While I was away...

I'm catching up on my RSS feeds and emails...

War on Want report "Stitched up" on the gross exploitation of women workers in the Bangladeshi garment industry.  The research is spot on but I was concerned that recommendations failed to mention any action or pressure on pension funds or insurance companies who own the companies that make money out of such misery.  Hat tip Phil T.

Tom P at Labour & Capital on the recent report on directors pensions by the High Pay Commission.  Double standards in boardrooms. Not only are directors paid far more than their workers but they build their pensions at a much higher rate - often with 1/30th DB schemes rather than 1/60th for their staff.

"A FTSE 100 director with a defined benefit pension could be expected to receive a
median annual pension worth £174,963 on retirement. The annual median pension paid from a private sector defined benefit pension scheme was £5,860 for the rest of the work force".

Good to see "Labourhome" back after nearly 2 years offline. Welcome back Alex! I notice that they are moderating comments :)

Astonishing history link from normblog "Trumpeter Landfrey, a bugler in the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaklava (October 25, 1854), sounds the charge again, playing a trumpet that was used at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The recording was made in 1890 and you can listen to it here. (Via.)".

Tribute at UNISONActive here to Newcastle City Branch Secretary and Northern Region Deputy Convenor, Kenny Bell, who died of cancer on August 14.  Kenny was quite simply a top trade unionist and will be sadly missed.   UNISONActive also has a link to this Guardian article on the true cost to workers of outsourcing which I will post further upon later this week.

trade unions and transforming public services

This was the afternoon session on Day 2 of the UNISON Leadership school. The theme was on public service reform and how we should be responding to the challenge and securing the future. The speakers were Hilary Wainwright Research Director, New Politics Programme and Kenny Bell Deputy Regional Convenor Northern Region.

We discussed how UNISON Newcastle City branch successfully fought off an attempt to privatise Council services by their “Our City is Not for Sale” campaign. I saw Kenny and his branch give a presentation on this to UNISON conference earlier this year. We now made an attempt to explore the issues more closely and in depth.

Hilary has even helped write a book on the subject “Public Service Reform...But not as we know it”. The sub title of the book is “How Democracy can transform public services”. I briefly met her at a Labour Party Red Pepper fringe this year where she spoke about the topic. I did take notes but this is yet another post I have never quite got around to blogging. The book itself is staring at me from the book shelf with a pile of worthy others similarly unread. I will post a review as soon as I can.

The campaign itself could be seen as a model for other branches to follow when faced with the threat of outsourcing of public services especially in commissioning and procurement. The campaign itself had three strands - Industrial, Political and Public. The branch organised itself from top to bottom. There were regular meetings and consultation with all members and stewards. Everyone knew what was happening, what they needed to do and what was being done and why. The core principals were no compulsory redundancies and no outsourcing. Hilary argued that democratically provided public services are inherently better than those provided by the private sector. Industrial democracy is also key to providing quality public services.

The key leadership principal that I picked up (Kenny made it clear that he thought it was all done collectively but I think he is being modest) that public servants are also consumers of public services. We all want high quality and efficient services. We are not luddites and realise that you cannot argue forever for the status quo. However we believe in public services being provided by publicly accountable organisations. Newcastle City branch by campaigning, lobbying, involving the public, researching and taking well organised industrial action - they were able to defeat the proposed outsourcing.

Afterwards we broke into work groups to discuss how far we can use this Newcastle model in our branches and regions. Then we did more Group project work and in the evening there was a film on the Enron fraud.