Our friends from the west
A few more Hammersmith and Fulham goodies for you, comrades:
We hear that the New Labour guns who run Unison have finally given beleaguered workers at Tory Hammersmith and Fulham council permission to ballot for strike action.
The strike will be in protest at a major downgrading of staff terms and conditions - a slash and burn of decent working standards that the council has been threatening for about a year.
It's all surely on now.
We trust absolutely that the regional officers that Unison's London office has parachuted in to help run the leftwing Hammersmith Unison branch are up to the sober task of organising strike action.
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As it happens, Hammersmith and Fulham staff have already chucked a spanner in council leader Stephen Greenhalgh's works with a brilliant little action of their own.
Last week, they were all - technically - sacked, then re-hired on the lesser terms and conditions. They had to sign up to the lesser terms and conditions if they wanted to be rehired.
Staff didn't make this quite as easy for the council as it sounds. It seems that as they signed, hundreds of them also noted that they were signing under duress. Then, they each lodged a case form for unfair dismissal - the argument being that they were sacked, unfairly, before being forced to sign up to the new terms.
Now, the council has a great big pile of forms to process. That's got to be a pain in the butt. HR will surely lose its rag.
Enough for now: suffice to say that it takes an awful lot of anger and energy to organise the sort of Up Yours action we've described above.
We expect plenty more of the same.
We've said it before, comrades, and we'll say it again - people who use and provide public services have no time for the Tory, Labour and Lib Dem line that they and the public sector must be destroyed if the nation is to be saved. Take it from those of us who talk to people who use and provide public services. They don't believe they're responsible for the recession. They want the banks to pay.
More to come.
