Responding to the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) budget the Wales TUC welcomed ‘the relative protection afforded to health and schools – as well as the recognition of the key role of social services’ but noted that the ‘massive cuts to capital programmes, like local road transport, are a major concern and will impact on the private sector, particularly construction.’
In sometimes lively debates the Wales TUC conference overwhelming agree a number of propositions that together will form the strategy for trade unions’ resistance to the cuts in Wales.
The main propositions agreed were:
· Postponing next year’s Wales TUC conference until 2012 in order to concentrate all of the congress’s resources on co-ordinating the anti cuts campaign.
· Developing a network of local campaign co-ordinators throughout Wales who will lead the delivery of the Wales TUC campaign in their locality.
· With all activities building toward a mass demonstration in London on 26th March 2011
· Proposing an all Wales framework agreement between local authority employers and unions under the auspices of the Workforce Partnership Council to mitigate job loss and the imposition of permanent reductions in terms and conditions.
In arriving at these decisions the English centric arguments of the ultra left, to set WAG up as the enemy by calling on it to set a deficit budget and ruling out negotiation on the cuts with the Welsh government, were overwhelmingly defeated.
Earlier on in the conference trade unionists heard the Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones roundly condemning councils who have used the threat of S188 notices to impose cuts in terms and conditions, stating that councils should engage positively with their trade unions and not resort to “the waving of redundancy notices to their workforce”; and then called for “all avenues to be explored before redundancies are considered, especially compulsory redundancies”.
The conference also had fraternal greetings from Grahame Smith – General Secretary of the Scottish TUC and Peter Bunting from the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.
In the course of Peter Bunting’s speech he predicted the mammoth workers’ demonstration held in Dublin the next day, Saturday, and declared that the trade union movement had a clear choice of being a spectator during these seismic economic upheavals or to be the mid-wife to a “second republic”.
UNISON played a major role in unifying this conferences with major contributions from Peter Crews, Wales convenor, and Paul O’Shea, Wales secretary; and provided an added focus to the campaign in Wales with Peter Crews declaring Rhondda Cynon Taff UNISON’s intention to hold a demonstration and march through Pontypridd in February and invited the Wales TUC to turn this into an all Wales rally in the build up to the TUC London demonstration in March.
http://www.tuc.org.uk/extras/WTUC_gov_cuts.pdf