Unison elections
Elections for seats on Unison’s national executive committee close on 22 October. Socialist Party members Hugo Pierre and John Malcolm are standing for the local government male seat and the northern region male seats respectively. To help build a fighting Unison leadership up to the job of defeating the Con-Dem cuts, support these candidates.
Tube unions enter talks
Transport unions RMT and TSSA entered talks with London Underground (LU) on 12 October. Arbitration service ACAS have organised the talks, in advance of the next strike days planned for 2 and 28 November.
The dispute is over plans to cut 800 ticket office and other station staff jobs. But now LU has announced further cuts. They want to get rid of 400 office and management jobs as well as leaving an equivalent number of vacancies unfilled.
Lecturers’ union calls cuts conference
The University and College Union’s (UCU) higher education sector, which represents academic staff in universities across the UK, will hold a special HE sector conference on 26 November to determine the course of national industrial action against job and pay cuts.
Dr Marion Hersh, speaking for the higher education committee (HEC), told UCU activists of the decision, in response to criticism from Socialist Party members and others of the HEC’s decision not to call a strike ballot and its apparent disconnection from UCU rank and file.
UCU members overwhelmingly mandated the HEC to call a strike in Autumn 2010 but the HEC, lacking confidence in the success of the ballot, declined.
Over the summer, the HEC called upon UCU branches to mobilise for industrial action but took no concrete steps to build for it.
Socialists and activists in UCU had been calling for a special sector conference this month since the 3 September decision not to ballot.
Edmund Schluessel, Cardiff University UCU (personal capacity)
Mail centres threatened
Two London mail centres, Nine Elms and another near Canning Town, are threatened with closure by Royal Mail. This affects 1,850 workers who face redundancies and transfers involving long journeys to other workplaces. The Communication Workers Union is building a campaign to fight these closures, which not only threaten jobs but also mean a poorer service to the community.
