Solidarity 555, 8 July 2020

Nationalise social care!

Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of NHS England, has called for politicians to “decisively answer” how social care can be reorganised to deal with the problems exposed by the Covid-19 crisis. Stevens is no left-winger. He spent the best part of a decade as Chief Executive of US private healthcare corporation United Health. He has defended and promoted privatisation in the NHS. But so glaring is the problem of a radically fractured and privatised social care system that in his interview with the BBC he hinted at some kind of public ownership: “ If you take back the history coming out of the...

University staff rally against cuts

On 25 June, over 500 people attended an online rally jointly organised by branches of the University and College Union (UCU) at Imperial College, SOAS, Roehampton and Liverpool Universities in parallel with socially-distanced protests in Liverpool and London. Those institutions are facing some of the harshest cuts in the university sector. Management at Reading have threatened to sack the entire workforce and rehire only those prepared to accept inferior terms and conditions. Roehampton staff have been asked to take a voluntary pay cut, and a redundancy scheme is up and running. Their branch...

British Airways threatens to fire and rehire

British Airways has seized on the pandemic crisis to attack the terms and conditions of its entire workforce. Using the claim that they need to impose redundancies, they are attempting to fire and re-hire every BA worker. Only weeks into the furlough scheme, with the state picking up almost the whole wage bill for BA staff, the company issued redundancy notices to 42,000 staff, with a deadline of 14 June to accept a wholescale change to their contracts and pay. BA was one of the first companies to argue that the lockdown left them no choice but to cut jobs and wages. Unite, the main union in...

Diary of an engineer: More efficient = less profit

The new plant manager, who began work in February, has resigned after four months. His resignation email praises the professionalism and warm welcome from all staff, and offers no explanation for his leaving or details of his next job. His message is also surprisingly poorly worded, with many spelling mistakes. I speculate that he’s unused to writing his own correspondence, and the “warm welcome” is meant sarcastically. The control room gossip has always been “he won’t last long”. Being sandwiched between the Sheffield City director and the gang of plant Operators must have left him with very...

The right to refuse (John Moloney's column)

The government is pressing ahead with its plan to reopen job centres and driving instruction centres to the public from 6 July. We’ve given advice to our members in those sectors that we thinking this return to public-facing work is unsafe, and have reminded them of their rights to refuse unsafe work. We’ll back up groups of members who take that action. We don’t know exactly how things will play out. 60% of staff in the Department for Work and Pensions are already working from the physical workplace, rather than from home. DWP workers have continued to see particularly vulnerable claimants...

PCS tells members: you have the right to refuse unsafe work

On 29 June, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) announced that it was re-introducing benefit conditionality, or sanctions, from 1 July. Conditionality was suspended at the start of lockdown for all claimants as it wasn’t practical to look for work. This also meant that staff could be redeployed on processing the millions of new Universal Credit claims. Secretary of State (and arch right-winger) Therese Coffey announced her intention that 14 Jobcentres would open on 2 July. As it happens only one opened, Marylebone. That was going to open come what may so Coffey could get her photo op...

The pandemic eight months on

About eight months after the Covid-19 pandemic started, in Wuhan, China, the infection count is rising fast again worldwide after two lulls.

The attack on Robert Cuffy

Robert Cuffy, a prominent Guyanese-American revolutionary socialist, was abused and mistreated by New York cops on a 1 July demonstration.

John McDonnell and Kate Osamor back Uyghur solidarity

John McDonnell MP and Kate Osamor MP spoke at a Uyghur Solidarity Campaign Zoom meeting on 5 July. John McDonnell said: I am sending solidarity to the Uyghur Solidarity meeting today, on the anniversary of the massacre. It is an opportune time to remind people of the suffering the Uyghur people have gone through, in recent years in particular. The savage repression by the Chinese state, the internment, the brutality meted out to the Uyghur people, the long sentences for those illegally imprisoned, and the whole attempt to wipe out the culture of the Uyghurs – it is appalling. We have to stand...

Hong Kong under the gun

The slogans of the long-running democracy movement in Hong Kong (above) are now declared to be crimes punishable by ten years or more in jail The Chinese National People’s Congress passed the Hong Kong National Security Act on 30 June. It was then gazetted and enacted as Annex 3 of the HKSAR Basic Law at 11 pm the same day. It came into effect on 1 July 1st, the day Hong Kong was handed over by the UK to China exactly 23 years ago. 1 July is a public holiday in Hong Kong, and the day when anti-Government demonstration marches are held. On 1 July, tens of thousands defied the new law and...

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