Workers at Kimpton Clocktower Hotel are taking action over union recognition (Pic: Wikimedia commons)
Workers at the Kimpton Clocktower Hotel in Manchester walked out on Saturday during the city’s annual Pride event.
This is historically the most lucrative day of the year for their employer.
The Unite union members at the hotel and its bar venue, The Refuge, are fighting for union recognition.
They are demanding the reinstatement of two union representatives.
Bosses sacked two senior Unite reps and held a disciplinary for another which resulted in a formal warning.
The union says they have been illegally targeted with dismissal for their union activities.
The workers are also demanding paid taxis to and from work during unsociable hours, sick pay, contracts and shifts that they can predict. And, they are fed up with uncomfortable and impractical uniforms.
Kimpton Clocktower is owned by IHG UK, a multimillion-pound hotel chain.
Jasmine, a union rep at Kimpton, says, “Rotas are released on Sunday, but can be changed by Monday.
“Trying to book doctors’ or dentists’ appointments is really difficult. Getting sick pay is very difficult. And we are on part-time contracts but we end up doing full‑time hours.”
The strikers are angry with low pay, when they live in one of Britain’s most expensive cities.
The dispute is the first ever hospitality strike in the north west.
Unite is currently running a petition demanding bosses stop their union busting and recognise the Kimpton workers’ rights to have their grievance heard collectively.
Health visitors have overwhelmingly rejected an offer aimed at ending a long-running dispute over their pay and grading.
Around 100 health visitors who are employed by Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board have been taking continuous industrial action since February. They are members of Unite the union, who claims some workers being underpaid by £9,000 a year.
The dispute centres on whether the workers should be employed at NHS band 6 or band 7 following a job evaluation.
Unite said 99 percent of those voting rejected the health board’s latest proposal, which would have provided a one-off payment of more than £5,000 rather than changing their salary band. The payment would have been subject to tax and other deductions.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said, “This is an utterly ludicrous offer from a health board that has lost all credibility.
“The Welsh government called on it to honour its own evaluation and yet it chooses to just insult our members with a pathetically low, one‑off lump sum.
The dispute has significantly reduced the number of health visitor appointments available locally.
Between March and May 2025, 6,140 visits were carried out. During the same three months this year, that fell to 909.
The previous Welsh government health minister Jeremy Miles instructed the health board to honour the job evaluation process.
First minister Rhun ap Iorwerth signed an open letter before taking office calling for band 6 health visitors to be upgraded to band 7.
The health workers protested outside the Welsh parliament in July, demanding that the promises be upheld.
Further strikes are planned every weekday for the next five weeks.
UCU union members at the University of Edinburgh have called five weeks of strikes starting on 28 September.
At the University of Dundee, UCU members will start their own five-week strike a week earlier.
EIS-ULA union members at Glasgow Caledonian University are set to strike during freshers’ week on Monday 7, Tuesday 8 and Thursday 10 September.
And at Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh, the UCU branch recently voted for strikes, giving them a mandate for action for the next year.
Last Tuesday, up to 500 workers at Dundee were called into meetings to tell them they are at risk of redundancy. Some were given just five minutes’ notice of the meeting.
Bosses at Edinburgh want to slash spending by £140 million and make more people redundant.
Scottish universities are facing a funding gap. The money they receive from the Scottish government and from international students’ tuition fees is failing to keep up with their expenses.
But university bosses have no answers other than to cut courses and throw workers on the scrapheap.
As students return to school next week, NEU union members at Woodfield, a special educational needs and disabilities (Send) school in west London, are set to strike.
The workers plan to walk out next Tuesday in a long running dispute with their boss, Compass Learning Partnership.
The trust is trying to impose a pay cut, equivalent to £4,000 a year, on some of the lowest paid workers at the school.
And last school year, it threatened 47 lead learning assistants with “fire and rehire”.The workers have signed new contracts, but they’ve called strikes over the conditions of their new contracts.
If the dispute is not resolved, they will walk out again on 15‑16 and 22‑23 September, with further dates to follow.
RMT union members at the East Midlands Railway (EMR) struck for 48 hours, over the bank holiday weekend.
They walked out over ongoing safety concerns, including a lack of air-conditioning, door faults and out of order toilets on Class 810 Aurora trains. Outside the strike they are also refusing to work on these trains.
They are right to be concerned. On Sunday it was reported that two Aurora trains had broken down.
The workers are set to strike again for 24 hours on Wednesday 16 September.
Workers at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) will be on strike on 4 and 5 September.
The PCS union members, alongside workers in the Prospect union, are demanding the museum become a Real Living Wage employer.
They are also striking for heat mitigation measures.
Workers will walk out at the museum’s East Storehouse, East Museum and the Young V&A. There is also a protest at the South Kensington site on Wednesday.
Join the picket lines:
Safety officers at Butlin’s holiday resort held a loud protest and marched through Bognor Regis last Friday as they began three days of strikes over the bank holiday weekend.
The UVW union members plan to strike again this weekend, from Thursday 10 to Tuesday 15 September and continuously from Monday 21 September.
Unite union members in seven local councils have successfully met the turnout threshold in a strike ballot that ended on 17 August.
The local authorities involved are Bolton, Cumberland, North East Lincolnshire, Great Yarmouth, Durham, Liverpool and Portsmouth. There is an ongoing ballot at Cardiff City council.
However, they are unable to strike over this year’s 3.3 percent local government pay offer because it has been accepted by the GMB and Unison unions.
Unison balloted members, but was unable to meet the Tory-imposed ballot turnout thresholds in enough large employers to go ahead with strikes.
About a dozen dock workers at Eastham, in Merseyside, are set to strike this Tuesday and Thursday and again on Monday 14 and Wednesday 16 September. The workers have been offered a paltry 2 percent pay increase.
Although their numbers are small, the Unite union members wield a lot of power. Their action will mean that ships will have to anchor outside the dock at great expense.
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