PCS is balloting 6,500 members for strike action following the Met Police’s refusal to extend the £1,250 London Allowance to civilian police staff - despite previously agreeing to discuss it during 2024/25 pay talks. www.pcs.org.uk/news-events/...

💰You’re making billions… for someone. 🏤Private companies & shareholders profit from once public utilities that SHOULD belong to us. And what do we get? Higher bills & worse services. 🗞️Read all about it: www.common-wealth.org/interactive/...

Billionaires, polluters, oligarchs. We're taking to the streets on Saturday 20 September to Make Them Pay. March with us. www.youtube.com/shorts/Bdk_r...

PCS is now running at least 18 disputes. Under a Labour government!

Action in the UK as well. Admittedly on a smaller scale!

🇫🇷 French unions are mobilising - EPSU will be on the streets together with them against brutal austerity measures too! This fight isn’t only France’s, it’s Europe’s. 📣 Workers demand a Europe for all, not the few. 📣 Workers demand a #PublicServiceAgenda - not a corporate one ✊🏾 #Solidarité

I read that because Robinson didn't get the 3M he claimed he would get for the march, he failed. I don't find that argument persuasive. On the day they vastly outnumbered us. If you add in the online audience following them, the deficit is even greater.

On Saturday, Robinson’s far-right march apparently had 300K live stream viewers by midday. Add the physical turnout, and we’re likely talking 300–400K people actively engaged. We were outnumbered 10:1 on the ground; that figure goes to 30+ to 1 when you take the online presence.

Yesterday's demo against the far right was vibrant, full of young people, notable for the number of women on it but we were vastly outnumbered. In that sense, the far right won. It was us who had to be escorted away by the police.

Marching to Bella Ciao

Clear of Tragflar Square

Moving past the fascists

Still waiting.

Forming up to leave Whitehall. That means marching past the fascists in Trafalgar Square

At the rally, but both ends of the streets are blocked by the fascists.

On the anti fascist march in London.

PCS members employed by pension administrator MyCSP have already undertaken 10 weeks of strike action. Now we have formally notified the employer of plans to extend the industrial action by a further six weeks, continuing until 7 November. www.pcs.org.uk/news-events/...

Sectoral bargaining is probably the key demand that the Trade Union movement must be making over the coming period. Decades ago, sectoral bargaining was commonplace in the UK. Through privatisation and concerted and systematic attacks on trade unionism,

TUC Congress 2025 has now ended. Some good debates, but as always with these things, subsequent actions are the most important things.

Today (9 September) PCS begins a consultative ballot in DWP on strike action over the pay in the department. To read more on that please go there: www.pcs.org.uk/news-events/...

Congratulations to the Swire Beverages (HK) Employees General Union. To read more about the TU movement in Hong Kong go here: www.equaltimes.org/it-s-an-uphi...

So why the wave of university unionisation in the US? Of course there must be a material basis for it, low wages, insecure employment etc. But such conditions are rife in many sectors of the US economy and haven't sparked a compatible unionisation drive.

I've mentioned before the wave of union recognition wins across universities and colleges in the US. In fact more than 50,000 graduate students and other student workers on 51 university campuses won union recognition since 2022. So it is good to see the wave continuing with the Uni of California.

Next Monday, 8 September, our fringe meeting at TUC Congress in Brighton, sponsored by our six national trade union affiliates, and with a great panel of speakers. Open to local trade unionists, Ukraine solidarity activists and others too. Please spread the word! #TUC25 #TUC2025

I wish the BMA well, and hope that the Resident Doctors send a resounding message to the government by voting overwhelmingly YES for industrial action.

ONS data shows private rents in England are increasingly unaffordable. Private renters on a median household income could expect to spend 36.3% of their income on an average-priced rented home in England in 2024; the figs being 25.9% for Wales and 25.3% for Northern Ireland.

Every time I talk of MHCLG, I think of the so-called friend of the unions, Angela Rayner. As I have repeatedly said she refuses to meet the unions in her department, has done nothing to encourage union membership in MHCLG and keeps in place all the Tory anti-trade union polices

Happy to have attended the MHCLG picket lines today.

"They peddle myths: that darker-skinned people are the strangers; that racism is understandable & acceptable; that we have to tighten our borders, celebrate the best of our history, grow our military, double down" @dannydorling.bsky.social on the real strangers among us www.dannydorling.org?p=10475

Our youngest supporter was on the Ofgem picket line in London today ❤️

Youth on our side again! Today it's Jace - who's ace! - helping out on the MyCSP picket line in Liverpool. The pickets have got that Friday feeling today, but will be back out on Monday unless their employer agrees to talks.

More from the BMA activist 'The system demands so much from us, but gives so little in return. ...The NHS just isn’t what it used to be .... People are exhausted. When you're working back-to-back 12-hour shifts, often without proper breaks, it becomes incredibly difficult to stay motivated.

Interesting point from a BMA activist 'But the truth is, we didn’t agree to a pay rise — we agreed to a process of pay restoration. That’s a crucial difference. Pay restoration is about gradually returning our salaries to the equivalent value of what doctors used to earn,

The Guardian report that nearly 1.4 million people say they work full-time on four days of the week. Whether this is compressed working i.e. five working days compressed into 4 days or a reduction of hours worked over 4 days with no loss of pay is not made clear in the article

Again from the We Own It Report on the railways. Section 10 is written by the RMT. It concerns insourcing services such as cleaning, station staffing, catering and more. RMT has launched the Better Jobs, Better Services campaign to show that if Great British Railways insources

We Own It propose a railway supervisory board where public service users sit alongside experts, elected local politicians, unions and wider community and environmental groups. This would be a major democratic step forward but the experience of unions on such boards in Germany

The We Own It Report on the railways makes three demands: Be ambitious: Invest at levels comparable to countries like Switzerland; expand lines and reduce fares. Deliver the benefits of public ownership: Enable cross-subsidy, integration, strategic planning by repealing outdated competition laws.

Good report from We Own It regarding the railways: vist.ly/4499x The document argues that 30 years of rail privatisation have failed, we lose between £1.2 and £1.5 billion to profits and waste each year due to privatisation, enough to cut rail fares by 18%.

Congratulations to, and solidarity with, our MyCSP members.

Every performance related pay system I've ever seen is discriminatory in effect, not only against black staff, those with disabilities but also by grade, with the lowest grades faring worse than higher grades. A truly terrible idea that we had thought we had seen the back of.

UK Govt to kick off public-private partnerships in England. It is new name for Private Finance Initiative. Private sector invests £1, gets £6+ back. The state guarantees corporate profits. Nothing learnt? Govt can create money, borrow, do QE, tax the rich ... why hand free cash to corporations?

Proud to have spoken at the solidarity rally for the Ukrainian trade union movement and Ukrainian people. No to dismemberment of Ukraine.

True now - think AI - as then. Productivity gains have to be shared with the workers. So our answer still remains more pay and less hours.

This article starts 'In the 1970s, private landlordism in the UK was a fringe part of the market – and a dying one. With council housing plentiful and house prices within the range of those with decent, working-class jobs, we did not need private landlords'. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Labor Notes reports 'Starbucks Workers United recently celebrated the unionization of their 600th store, disproving reams of conventional wisdom: you can’t organize small shops… you can’t organize high-turnover workplaces… you can’t organize young people. For a gripping

Also to a lesser or greater degree unions contest the power of the employer in the workplace. Politically they can, and have acted as a counterbalance to the power of the wealthy and the big corporations. In other words, they're vital for democracy.

PCS doing its bit to build the renewables revolution. We are putting on more solar panels to our HQ building. This means we will be more or less self-sufficient for many months of the year. If we can do this, every sizeable organisation can.

Experts say you've been misled about the true cost of public ownership of water. 1/4

The GMB union reports that Ministers are lining up administrators for Thames Water. Certainly the financial collapse of this water company has been on the cards for some time given the vast debts it has built up over the years.

The practice of paying wind farms not to operate is called curtailment. In this case they were paid £117M not to produce electricity. Green power is wasted whilst many people who need that energy cannot afford it. The government must reform the system and ensure renewables serve the public good.