Strike Follow

SOME 1,700 workers have thrown down the gauntlet to a leading multinational after voting overwhelmingly for strike action. Workers at Scottish Power and Manweb were set to hold their first two-day strike next week.

ELECTRICIANS who were sacked for taking unofficial action were right to strike, an employment tribunal said last week. The ruling is a boost for the 250 electricians who worked for Britain's biggest electrical contractor, Balfour Kilpatrick, on the Pfizer site in Kent. They struck for seven and a half weeks over health and safety in April last year.

AROUND 150 ancillary workers in the UNISON union at the new PFI hospital in Carlisle have voted by three to one to strike against the conditions offered by the Interserve private company they work for.

TUBE DRIVERS in London were set to strike on Friday of this week in a dispute that should be a rallying point for everyone opposed to New Labour's privatisation plans for London Underground.

HUNDREDS OF council workers in Newcastle stayed away from work last Friday, despite their union leaders calling off a planned one-day strike in the face of an injunction.

THE STRIKE for safety by hundreds of civil servants in the PCS union in west London is set to turn into a national dispute. The strikers, in Brent and Lambeth in London, entered their fifth week of indefinite strike on Monday of this week.

HEALTH BOSSES in Glasgow have upped the stakes in the long-running fight by medical secretaries to win decent pay. All 300 of the secretaries are due to strike for a week from Monday. Sixty medical secretaries in the surgical division are already striking for three days every week.

UNION LEADERS are ignoring a strike vote by further education lecturers. Instead leaders of the NATFHE union are ordering a new ballot and recommending that workers accept the same employers' offer they have just voted against! Lecturers delivered a two to one ballot majority in favour of rejecting a pay offer of just an extra 0.3 percent from next April.

"TO RETALIATE in a massive military way is not the answer. I would feel dreadful about US retribution. There is no difference between innocent men, women and children getting killed and my brother. I think Bush should be caged at the moment. He is a loose cannon. He is building up his forces for a military strike. That is not the answer."

MEDICAL secretaries in Glasgow are escalating their fight over regrading and low pay. From this week 60 secretaries in the surgical division will be taking three days of strike action every week.

CWU UNION leaders have made a deal with Royal Mail bosses to drop threatened strike ballots. In return managers have agreed not to impose changes to workers' terms and conditions at a local level without agreement with the union.

THE CIVIL service dispute in London is escalating. The PCS union has started to ballot its members in the Benefits Agency and Employment Service for indefinite strike action in over 50 Pathfinder offices. Staff are being balloted in offices from Exeter to Aberdeen.