Solidarity 579, 27 January 2021

Calling out Compass

Images of free-school-meal-substitute “hampers” flooded across social media in mid-January, and very quickly the story was picked up by the mainstream media. Tweeter @RoadsideMum had received her “hamper” as the parent of two children. Supposedly enough to last ten days, it wouldn’t have sustained a hungry teenager for more than about fifteen minutes. Other families started to photograph their “hampers”. Half a tomato wrapped in cellophane. Half a tin of tuna in a money bag. Chartwells bill the government £30 per hamper. A quick trip to Asda online priced the contents at slightly under £5.50...

Sywell strikes against academisation

Members of the National Education Union at Sywell Primary School in Northamptonshire are set to strike on Tuesday 26 and Thursday 28 January over a long-running dispute against the academisation of their school.

Unison left: a chance for unity?

The right-wing continuity candidate Christina McAnea won the General Secretary election for the public service workers’ union Unison (result announced 11 January). But there were reasons to be encouraged by the result. Rank-and-file left candidate Paul Holmes delivered a strong vote. McAnea won the election with 63,900 votes, Paul Holmes came in second place with 45,220 votes. Candidates backed by different sections of the left won more than 50% of votes cast. Assistant general secretary Roger McKenzie, backed by Jeremy Corbyn and much of the “official” Labour left, got 14,450 votes, and the...

Fix schools, not students

Three people were arrested for protesting outside the Ministry of Education in Singapore on Tuesday 26 January. The Ministry has come under fire for telling a transgender student to reduce her hormone replacement therapy or face expulsion. Ashlee, the student, had previously been sent home for having long hair and not obeying the dress code. Gay sex is a crime in Singapore. An annual LGBTQ rights event, Pink Dot, has helped to educate people and exert mass pressure on the government. Students, teachers and school workers must join together to demand that schools be safe for LGBTQ students.

Diary of a Tube worker: Stretching us thin

Getting information in writing seems almost impossible. Putting something in an email makes it more official, of course. So I am presented with the email on a day off that just says “call me when you can”. I email back. I can see I’m spare on the roster, and with Covid now running riot through some station groups I can see I’m likely to be moving between stations, covering here and there. But I want to know if I’m having to get up at 0500 and to come in at 0700, or If I can hold on till I’m needed to fill the first gap at 1100. An email pings back from a manager. “Please give us a call”. Why...

Kino Eye: Woody Guthrie on-screen

At the Biden inauguration, bejewelled Jennifer Lopez’s warbling and truncated rendering of the Woody Guthrie classic This Land is Your Land was a travesty of the real thing. Fortunately, you can go online and hear the original. There is also the semi-fictionalised film of Guthrie’s life, Bound for Glory (Hal Ashby, 1976), which covers the time from when he leaves his home in the Oklahoma Dustbowl and heads for California. Angered by what he sees in the migrant camps and the brutal treatment of migrant workers, he dedicates himself, through his songs, to fight their cause. It is rumoured that...

DVLA scandal hits the press

The lack of robust Covid safety measures at DVLA Swansea, mentioned before in these columns, has now been picked up by the national press. The Department for Transport has been written to twice by the Labour government of Wales, which has demanded that the numbers of workers in the physical workplace be drastically reduced. PCS has repeatedly demanded that all workers are sent home — even those whose jobs don’t allow home working. It’s clearly not safe for people to be in the workplace at the moment, so people should be at home on full pay. Part of the background is a catastrophic strategic...

Merseyrail: vote yes for action!

RMT launched a new ballot for industrial action on Merseyrail on 21 January. The vote runs until 11 February.

The union gave bosses a November deadline to open talks on a new pay settlement. With the employer having failed to meet that deadline, the union quite rightly declared a dispute and has...

British Gas: revolt against 15% pay cut

British Gas workers’ strikes against their employer’s plan to worsen its workers terms and conditions by sacking them en masse and re-engaging them on new contracts continued on 22 and 25 January, with further strikes planned on 29, 30, 31 January, and 1 February. More strikes are expected after that. Although bosses at Centrica, British Gas’s parent company, claim that “base pay and pensions are protected” under the new terms, British Gas workers say they face a real-terms pay cut of up to 15% in the hourly rate, in part because of the imposition of additional hours. Some workers could face...

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