Exam board workers on the picket line in Manchester
Unison union members at AQA, Britain’s largest exam board, voted overwhelmingly to accept a pay deal and claimed victory.
Around 400 members struck from May to July in a determined fight for pay restoration.
The workers, who are based in Manchester, Guildford and Milton Keynes, have forced AQA to commit to become a real living wage accredited employer.
They have won an average 5.5 percent increase, rising to around 13 percent for the lowest‑paid workers. While they did not win pay restoration for all workers, the deal does represent an above inflation wage rise for everyone.
Laura, an AQA worker and Unison member, told Socialist Worker, “This deal was accepted by a large majority of our members.
“We know that 10 percent of workers at AQA were using food banks, so this pay increase represents real change for our lowest paid members,” she said.
AQA has also agreed to bring forwards an independent equalities review to the end of this year.
The current performance‑related pay scale means workers who go “above and beyond” at work take home higher pay. But proportionately fewer workers from an ethnic minority background receive these outstanding ratings.
“This issue mobilised people and increased the number of people who were in the union,” said Laura.
“It was the equalities issue that lit a fire under people.”
She explained that workers are prepared to strike again if bosses don’t hold up their side of the bargain.
“We’ll keep the dispute open until these are delivered.
“We have a mandate for a year, so we could still go back out on strike if they go back on anything,” she said.
There are important lessons from the AQA strike that are vital for other workers.
“First, don’t be scared to have an argument with members about the need to escalate action,” said Laura.
“You have to keep up the momentum and not call off strikes when bosses make it a requirement for negotiations.
“That’s how you turn a good win into a massive victory,” said Laura.
“Second, our strike was not just about one workplace. It was much bigger than that.
We brought in a lot of external support and invited other union branches to meetings and picket lines.
“But it’s also good for other branches to visit picket lines and see people doing something about pay. People go away thinking, ‘Why don’t we do that?’”
It is an inspiring example that other trade unionists should try to replicate around the country as the cost of living crisis continues to hit.
Escalation in frame for Scottish gallery workers
Ahead of their final day of strikes this Thursday, PCS union members at the National Galleries of Scotland are planning to escalate their fight against job cuts.
Edinburgh striker Alan told Socialist Worker, “Members understand that we need to escalate.
“Management can manage four days of strikes spread out,” he said. “But if we went for extended action, the galleries would have to be closed at all times.
“If we were disturbing all the shifts for multiple days in row, they couldn’t cope.”
Alan said, “There’s a real mood to keep fighting on this.”
Members are in discussion over future action.
“We’re really lucky to have such a strong branch—we have a 90 percent union density now—and the support of the union,” said Alan.
“We know that this is just the first cut. If this goes through, they’ll be coming for other jobs and other sectors too.”
- Visit the picket lines on 20 August, 8am, National Gallery, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Bosses taking advantage of Manchester health workers
Hundreds of theatre workers for the Northern Care Alliance NHS trust in Greater Manchester are set to return to picket lines next week.
They plan to walk out on Monday, Wednesday and Friday for 24 hours. The last of next week’s actions will mark their seventh day of strikes so far.
The Unison union members are furious at bosses who are refusing to pay the nationally agreed time and a half overtime rate.
Instead, the trust is using the NHS Professionals in-house agency to organise overtime at rates often lower than even normal pay. It means some workers are missing out on more than £80 a shift.
A local health activist told Socialist Worker that many staff agree to work overtime to help out on their own or neighbouring wards when they are desperately short-staffed.
But the bosses are taking advantage of their kindness and refuse to pay them properly.
Picket lines are set for Salford Royal, Fairfield, Rochdale Infirmary and Royal Oldham hospitals and run from 7.30am till 11am.
Local trade unionists should attend picket lines and invite strikers to speak to their branches.
- Strikers from all four hospitals have organised a joint march, picket and rally in Salford on Wednesday 26 August. Gather outside Salford Royal at 11.30am
University crisis deepens
The financial crisis in universities could be catastrophic for Andy Burnham’s Labour government.
At the University of Exeter, all teaching in geography at the Penryn campus in Cornwall has been cancelled.
The announcement means there will be no undergraduate geography degrees for the whole county of Cornwall.
The university chose A Level results day to make the announcement, when many school and college leavers would have been celebrating their results and planning their move to Exeter.
University managements have pointed to the drop in the number of student visa applications.
But university workers are asking why the bosses’ first response to a crisis is always to cut workers’ jobs.
UCU union branch members at Exeter are balloting for strikes. The union says it has submitted 50 counter‑proposals to the bosses’ plans for cuts.
Meanwhile, parents of students at Goldsmiths university in south east London have called on university bosses to resolve a dispute with workers.
UCU members started a marking and assessment boycott in April in response to £22 million of planned cuts.
They have been on indefinite strike since June. It has left some students facing the prospect of being unable to graduate.
Lifeboat workers won’t be moved
Workers on the Isle of Wight who make lifeboats for the RNLI Lifeboat charity struck last week. They are set to walk out this Wednesday and next Tuesday.
The Unite union members are fuming that charity bosses want to close the site and relocate them all to Poole, in Dorset.
The workers say they cannot afford to move to Poole and that bosses haven’t addressed the impact on their families and personal lives from forcing them to move.
Keeping up the energy of strikes
Workers for the Ofgem energy regulator are set to take action this month in a long-running dispute over job security and conditions.
Three strike days have been announced to coincide with the announcement of the new price cap—which limits how much energy supplies can charge a household.
The PCS union members will be on strike on 24-26 August.
Strikes develop at foreign office
Workers at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) will be on strike on 26 August.
Last week more than 100 members of the PCS union were out against a planned restructure that could lead to compulsory redundancies.
The union is confident the FCDO will move on their demands.
- Join the picket line on 26 August at King Charles St, London SW1A 2AH and FCDO, Abercrombie House, Eaglesham Rd, East Kilbride G75 8EA from 8-10am
Scientists being bled dry by bosses
Blood scientists at two teaching hospitals in Lancashire have escalated their strikes—and withdrawn from an emergency agreement with their NHS trust.
The Unite union members are in dispute over unpaid holiday pay and bosses’ failure to honour an earlier employment tribunal ruling.
Some workers are owed thousands of pounds.
Workers first walked out in June and have struck on every weekday since.
The union says it has now withdrawn from a special arrangement that allowed some strikers to continue providing critical services, including emergency blood tests and transfusions.
Unite said the trust was trying to undermine the strike.
It was giving staff routine work to do on the shifts they are working during the walkout—instead of the “life and limb cover” agreed.
The start of a truly Marxist ecology
Ilmensky nature reserve, founded as a zapovednik in 1920 (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
The Russian revolution was one that was intimately concerned with questions of environment, conservation and ecology.
In his 1908 novel Red Star, set on a utopian socialist Mars, the Bolshevik scientist Alexander Bogdanov imagines a conversation between two Martians concerned about an energy crisis.
One Martian, named Sterni, proposes that they simply wipe out the earthlings in order to exploit Earth’s natural resources. Even before the revolution, Netti, Sterni’s fellow martian, reprimands him. Netti tells Sterni that socialists cannot propose to eliminate “an entire individual type of life, a type which we can never resurrect or replace”.
The Russian revolution toppled the Tsarist autocracy nine years later and swept the Bolsheviks into power.
One of the first decrees they passed was a decree that made land common property. Later decrees on forests and wildlife would put restrictions on hunting and forestry.
Vladimir Lenin himself took an interest in conservation, closely reading geographer Vladimir Sukachev’s pioneering research on swamps.
In 1919, as the white army was fighting against the revolution, Lenin took time to meet with conservationists.
Lenin backed Bolshevik education minister Anatoly Lunacharsky’s environmental reforms and made sure that conservation remained part of education.
Lenin also encouraged Lunacharsky to set up the “zapovednik” system. These were nature reserves created almost exclusively for research. These were revolutionary as nature reserves in capitalist countries had existed primarily for recreation.
By 1929, some 61 zapovedniks had been established across Russia, totalling 4 million hectares of land.
Zapovedniks led to a revolution in ecological thought. Before the Bolsheviks, ecology was primarily concerned with the relationship between plants and soils. It was in the zapovednik that scientists began to observe the crucial role that animals play in the ecosystem.
It was through the zapovedniks that Vladimir Stanchinsky, an ecologist academically isolated in pre-revolutionary Russia, was able to begin his pioneering studies of energy.
Stanchinsky theorised that energy is lost at each step of the food chain. Because so little energy survives each transfer, the organisms at the top of the food chain have far less energy available to them, limiting how many predators an ecosystem can maintain.
This theory became the basis for the “trophic ladder”, a model that is foundational to environmental science and archaeology. Stanchinsky’s theories were embraced by the Bolsheviks and he became editor of the Soviet Union’s first ecological journal.
Thinkers like geoscientist Vladimir Vernadsky, who had been unable to secure funding in the West, were supported by the Bolshevik government.
In his work at the Russian Academy of Science, Vernadsky developed the theory of the biosphere. This posited that animals could be viewed as a geological force with the potential to shape the natural world.
Other soviet ecologists such as Alexander Oparin created theories around the origins of life that remain influential to this day. And geneticist Nikolai Vavilov discovered the origins of domesticated plant life.
The story of Bolshevik ecology would end with the rise of Joseph Stalin, his counter-revolution and his promotion of agriculturalist Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko maintained a dictatorial rule over soviet ecology and believed in human dominance over nature, instead of harmony with it.
The zapovedniks were turned into tools for this project—to transform nature, not to study it. Scientists like Vavilov who opposed Lysenko found themselves imprisoned and eventually lying in unmarked graves.
But for a moment, during the Russian Revolution, anything was possible. Scientific possibilities exploded and the barriers of human knowledge were brought down.
The story of Soviet ecology shows that revolutions can liberate not only humankind, but nature as well.
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