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Teachers’ Union to strike against Tory attacks

January 20, 2013 By Leave a Comment
NUT teachers voting unanimously for strike action

NUT teachers voting unanimously for strike action

Teachers in the National Union of Teachers (NUT) will strike on March 13th. This is to strike back against endless attacks by education secretary Michael Gove.

The Tories want to abolish automatic pay progression and replace it with performance-related pay. This isn’t about giving teachers’ incentives to work harder. It’s about getting rid of national pay bargaining – where rates won by unions apply to all equivalent staff.

This latest attack comes shortly after teachers’ were defeated in their struggle to defend pensions. The union leaders’ inability to wage a sustained, effective campaign means teachers have lost on average 16% of their pay through freezes and higher pension contributions.

The divisions and lack of strategy has given Michael Gove the confidence to press ahead with his plans to transform education – destroying the comprehensive system and replacing it with privately-run for-profit schools.

The Tories don’t want to reform education in order to improve everyone’s chances. They want to take it over, let the market run it, and use it to suit the needs of millionaire bosses and politicians.

This means we need a credible strategy for fighting back. An NUT strike on March 13th could be joined by civil servants in the PCS and university and college lecturers in the UCU. This will also be the day for second European Day of Action – like the one on November 14 which saw millions of workers striking against austerity across Europe.

The last few years have shown that young people, too, will need to take our place in the front lines of this struggle. From the students in parliament square defending access to education, to the youth on the streets of August 2011 rising up against routine police violence, we have been the most willing to join together to take on the Tories.

School students should support their teachers on strike and organise to raise their own demands alongside them. Action committees in schools can unite students and teachers in planning joint action and be stronger by struggling together.

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Filed Under: Education, News Tagged With: , , , ,

Solidarity with the struggles of workers and youth in Quebec

July 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

REVOLUTION sends our fraternal greetings to all youth taking part in the Quebec Student Strike. We address this letter in a spirit of solidarity and recognition that your struggle is the same being fought in the universities, squares and schools across Europe.

On June 22nd global ‘Casserole’ protests marked the birth of an international solidarity movement.

From Montreal to Madrid, youth have been in the vanguard of opposition to the crisis. Revolutions against dictatorship and occupations against austerity have put youth on the frontline of the international class struggle.

Since February 13th 150,000 students have joined an indefinite general strike against attempts to increase tuition fees by 75%. Hundreds of thousands more have staged boycotts, walkouts and solidarity action for over four months.

If fees were the spark, anger at wider attacks provided the fuel for a movement which has brought youth and workers into the streets to defy the batons, courts and tear gas of a regime with no solution but repression.

The defence of education led by the students of Quebec is an inspiration to all youth across the world waging their own resistance to cuts, poverty and unemployment.

Jean-Luc Charest’s ‘liberal’ government knows that it cannot permit a victorious student movement to signal to the world that resistance is necessary – and victory possible.

The success of the student assemblies and federations in drawing the government into a wider confrontation with education and public-sector workers is the key to the strike’s success.

But attempts to compromise and retreat show that young people alone cannot resist indefinitely.

The government refuses to negotiate – counting on dividing ‘moderate’ from ‘radical’, ‘privileged students’ from ‘struggling families’. The attacks on democratic rights imposed under Bill 78 gives Charest unlimited power to ban the right to strike, protest or assemble.

The strike movement has the initiative; now it must use it and answer the question ‘where next?’

With the students out of the way, the government will turn on the social spending for welfare programmes, calculating that making an example of the students will intimidate workers and youth into silence when their turn comes.

Success then, depends on whether we can transform a movement in defence of education into a working class resistance to the austerity offensive imposed by Charest and the federal government.

To the trade unions – the only social force capable of bringing down the government – we must say ‘our struggle is yours – and your struggles will only be strengthened by our victory’.

Raising common demands and taking united action on this basis is necessary to mobilise the forces necessary to stand up to the government’s violence and attempts to divide-and-rule.

Joint strike committees and democratic assemblies must be used to launch a national campaign in defence of education, against the social cuts and reverse the attacks on democratic rights.

The democratic structures uniting the unemployed alongside the youth and workers can form the basis for national action independent of the vacillating leaders of trade unions and reformist parties.

Now is not the time for compromise – the result of the crisis is that our  health, education, pensions and wages will be slashed to inflate profit rates for a privileged minority class. Unemployment is used to reduce wages and intensify competition.

In every country capitalism has the least to offer to the youth. The capitalist solution to the crisis is simple – we, the youth and working class, will pay.

But in the schools, in the workplace and on the streets millions have shown that we refuse to pay for a crisis we didn’t cause.

We think we need to turn that courage and determination into a real force for social change. We want to build a revolutionary youth movement, armed with a programme which calls for the independent organisation of young people as part of the international class struggle.

The capitalist crisis has thrown up challenges new and old. From Sudan to Athens, youth are facing the question of how we can go beyond a system which offers no future – and says we must pay for the mistakes of the past.

The struggle for workers’ power and communism provides the only alternative for the oppressed, impoverished and exploited masses.

We appeal to all revolutionary youth to join us in building a new Youth International – a fighting organisation of young communists in every country, committed to a strategy of international working-class revolution.

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Unity means victory at London school strike

May 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A school in London’s East End have forced school management to back down on their plans to cut pay and job losses by staging determined, united strike action across two unions.

Staff at Central Foundation Girls’ School in Bow took their first day of action on Wednesday 25th April which was called by the NUT and supported by Unison after talks of pay and conditions fell through.

The school staff is being threatened with redundancies and changing support staff from all year contracts to term-time only ones which means a cut in pay and the support they give. There’s also a concern about teachers’ non-classroom time being cut meaning less time to mark work, see parents or give one-to-one tuition.

This days strike won a satisfying settlement over the compulsory redundancies and pay cuts which were threatened.

The staff and teachers struck for a second time on Friday 11th May over class-room time being cut which was still outstanding.

Following the second day of action the management said that teacher’s workload will be reviewed with all new proposals going to the union before being implemented. Teaching staff will have to increase their teaching load but by half of what the management initially wanted and this will also be reviewed next year.

By all the staff uniting and striking together they managed to achieve a victory and prove to the management that they do have the power to stop these changes going through. They now must maintain this strength to ensure the reviews do happen and the changes don’t go through un-noticed.

Staff will maintain the strike committee as a joint-union committee meeting once every half term. This will oversee the proposed changes to working structures and develop closer links between ordinary union members in Unison and NUT.

Playing unions off against each other is a favourite tactic of headteachers up and down the country. Whether they are trying to push through academisation or undermine hard-fought working conditions, this action shows union members that unity is the key to victory.

Students can also play our part in supporting struggles by our teachers. By organising boycotts, petitions and leafletting we can add dramatically to the pressure on school management. School bosses can always negotiate with trade union leaders, but the last thing they want is active, political students prepared to challenge their lying propaganda.

If there’s a strike at your school, get in touch and see the resources section for advice on organising within schools and colleges.

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Filed Under: Education, News Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

UCU suspends March 1 strike

February 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

On Tuesday 2nd Feb, the UCU decided to suspend its strike action set for March 1st.

The decision was taken by delegates to the Higher Education sector conference, in return for further negotiations over attacks to their USS pension scheme.

The motion to suspend action was passed by 3 to 2.

Lecturers in the UCU took strike action on twice in March, and on June and November 30th last year.

Although the decision to suspend action is unfortunate, there were no branch motions in support of the negotiators’ position. The conference passed all amendment to the negotiators’ position.

These included:

  • imposing a time-limit on the suspension of action
  • placing minimum conditions before the dispute could be settled

and

  • sacking the chair of the joint negotiating committee

Defence of final-salary pension schemes has not been dropped from negotiations.

With Unison and Unite doing their best to wind-up the pensions dispute, thousands of people are looking to the PCS and UCU to take a lead in fighting back.

The determination of grassroots UCU members to continue the struggle is inspiring. So are the efforts by the electricians organising through the Sparks’ campaign in Unite.

Building a powerful movement of grassroots members in the unions is key to preventing a sell-out. Today’s battle over pensions will decide the pensions for the next generations. We think it’s vital for young people to support strikes against pension cuts, because we refuse to let Tories or Union bureaucrats sell out our futures.

The economic crisis was caused by capitalism, and the debt was caused by bailing out the banks. Pensions, jobs and education shouldn’t be cut to fix a system which is rotten to the core.



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100 million workers in world’s biggest strike

February 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

On February 28th over 100,000,000 Indian workers will stage the world’s biggest strike.

Workers will walk out for 24 hours, closing docks, railways, airports, and public banks. Energy, mining and road transport workers will also join the action, set to hit during the parliament’s Budget session.

The general strike is supported by all 11 of India’s trade unions. They are striking for the minimum wage to cover the whole population, and for temporary workers to get the same rights as those on permanent contracts. They are also demanding pension cover for all workers, including the private sector, an end to corruption and for limits on price rises.

The government has refused to negotiate for more than 2 years, using the courts and police to attack the trade union movement. All the while, India’s rich are growing richer, leaving 400 million in absolute poverty.

The last few years have seen a dramatic rise in the number off millionaires and billionaires; the 55 richest Indians own 1/6th of all the country’s wealth. This dramatic increase in wealth has been achieved through cutting jobs, pay and pension rights.

The strike highlights that workers are realising that the system they live and work under is only benefiting the wealthy and bosses and they are willing to fight back against this.

This is shown by the increase in struggles for trade union recognition in the car industry, wildcat strikes by Air India workers and walkouts by telecom and mining workers against privatisation plans.

As tension rises in the run-up to this epic confrontation, a clash on Saturday between workers and police outside a ceramics factory ended in the brutal murder of a local union leader while in police custody.

Workers had been in dispute with their employers over the use of temporary workers on worse pay and conditions and for the reinstatement of colleagues who have been suspended during the dispute.

There have been daily protests outside the factory but on Saturday police used sticks to beat protesters and then opened fire.

As well as killing union leader Murali Mohan, nine protesters were left with critical injuries. In retaliation, hundreds of workers stormed the house of a company boss, killing him, before going on to set fire to the factory, and attacking workers scabbing on the strike.

This episode shows the level of state-backed violence which is routinely used to intimidate the Indian working-class movement.

With just 4 weeks until the general strike, the Indian ruling class is doing its best to scare people into silence. The uprising by Egyptian workers in January 2011 showed that the existing rulers are only safe as long as there is no organised challenge to their power.

28th February promises to be an opportunity to demonstrate the power of ordinary people when we organise against low pay, bad housing and no future.

It will expose the parasitic role of the capitalists, and demonstrate that the courts, police and government exist only to defend the ‘right’ of a few bosses to exploit hundreds of millions of people.

The resistance of Indian workers to privatisation and cost-cutting is the same struggle we are facing in Britain: defending our jobs and living conditions against a ruling class determined to make us pay for their crisis.

Solidarity with Indian workers on the 28th February!

 

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Nigeria bombings aim to split resistance

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7 billion people is no problem

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Birmingham school defies privatisation pressure

January 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A primary school in Birmingham has become the latest to join a growing tide of strikes and industrial action by teachers opposed to the privatisation of schools through the Academies programme.

Staff at Montgomery Primary school first took action in December when NASUWT, NUT and GMB members were on strike and the school was closed.

The school is in one of the most deprived areas in Birmingham and is one of the schools on Gove’s hit list of ‘underperforming schools.’ In reality, like most of the schools being targeted it is a school handicapped by the effects of poverty on its intake, which is doing its best to improve.

Today the picket line was even bigger than previously with over 100 people there, including parents, students and members of the public.

Teachers and parents recognise that what is needed is an investment in support and resources to improve the school – not flogging it off to the highest bidder.

With three outstanding schools in the area, teachers believe they could offer support through the local authority to Montgomery who received a ‘satisfactory’ in their last Ofsted report of 2009.

As usual many of the school governors are sitting on the fence, with Councillor Victoria Quinn (Labour, Sparkbrook) saying she would ‘oppose the idea of academies in theory.’ She added they were trying to buy time by looking for a sponsor themselves but that the Department of Education has the power to appoint one.

DavidRoom, deputy general secretary of Birmingham NUT argued there was no pressure on the school to become an academy.

He said: “There are other means of supporting schools and raising standards.”

The unions have asked for further negotiations and parents have handed in a petition calling for proper consultation signed by more than 700 people, but both have been ignored. The purpose of this is to avoid giving people a public forum where they can voice their opposition and expose the councillors and governors who back this sell-off.

The head-teacher and majority of the governors believe that if they refuse to become an academy then Education Secretary Michael Gove will send in Ofsted and fail the school. This is what Gove is relying on – bullying schools into becoming academies.

The determination showed by the staff and parents in Montgomery school in Birmingham and Downhills School in Haringey show that there is alternative to this.

Schools need clear structures linking parents, students, teachers and the governing body together to improve standards of education. Academy status takes school out of Local Authority oversight, meaning that specialist services become more expense and are quickly ditched, as the sponsor focuses on boosting league table rankings.

Private sponsors have no incentive to improve support for students with the most problems, since their investment in the school is calculated on its ability to produce a direct profit, or reinforce a business’s ‘community-friendly’ credentials.

The withdrawal of the White Paper on Higher Education shows that mass opposition can achieve results. So far schools have been left to fight Academy proposals alone – this is a strategy doomed to failure. We need to make the campaign against Academies part of the wider resistance to cuts and austerity.

Only in this way can we bring our maximum collective strength to bear against those who are determined to tear up our social inheritance and flog it to their rich friends.

 


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Privatisation bill rolled into ditch – for now

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Leeds Unilever workers strike to defend pensions

January 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This Saturday (21.01.12) workers at Unilever factories in Leeds and Port Sunlight went on strike for 24 hours as part of the 12 day program of rolling action across the 12 Unilever UK sites.

The action has been taken by USDAW, UNITE and GMB over Unilever’s refusal to continue negotiations about pensions.

Unilever wants to switch the workers from a final salary pension scheme to a career-average re-valued earnings (CARE) plan, a cheaper option for the company.

The company is following the example of other large companies, saying that the final salary scheme is a ‘broken model’. In this offensive, the bosses are championed by the Con-Dem government itself, which is desperate to bust pension rights in order to make public services (and the workers that come with them) a more attractive investment for privatisation.

Workers are on average losing out on 20% of their retirement income, with some losing up to 40%.

All this would seem to point to a company in financial trouble but Unilever made £6.1 billion in profit last year, and the CEO was paid more than £3.5 million when you take in to account his salary, free shares, bonus, and, shockingly, a contribution to his pension! This is the same CEO who said last year ‘What I want is a sustainable and equitable capitalism. Why can’t we have that as a model?’

This has not the first betrayal from the bosses at Unilever. In 2008, it closed its final salary scheme to newcomers but promised to ensure that the existing workers would keep the scheme. For this privilege the workers had to up their contributions from 5% to 7%. Unilever couldn’t even keep up this sham for 3 years.

Understandably, the unions are sceptical about the CARE plan they have been offered. Unilever will only commit to this plan for 3 years, leaving the possibility of another downgrade probable.

This strike demostrates the contradiction that is ethical capitalism. Corparations can only make profit through exploitation of their workers, and in times of recession they cut pay, pensions and jobs in order to ensure maximum profits.

Furthermore, it is necessary to learn the lesson that by conceding to one compromise on workers’ rights the bosses get their foot in the door, while they prepare future attacks.

The action taken by the workers in Leeds and Merseyside this weekend shows that it is important for private sector workers to support those in the public sector when they take mass action like on November 30th.

When the government attacks the pensions of its own workers, this just encourages private bosses to further downgrade their own employees’ pension schemes.

Unions must take strike action until this assault on the pensions of Unilever workers stops.

Today’s struggles over pensions are immensely relevant for young people. Deals cut with unions in the past have already led to younger workers getting worse pensions than those a few years older doing the same work.

If the government succeeds in smashing the public sector pension rights, then that will pave the way for an onslaught which will make pensions a pipe-dream for our generation and the next.


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Primark workers set for strike action

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Build a new anticapitalist organisation

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Primark workers set for strike action

January 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Primark workers in Northern Ireland have been balloted for potential strike action against efforts by management to freeze their pay for a second year running.

A consultative ballot was held before Christmas by the Usdaw union, with 95% of members voting in favour of holding a ballot for industrial action.

Most Primark workers earn just £6.84 an hour, and with the prices of food, utilities and transport rocketing, millions of low-paid workers are struggling to make ends meet.

In 2010, workers accepted a pay freeze, but Primark bosses again refused to offer any increase this year – despite making a £309million profit.

Usdaw has around 640 members spread across Primark’s eight stores in Northern Ireland, around 85% of the total number of employees.

This action comes just a few days after workers at a La Senza store in Dublin occupied it after they were sacked without pay.

Retail workers, who are mainly young, low-paid women have been hit hard by the recession. Temporary contracts and high turnover are used to undermine union membership.

In order to cut costs and maximise profits, bosses are forcing workers to accept attacks on pay, job security and workplace rights.

Determined action at Primark would be an inspiring demonstration of why resistance is possible and necessary.

The bosses use the courts, media, politicians and ‘public opinion’ to attack every case of workers going on strike to defend themselves.

But the courts, bosses, media and politicians are not accountable to people whose livelihoods they are wrecking.

Going on strike exposes the divide in society between those who must work for a living, and the minority who live off the value created by those who work for them.

Exposing this class system and fighting for an alternative is more necessary than ever.



 

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La Senza workers occupy store

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The Encyclopedia Strikes Back

January 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Wikipedia has taken its english-language page offline in a protest against a proposed anti-piracy law being debated by the United States’ Congress.

It is opposed to the Stop Online Piracy (Sopa) and Protect Intellectual Property (Pipa) Acts which are designed to block access to websites hosting unauthorised copyrighted material.

The encyclopedia giant has been joined by Reddit and Google, in the largest protest of its kind by some of the biggest players in the internet industry.

Wikipedia’s homepage was blacked out and features this message: ”For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopaedia in human history. Right now, the US Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.”

Google has blacked out its logo, and links to a petition against SOPA.

If passed the law would give content owners and the government the power to seek court orders forcing search engines to block content associated with ‘piracy’.

However critics claim that the bills are so vague, and broad, that they present a real danger to freedom of the internet. While the US criticises China on a regular basis for its extensive internet censorship, it is currently debating laws which would remove any foreign websites infringing US copyright law.

Predictably, the bills have their supporters. Supporters like Rupert Murdoch and his fellow media barons with their legions of lobbyists.

Other sites, including Twitter, refused to join the protest. Twitter boss Dick Costolo tweeted ”Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.”

Blunt, but perhaps more honest than Google’s hypocrisy – the search engine involved in today’s ‘blackout’ has been criticised for co-operating with the Chinese government’s efforts to censor online search results.

This just about sums up the protest. Certainly the SOPA and PIPA laws are yet another infringement on the rights to freedom of speech, but equally they do no more than extend the already existing copyright laws to the online realm.

Information is always by someone, for someone. The monopoly control of the majority of the worlds’ information outlets is one of the single most important factors in shaping our ideas about the world we live in.

This isn’t a clear-cut case of new, pro-freedom businesses against the old establishment. The case of Google, and Twitter’s ‘business as usual’ demonstrates that they are businesses like any other. As such we must not see them as reliable allies in the struggle to extend freedom of speech and information.

We should oppose any further power for these interests in the physical or online information industries. But equally we should not fall into the trap of uncritically supporting those for whom economic convenience means they temporarily find themselves defending free access to information.

We support today’s protest against the SOPA and PIPA bills, but they are not democratic. We would not support shipyards closing if governments raised the minimum wage, so we must stay vigilant and remember that companies like Google have a huge influence over our lives, with virtually zero accountability to the millions who rely on it.

 

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Sparks defy union and bosses to defend pay

December 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Once again the sparks have shown the rest of us how to fight back, organising one of the largest wildcat strikes in decades. Construction sites across the country were shut down as trade unionists picketed and occupied sites, defying the corporate killers Balfour Beatty, who have legally challenged the right of the electricians to go on strike.

JARGON BUSTER: wildcat strikes mean picketing sites even if the courts rule it illegal or the union won’t officially support it.

Official strike action against Balfour Beatty had been scheduled for December 7th, but Unite leaders decided to back down in the face of legal challenges from the company, who claimed 70 union members were sent ballots when they shouldn’t have been. The bosses threatened to take Unite to court and have the strike banned, just like BA bosses did last year.

The leaders of the union sent out a press release promising to re-ballot their members and delay the strikes. They’re talking big but in practice are too scared to break the Tory anti-union laws. Fortunately many Unite members ignored the press release and decided that December 7th was the right time to take action, as the bosses of the seven companies trying to slash pay and conditions promised to use the day to force workers onto their new contracts.

Protests and pickets happened across the country. In London, police used dogs and attempted kettles to prevent the sparks from blocking construction work at Blackfriars’ Station. So the hundreds present occupied the road in front of the site entrance, leaving the site empty, before marching on Balfour Beatty HQ! As they passed a Gattes Brothers site (GB is another construction firm trying to tear up workers’ pay and conditions) a fire alarm went off, meaning another boost for the protestors’ numbers and another site shut down.

In Glasgow around 200 strikers took the protest to Balfour Beatty’s offices before occupying the offices at a nearby site. Pickets from Manchester stormed a council meeting demanding an answer to why the council had used one of the NG Bailey (one of the Big 7 and a notorious blacklisting firm) to do construction on the town hall. Protests also spread to Wales for the first time, as 40 sparks protested at Llandough Hospital construction site.

There were also a number of other strikes and protests in Hull, Immingham, Teeside, Birmingham, Hartlepool and Wirral. While the heads of the union are asking the employers to sit in ACAS negotiations to prevent further strikes and civil disobedience, the electricians are taking the struggle forward and putting the bosses on the back foot by continuing with the kind of direct action needed to win.

The sparks have been let down by so many who claim to stand for the workers; from union leaders who don’t have the spine for a fight or the will to break the anti-union laws, to Labour councillors who have given the firms breaking their workers’ backs and breaking blacklisting laws lucrative contracts. They’ve already experienced the wrath of the police (they even got a mention in a memo sent to business-owners about terrorist threats!) and the courts, which uphold the bosses’ laws and crack down on legitimate protest. But they’re still growing stronger.

This is because the workers are organising at the grassroots level and pressuring the Unite union to go further. In August 500 ordinary trade-unionists set up the Rank and File National Committee, which has been key in helping organise in the face of the bloated bureaucracy’s lack of action.

The sparks are currently taking on Balfour Beatty as the ringleader of the Big 7. Tomorrow (Friday 9th), electricians are planning on giving the Managing Director of the firm a welcome of their own at an award show in his honour. We encourage all activists to support the protests, pickets and occupations at Balfour Beatty- check out our expose of the corruption and cruelty inherent in the company and share the info with your mates and other activists. There are so many reasons to take on these corporate killers, and right now we need to work with the employees who can shut down the sites.

But if the sparks are to be successful, they need to keep up the pressure. There’s already been some really positive developments, with non-Balfour sites being shut down and targeted by roving picket lines (‘flying pickets’), and workers at 2 of the other Big 7 firms balloting for official action. We need pickets at every site and occupations of the companies’ offices to give the bosses the message that we won’t give up until JIB terms and conditions are given to every worker in construction- One out, all out, stay out to win!

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Sparks vote to strike at Balfour Beatty

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Sparks march under media blackout

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The electricians’ fight is our fight! 

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