Solidarity 172, 30 April 2010

The pretentiously titled “World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth” took place in Cochabamba, Bolivia, between 19 and 22 April. Called by the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, the conference attracted over 30,000 people to discuss the way forward after the failure of Copenhagen climate talks. While participants were rightly critical of the existing neo-liberal political economy of climate change, which puts market instruments at the centre of its strategy to tackle the issue (and leaves the dominant social relations untouched), their positive proposals lacked...

Last week anti-cuts activists swept the board in our student union elections. All three candidates on the “Stop the cuts! Shake up YOUR union” slate were elected — Robin Law as President, Fatima Hagi as student Trustee and myself as VP Education. Less than a year ago there was little activist culture at Westminster. The SU was dominated by a bunch of self-serving incompetents, with those who wanted a fight isolated. The anti-cuts movement has changed all that. Westminster is facing almost 300 job losses, course cuts and the closure of our nursery. After a period of patiently building up the...

Despite a background of grassroots struggles against cuts and fees, NUS conference 2010 saw the Blairite leadership entrench itself and push further down the road of bureaucratisation, depoliticisation and capitulation to the government. Conference was dramatically smaller than in previous years. Nearly 50% of delegates were full-time sabbatical officers. They voted overwhelmingly for the anodyne-sounding goal of “progressing the Collaborations Agenda”. What this actually means is the merger of part of the union’s structure with its commercial services organisation NUSSL and, bizarrely, AMSU...

Teaching staff at nearly a dozen Further Education colleges in London, as well as University College London and Westminster University, will take strike action on 5 May in the first coordinated wave of strike action in response to the government’s education cuts. Because cuts are being delivered locally, the UCU is prevented from taking national action on the issue (which would fall foul of the anti-union laws). However, the May strikes show that coordinating workplace-by-workplace action so workers strike on the same day, and with the maximum impact, is clearly possible. Socialists and other...

Dominic Warner works in a commercial call centre in north London. Tell us a little bit about the work you do. I do customer service work in a call-centre, for a company which buys gold. It mainly involves being abused and shouted at by dissatisfied customers, and dealing with prank calls from kids. About 70% of our time is spent sitting around waiting for calls to come in; it’s a great opportunity to catch up on some reading. Do you and your workmates get the pay and conditions you deserve? We’re paid just above the minimum wage, which is not great, but the main sticking point is hours. The...

A BNP election broadcast went out on Monday 26 April on BBC 1 in England. A few dozen people demonstrated outside Broadcasting House against the transmission, in a protest organised by Unite Against Fascism, Expose the BNP and the broadcasting union BECTU. Earlier BECTU had issued a statement aimed at its members inside the BBC: “BECTU’s advice to its members is that where they are requested to work on a BNP party political broadcast and do not wish to do so, in the first instance they must advise their line manager and also inform BECTU. Past experience suggests that broadcasters have ensured...

Postal workers voted two-to-one to accept the deal drawn up between the CWU leadership and Royal Mail management. The deal represents a pay rise of 7%, but over four years. It also represents the abolition of the per-item payment rate for junk-mail deliveries, which will be replaced with a standard weekly payment of £20.80. For delivery workers, the deal is yet another shoddy let-down from their union leadership and scant reward for the courage they showed throughout months of strike action. The union negotiated the deal almost entirely behind closed-doors and sprang it on the membership as a...

Primary school head teachers, members of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) will boycott the SATs tests due on 10-13 May. They will lock up the test papers when they receive them, before 10 May, and not issue them. Labour schools minister Ed Balls has staged an apt finale to his term in office by urging school governors to bypass the head teacher and enforce the hated tests, maybe even by instructing the head teacher to stay off school during the test period! On 16 April the NUT and NAHT announced their ballot results. The result of the NUT...

Ryan Slaughter is an organiser for Community, a trade union formed from a merger of steel, ceramics and textile workers’ unions. He spoke to Solidarity about the union’s organisation campaign in betting shops. We were traditionally a steel and manufacturing union, but we found a lot of workers who had manufacturing jobs have over the past few years gone into retail. We had a few members who went to work in betting shops, so we started organising there. We currently have members across the whole of the sector — Ladbrokes, William Hill, Coral, Paddy Power. We also have membership in smaller...

In February, London Underground announced 800 front-line stations job cuts: 450 ticket sellers, around 200 station assistants, alongside a handful of managers. Facing a slick campaign from London Underground, RMT activists are campaigning hard, and are now waiting for a fighting response from the top of the union. Latest figures show that every station will lose a significant number of staff, when we have too few already! Even current numbers leave some stations regularly unstaffed. There are never enough to deal with incidents. When a short delay leads to overcrowding on platforms, staff need...