Zero hours, Zero pay, Zero rights

The Guardian reports on the findings of the 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study which found that the proportion of large employers (100+ staff) with employees on zero-hours contracts rose from 11% in 2004 to 23% in 2011. The ultimate in labour market flexibility, the growth in this abusive retainer system is attributed to the rise in public sector outsourcing and employer avoidance of equal rights for agency worker workers:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/apr/02/rise-staff-zero-hour-contracts
   For a previous UNISONActive report on agency workers in the NHS read here:http://unisonactive.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/zero-hours-contracts-are-undermining.html

Hands Off the National Minimum Wage

14 years ago this week, on 1 April 1999, Labour introduced the UK's first ever national minimum wage (NMW) with an adult hourly rate of £3.60. Today it stands at £6.19 and is uprated annually on the recommendation of the Low Pay Commission. Now the Con Dems are insisting that the supposedly impartial body changes its terms of reference to consider the impact on ‘employment and the economy’ before agreeing future increases - leading to press speculation of a freeze or cut in the adult minimum wage rate (the 18 to 20 rate was frozen last October):
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9965039/Minimum-wage-could-be-frozen-or-cut-if-it-starts-to-cost-jobs-or-damage-economy-Government-suggests.html
TULO has responded quickly and launched a petition calling on the Government to back off from its plans:
http://www.unionstogether.org.uk/protecttheminimumwage

Grimmer up North

Crisis loans to help the most desperate cease today but as revealed in the Manchester Evening News things will be far grimmer up north where already struggling councils will have to pick up the pieces. If there is one way to drive desperate people towards loan sharks this is it! Yet the disciples of Thatcher have the audacity to try and justify such grotesque attacks on the welfare state in the name of ‘fairness’:
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/
news/greater-manchester-news/3000-greater-manchester-families-week-2499008
Anna Rose

Austerity ratchet turned up on poor as rich receive cash windfall

This week marks an escalation in the Coalition Government’s war against the poor in Britain. Passed off as ‘predictable criticism’ by well heeled Chancellor George Osborne MP, there is growing public outrage at the imposition of the bedroom tax on low income social housing tenants at the same time as the richest 1.5% of earners receive a 5% tax cut with 13,000 millionaires getting a tax cut of £100,000 per year:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/03/why-april-will-be-cruellest-month-age-austerity

Gender politics - from individual empowerment to collective power

More high-quality, better paid part-time jobs are required to address flexibility and the concerns of older women, according to an Institute for Public Policy Research report into gender equality. A focus on ‘women at the top’ or 'women who've made it' detracts from a strong political voice for the collective demands required to transform the majority of women’s lives: http://www.ippr.org/images/media/files/publication/2013/03/great-expectations-gender-equality_Mar2013_10562.pdf

Working for the rebirth of Canada's labour movement

The pattern of union membership in Canada is a mirror image of the UK’s. Since the 1970’s a sharp fall in private sector membership has been offset by growth in unionisation of public sector workers, which in turn is being undermined by outsourcing and privatisation. An interesting feature article in the Globe and Mail examines efforts to revive Canada’s trade union movement which, according to an internal union report, ‘faces an enormous and historic moment of truth. If unions do not change, and quickly, we will steadily follow U.S. unions into continuing decline’
http://m.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/do-unions-have-a-future/article10310754/?service=mobile

The Fool by Hugh MacDiarmid

He said that he was God.
'We are well met,' I cried.
'I've always hoped I should
Meet God before I died.'

I slew him then and cast
His corpse into a pool,
--But how I wish he had
Indeed been God, the fool!
http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/hugh-macdiarmid

To Hell with the Con Dem Bedroom Tax

Today another Bedroom Tax Day of Action will take place across the country building upon the spontaneous nationwide protests of a fortnight ago. A full list of the 50+ protests taking place is available on the Labour Left website.
    Dave Prentis speaks on behalf of all UNION members in condemning the obscene and punitive social engineering which underpins this grotesque attack on the incomes of Britain’s poorest people: ‘I can understand why landlords might be driven to take a sledgehammer to the bedroom wall and the bedroom tax. Where are the smaller homes to move to? They just aren’t available. It hits 670,000 households in April but in the whole of last year there were only 250,000 social lettings’.

The Truth Unites by Bertolt Brecht

Friends, I would wish you should know the truth and say it!
Not like the tired fleeing Caesars ‘Tomorrow we get the rations!’
But like Lenin: Tomorrow evening
We are done for, UNLESS…
As the little nursery rhyme has it:
           Brother, to the solution
           Of this problem now I turn
           No way out of our precarious position
           No way we can cut and run’.
Friends, a robust confession
And a robust UNLESS !
http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv10n2/brecht.htm

Tribute to Inez

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions has published a video of a powerful tribute to the achievements, life, times and unfinished business of Inez McCormack by UNISON's Northern Ireland Regional Secretary, Patricia McKeown:
http://vimeo.com/62283755