The Socialist 31 January 2018

Save our NHS - kick out the privatisers

NHS: use the 3 February protests as a launch pad for a mass movement

NHS we're ready to fight

Northern health campaigns conference discusses the fightback

8,000 strong petition opposes closure of Sheffield health services

Labour NHS rally reveals horrors but offers no way forward

Leicester NHS protest

Trump as Nixon: urgent questions about press freedom and the state

Capitalism v cricket

For workplace trade union organisation against sexual harassment

Presidents Club sexism scandal: what you thought

100 years since women won the vote

Victory for Hackney school cleaners!

Local government workers' reps reject 2% pay offer

University workers' walkout for decent pensions

Merseyrail protest

Supermarket's slash jobs - union fightback needed

Cammell Lairds strikers demand improved pay and conditions

Labour civil war re-erupts over Haringey regeneration project

Tory infighting escalates - workers' action can oust them

Failing academy chain strips school assets - end academisation!

Capitalists fear for their system at Davos

Majority of kids poor in some areas

Fat cat vice chancellors schooled by Brum students

Confident London Socialist Party conference discusses key issues

Your newspaper fights with you: help fund it with May Day greetings

Bristol anti-cuts campaigners debate alternatives to the cuts

Stop the war on the Kurds

Sudan: Free Mohamed Satti

Vienna: 50,000 march against racism and austerity

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Local government workers' reps reject 2% pay offer

Unison conference 2016 photo Paul Mattsson, photo Paul Mattsson (Click to enlarge)

Glenn Kelly, Socialist Party industrial organiser

The fight for coordinated strike action to win fair pay for public sector workers took a step closer on 23 January when the elected Unison national committee for local government workers voted to recommend rejection of the 2% pay offer to its 600,000 members.

2% represents yet another pay cut with inflation running at 3.9%, and this comes on top of years of little or no pay rises. Local government pay has fallen by 21% in real terms since 2010.

This vote comes on top of the recent Unite the Union national local government committee decision to call for its members to reject the deal as well.

If the leadership were now to campaign vigorously for a rejection of the deal there is the real prospect of local government unions Unison and Unite joining the civil servants union PCS in the fight over pay this year.

However we should be under no illusions that there are those in Unison who will do all they can to undermine the vote. In the weeks leading up to the meeting the unelected national officer for local government toured the country trying to persuade regions to accept the deal.

Even at the meeting the national elected reps had to force a vote on the right to even debate the offer before a vote was taken on whether to accept or reject it. Despite the vote there is even talk now that the recommendation to reject won't even be put on the paperwork going out to members.

The reality is that winning a vote to reject the offer will have to be by a campaign waged locally and regionally by the branches and activists.

That campaign must start now, Unison members and branches should be approached to link up with Unite and the PCS in the pay protests called for 31 January.

In this issue

Save our NHS

NHS: use the 3 February protests as a launch pad for a mass movement