into resigning. The university then replaced them with its own unelected appointees.
Workers at the Shorts aircraft plant in Belfast are to ballot on strikes against compulsory redundancies. Shorts, owned by the Canadian Bombardier Aerospace group, wants to cut some 2,000 jobs out of the 7,500-strong workforce.
WORKERS AT the Caterpillar factory in Peterlee, County Durham, staged their third one-day strike on Tuesday. They are fighting a plan by the US multinational to freeze their pay, impose flexible shift patterns and undermine other longstanding agreements.
Some 150,000 postal workers started a national strike ballot this week over pay. They are fighting management's attempt to hold down pay and to squeeze even more work out of fewer people.
Tens of thousands of civil servants are set to strike next Monday and Tuesday. The workers are PCS union members in benefits offices and job centres. They are striking against New Labour's plans to remove safety screens in the amalgamated benefit agencies and job centres being set up.
Sit-in rattles Mersey bin bosses BIN WORKERS in Liverpool staged a sit-in at their depot on Monday, furious at the way they were being treated by bosses. The 250 workers at the Fazakerley depot work for the private firm Onyx, which has the contract for the city's rubbish collection. Their bosses had made a cock-up and paid the workers double pay at Christmas. Workers had themselves pointed this mistake out to the company and understood that they would pay it back in instalments.
Alan Milburn's plan to ram through even more privatisation in the NHS sent shock waves through the Unison executive last week. A meeting of the union's health executive was so stunned that its business was suspended to allow people to take stock of Milburn's plan and discuss our response.
