Workers at Royal Mail have voted overwhelmingly in favour of strike action over management plans for job cuts. 76% of workers who responded to the ballot voted in favour of industrial action. The roots of the dispute go back to the settlement that ended the 2007 national postal strike.

At the time it was announced as a victory, but in fact the CWU union agreed to management plans to cut jobs. The ‘victory’ was that the CWU and Royal Mail management would negotiate the details of the cuts at a local level. Now postal workers are unhappy with the results of those negotiations. One trigger is the Royal Mail’s refusal to “Pay for Change.” In unilaterally imposing such changes by so-called ‘executive action’, Royal Mail have reopened the dispute.

Regardless of work status (temporary or permanent, agency, full or part-time) or our contracts of employment, most of us have certain basic rights. These include:

1. The right to be told in writing how much and when we are to be paid.
The Minimum Wage for those over 22 years of age is set at £5.80,.  For 18-21 year olds it is £4.83 and for 16-17 year olds it is £3.57. For agency workers, wages must be paid on the agreed day, even if the hiring company has not paid the agency.

2. The right to at least 28 days paid leave per year.

May 2010 will see a general election where the main parties will compete with each other in promising cuts in public expenditure and attacks on public sector workers pay and conditions.

This offensive is egged on by the media and parts of it are fast becoming accepted wisdom - even if the supposed facts underpinning this version of events are wrong.

While the media like to talk about public sector bureaucracy, the vast majority of public sector workers do things that are useful – nurses, doctors, street cleaners, library assistants, meals-on-wheels drivers, carers, teachers – are just a few examples. Whoever gets in after the next election, these groups of workers are a prime target for cuts to balance the State’s books after the multi-billion pound bank bail-outs. The bureaucrats will for the most part not be the victims of these cuts, but those doing the cutting.

While the recent media spin is suggesting that we’re ‘on our way out of recession’, the reality on the ground is that workers are still facing attacks across sectors in the forms of job cuts and community provisions. Education has been one of the sectors worst hit in this period, with £65m slashed from higher-education (HE) budgets, schools closing left, right and centre, and jobs to go at approximately 100 of the 150 HE institutions in the UK . The situation is as bleak as ever.

In August, around 250 members of teaching staff at Tower Hamlets College (THC), East London went on indefinite strike over threats of compulsory redundancies, and cuts in provision of ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) courses. Catalyst spoke to Rachel, a member of the striking staff, about the background of the dispute, the issues at hand, and the feelings after the strike came to an end in late September.

When it comes to drugs, the state’s policy has traditionally been hard-line; blanket prohibition and the criminalisation of users. However a recent government-backed study has cast doubt on the wisdom of this approach, by showing that prescribing heroin to addicts both drastically cut the use of street drugs and markedly reduced crime.

8-page leaflet looking at what we can learn from the 2007 postal strike, the 2008 public sector strike and the 2009 Visteon occupation.

The leaflet was produced for a demo against the Labour Party Conference on Sunday 27th September. It is based on several previously published articles and we try to draw the lessons of recent relevant struggles in the UK.

For Workers’ Control

Lessons of recent struggles in the UK

Recent years have seen promising signs of a working class fightback, after decades of attacks on working class living standards.

But it is still early days. What can we learn from recent struggles? How can we turn isolated victories into a class-wide fightback to improve our working and living conditions, and resist the further cuts that have been promised in the next few years? We can start to answer these questions by studying the lessons of recent workers’ struggles in the UK…

South London Solidarity Federation Supports the Tube Cleaners. An article about the Tube cleaners Strike and action reports. July 4th, 2008 taken from LibCom.org

Tube cleaners’ union RMT has demanded an end to “appalling intimidation“ of members involved in a 48-hour strike for a living wage on, one on July 1st-3rd. Tube cleaners also engaged in a 24-hour strike on June 25th-26th.

The union is gathering evidence that cleaners have been bullied, harassed and threatened with the sack and with illegal punitive deductions from their wages if they take strike action.

“Reports coming in from picket lines over the last 36 hours indicate that the employers are so desperate that they are resorting to gangster-style intimidation and using the worst sort of fear tactics to stop more people joining the strike, “ RMT general secretary Bob Crow said today.

This is a leaflet we produced in August 2009, explaining some basics of anarcho-syndicalism.

If you want a copy, please get in touch with us, or download the attached pdf file.

What is anarcho-syndicalism?

Anarchism is a revolutionary political current that declares “freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice and socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.”

Syndicalism is the workers’ movement. Deriving from the French word for Trade Unionism (Syndicalisme), it seeks to unite workers on an economic basis to fight for their interests.

Anarcho-syndicalism is anarchism applied to the workers’ movement. From small educational groups to mass revolutionary unions, libertarian organisation grows and is controlled from the bottom up.

In this issue:

The University Funding Freeze ; Alternative G20 at University of East London ; Roundup ... University and Colleges Roundup ; H.E. Pay: Don't be Fooled ; Break with Partnership