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A repository for reports, opinions and bits of writing on labour, trade union and other issues by a union activist and retired social worker.

Saturday 26 March 2011

We can achieve anything acting together

We can achieve anything if we act together like this, said one marcher today as hundreds of thousands march through London. Here we report on the march at Piccadilly, with the huge UNISON contingent still passing after at least an hour.

One reported police estimate is that 400,000 are marching. Even the Daily Mail is owning up to 250,000 in the biggest trade union demonstration in a generation.

A huge sea of purple and green UNISON banners, flags and placards are packing London’s streets to the deafening sound of UNISON vuvuzelas in a massive show of solidarity and resolve to save our public services and welfare state from the most savage attacks they have ever seen.

Wednesday 2 March 2011

Myths rally to attack national bargaining

Attacks on national bargaining are not new. Neither are myth-peddling and selective statistics to whip up hysteria against public service workers. But to see both so transparently together in a self-contradicting liberal think tank paper would be entertaining if it were not so dangerously dressed up as academic analysis.

The Telegraph jumps on the bandwagon with a piece by Julian Astle of the CentreForum think tank extolling the work of Professor Alison Wolf who manages to conclude that “Britain needs to rid itself of rigid centralised wage bargaining. These systems are economically harmful, undermine quality in the public services, and perpetuate disadvantage.”