Today (5th August 2009) is the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Tower Hamlets Housing Strike. During which some 300 UNISON members of the borough Housing department went out on all out strike for a month in protest at proposed cuts to the number of local housing offices and the threat of 100 redundancies.I was the chair of the strike committee.
Eventually we hammered out a compromise with management. Instead of the proposed reduction in the number of local estate based offices from 24 to 8 sites – 16 would remain open and that there would be no compulsory redundancies.
Check out this early on-line report here
All in all it was a very demanding but fascinating experience which helped shaped my politics and understanding of trade unionism - which of course I will share with you as I post various pictures from the “dispute” during the next 4 weeks.
Current picture (1) is our totally legal picket line outside the Salmon Lane office, Poplar, E14. We were really not very good at counting past 6.
2 comments:
John
compare with your previous post - on the one hand - happy positive working class members fighting a good and winnerable cause in bright sunshine with sensible and trustworthy local leadership.
With the tiny numbers of wet rag miserable middle class and middle aged white unrepresentative weirdo SPEWS.
Cough, splutter: I simply couldn’t possibly comment.
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