Private firms cash in on Probation outsourcing

Despite the exclusion of discredited big beasts G4S and Serco from recent competitive tendering for £450m of probation services contracts in England and Wales, the private sector has swept the board with two outsourcing companies - Sodexo and Purple Futures - leading 'consortiums' that were last week awarded a majority of the 21 regional, ten year long, contracts:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/oct/29/justice-probation-contracts-private-companies

Militant by Langston Hughes

Let all who will
Eat quietly the bread of shame.
I cannot,
Without complaining loud and long.
Tasting its bitterness in my throat,
And feeling to my very soul
It's wrong.
For honest work
You proffer me poor pay,
for honest dreams
Your spit is in my face,
And so my fist is clenched
Today-
To strike your face.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/langston-hughes

NHS Unions can make Con Dem's pay for reneging on PRB pay rise

Following last week’s health service group executive and subsequent liaison with other NHS unions, UNISON has confirmed that our members working in the NHS in England will stage a further four-hour stoppage between 7am and 11am on Monday 24 November. This will be followed by a week of action short of strike action between Tuesday 25 and Sunday 30 November when members will work to rule and not do any unpaid overtime. The stakes are high and it’s vital that the next strike (now joined by radiographers) builds on the impressive action taken on 13 October.  The Con Dem decision to unilaterally reject the recommendation of the independent NHS pay review body for a ‘1 per cent increase to all Agenda for Change pay points from 1 April 2014’ was compounded by the decision to award non consolidated 1% cash payments only to staff on the top of pay bands, thus discriminating against the 60% of staff receiving contractual increments this year. Public support is overwhelmingly with NHS workers and if the joint action can be sustained into 2015 the Con Dem’s can be forced to pay a heavy political price for this unprecedented attack on health workers.

Britain’s low pay epidemic

'Low Pay Britain 2014', the Resolution Foundation’s annual audit of low pay across Britain, has found that the number of people earning less than two-thirds of median hourly pay, equivalent to £7.69 an hour, rose to 5.2 million, an increase of 250,000 on the previous year and 22% of the national workforce:
http://www.channel4.com/news/low-wages-money-earnings-record-employment-pay

Italian trade unionists stand up in defence of workers' rights

In their biggest protest for a decade, up to one million Italian trade unionists mobilised in Rome yesterday in opposition to attacks on employment rights by the Democratic Party led Italian Government. Susanna Camusso, head of the CGIL, the trade union centre which organised the protest, said: "We want work for everyone, and work with rights. This is a demonstration for those without work, without rights, those who suffer, who have no certainties for the future. We are here and we're not going away. We will strike and use all our strength to fight to change this Government's policies."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-29771540

In This Light by Alan Dunnett

You sit with the others staring at the agenda.
Everything is in order and respectable.
The chairperson is venerated, the coffee
is not instant. The doorknobs are burnished gold
in this light.

Protest to Survive?

'Since 2011, the trade union movement has focused on building A to B marches and ‘co-ordinated strike action’, bringing together multiple sectors of the economy for a set of largely symbolic and defensive one-day strikes. This strategy has since witnessed a slow death by repetition' writes Michael Chessum on the New Statesman's blog reflecting on last Saturday's Britain Needs a Pay Rise march in London and simultaneous protests in Belfast and Glasgow.
     Over the conference season and in UNISON's In Focus magazine a much needed 'Autumn of Action' was launched to defeat public sector pay restraint but even before our clocks were turned back this strategy foundered as the NJC unions, first GMB and Unite (a crucial fact omitted by Chessum) and then UNISON, suspended the 14 October local government strike. Treasury claims that since 2010 pay restraint has removed £12bn from the pocket of public sector workers with minimal union resistance provides hard evidence to support Chessum's polemic that unions will need to raise our game if we are to defeat the 'entrenched Thatcherite consensus' which promises us further austerity and pay freezes regardless of next May's General Election outcome.

It’s also fine by Mourid Barghouti

It’s also fine to die in our beds
on a clean pillow
and among our friends.
It’s fine to die, once,
our hands crossed on our chests,
empty and pale,
with no scratches, no chains, no banners,
and no petitions.

How the UK's privatised electricity industry mutated into (foreign) state owned corporations

The widely acclaimed 'Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else’ by James Meek is, according to the FT's reviewer, ‘a book to read if you want vivid details of what went wrong’ in the aftermath of the Conservative Party’s orgy of privatisation in the 1980’s and 1990’s. The book's stand out essay, on the sale of UK electricity, charts the changes in ownership which have left foreign but state owned corporations dominant in the sector. It was first published in the LRB and can be read here. It highlights the contrasting approaches of UNISON and the French union CGT, with the latter bemused at the lack of resistance shown by UK unions to privatisation and foreign takeovers.

Unions and the 'Post Political Labour Movement'

For decades union activists across the world have argued the case for or against alliances between trade unions and social democratic parties, or with other parties with political and organisational links to the trade unions.

In the UK it has raged around the links to the Labour Party, now reformed (or `deformed` depending on your position) once again by the fallout from the Grangemouth and Falkirk  episodes involving Unite and the Labour Party. UNISON retains its still superior (in the light of those 2 incidents) options of Labour Link or the attractive option of the Political Fund, or even `none of the above`.