Privatisation Follow

THE GOVERNMENT has given the clearest indication yet that it is going to privatise the post. It won’t admit it is privatisation, but all the indications are that ministers are ready to end the Royal Mail’s present structure.

The fight against the privatisation of council homes gained a significant victory in Tony Blair’s own constituency last week.

Health workers were another group of emergency service workers who performed tirelessly last week to save lives.

Today’s housing struggle Council tenants in Bow, east London, are angry at being blackmailed and rushed into a ballot for privatisation of their estates by Tower Hamlets council.

Unison's national delegate conference, held in Glasgow last week, saw the union commit itself to a series of tough policies over privatisation, pensions and opposition to the Labour government’s domestic agenda.

Two Unison union activists who have been suspended for opposing council house privatisation in Sefton on Merseyside spoke out at the launch of the MPs’ report and made an appeal for solidarity from other trade unionists.

The debates over the CWU postal and telecom union’s relations with the Labour Party continued to run throughout its conference last week.

One million children in Britain live in poor quality housing. Council house building has practically ceased and millions of people are too poor to buy a home. Millions more live in fear of a rise in interest rates that will make their mortgage unpayable. New Labour has no solution to the crisis except sell-offs and privatisation. But past struggles show how we can fight back.

WORKERS AT Sefton council on Merseyside have voted to ballot for industrial action over the victimisation of two union officials and four shop stewards for opposing privatisation of council housing.

In a military crackdown hundreds of Pakistan Telecom Corp Limited (PTCL) workers have been arrested across the country. According to the PTCL Workers Action Committee, 1,500 have been arrested since Saturday 11 June, when the government announced that the telecom sell off will start on 18 June.

Working people in France have delivered a defiant no to privatisation, neo-liberalism and Blairite policies across Europe.

A massive strike by telecom workers in Pakistan is threatening to derail the government’s privatisation programme which would cut up to 4.2 million phone lines. Over the last two weeks over 55,000 workers at the Pakistan Telecom Company Limited (PTCL) have been involved in strike action. The government’s first response was to postpone the privatisation in the hope of demobilising the workers, and then to announce that privatisation was back on. At the time of writing, the unions had just announced the resumption of the strike.