Local Councils

Scottish councils are lining up not just to cut jobs and services but also to attack the terms and conditions of their workforces. Over the next two years Glasgow City Council plans to axe at least 3,500 jobs and cut its spending by £100m, on top of nearly £40m cut in the current financial year. Additional job losses are likely when Glasgow “pools” some of its departments with neighbouring councils. Further “savings” are to be made by attacks on its workforce’s terms and conditions: cuts in annual leave entitlements, longer working day, more rigorous absence management policy, end to flexible...

Birmingham’s Tory-led council has made a number of concessions in a dispute with refuse workers, who suspended their ongoing work-to-rule and a planned strike. Bosses have backed off from making a proposed 20% pay cut and has offered a 4-day week of 9.25 hours per day. Many workers are sceptical about the decision to abandon strikes, believing that it puts unions in a position of weakness in ongoing negotiations. The dispute has its roots in a significant pay-cut which in turns results from an equal pay dispute. The bin workers’ struggle is particularly important given that Birmingham is one...

Quora.com is now being hyped as the next big social media thing — a crowd-sourced version of wiki-answers, combining features of (and integrating with) twitter and Facebook. Someone asks a question to an online community, the members of the community provide a set of answers and then the community vote on which they believe to be the best answer. The winning answers might receive a financial reward. Apparently this technology managed to solve in a matter of weeks some problems that NASA scientists had been working on non-stop for years. But this could also drive out individuality, and tend...

Labour and trade union activists meeting on 15 January in London at the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) conference voted almost unanimously to call on Labour councils to defy the Tory/ Lib-Dem cuts. The LRC is the biggest grouping of the Labour left, and has the affiliation of six unions, four Labour-affiliated and two (RMT and FBU) not. Only one speaker at the conference, Charlynne Pullen, a Labour councillor from Islington, north London, demurred. Her council has put out a leaflet denouncing the local cuts (pictured below), and council leader Catherine West has told anti-cuts...

With over 100,000 local government jobs under threat, both council bosses and council workers are preparing for war. Budgets need to be set at council meetings before the start of April and local politicians are slowly revealing the detail of the cuts. Kirklees Unison branch recently balloted members over plans to cut non-school staff from 11,200 to 9,500. On a poor turnout (due in part to the snow) the branch got a slim majority for action. Branch officers kept their nerve and planned five days of action to start Monday 10 January. At the last minute management made an offer of no job losses...

Click here to download pdf. Survey section: Historic compromise in South Africa? The 30th anniversary of the introduction of the contraceptive pill Poll tax: 12 million defy the law France's Front National Labour: towards a one-faction party? A tale of two industrial struggles: ambulance workers, and engineering Israel/Palestine: influx and intifada Northern Ireland: Ulster says maybe.

Hackney council's ruling Labour Group has passed a motion (reproduced below) spelling out the ambition to "lead the fight against the cuts" at the same time as... making them. This is a common line among slightly-leftish Labour councils. The Labour Party nationally, and the Labour Group in Hackney, must (says the motion) "play the leading role in campaigning against" - if not the cuts as such, at least "the excessive speed and depth of the cuts". Leaflets, petitions, street stalls, rallies, demonstrations, banners on demonstrations are promised. The Labour Group resolves to "use the campaign...

Darrell Goodliffe, on the left-Labour website "Left Futures" , has called on Labour councils to refuse to make the cuts demanded by the coalition government. Read the whole article here . Goodliffe points out that Labour councils which say that they "have to" cut immediately are ignoring other short-term options. "One obvious one is for councils to increase their borrowing. The government itself has clearly provided for this; with councils being allowed to borrow against projected (as opposed to guaranteed) extra income from large-scale projects. Reducing the pay of top council executives and...

I work with a voluntary organisation in a big northern city. We offer a drop-in centre — washing facilities, food, health and housing advice — to people who are addicts, often homeless and with mental and physical health problems. Last year, we had 2000 visits from clients. We did this on £70,000 of funding. More than half came from our local council. We got a new form from the council a few weeks ago. Can we tell them how much it would affect us if they cut that grant? 1. a bit; 2. quite a lot; 3. a lot? (Give percentages). So we answered the question. Answers. 1. 5% cut. No more training...

The Scottish Unison Council, made up of delegates from all branches in Scotland, voted on 3 December for a call that the Scottish Parliament and local councils should defy Tory cuts and set “needs budgets”. This is the first time in the current anti-cuts agitation that a large body in the labour movement has raised the call for councils to defy the cuts. Solidarity has been raising the call for some time, but even the rest of the left press has so far been hesitant about it. In the 1980s, that call won wide support, though in the end all Labour councils — even those known as “left” like...