It
won’t come as a big surprise to most thinking workers that a bunch of
Tory councillors sat around and made the decision to institute a pay
freeze in local government. No surprise that is because the memory of
Thatcherism is still etched on many workers minds and secondly because
with New Labour  already advocating a 1% pay
ceiling on public sector pay, how were the Tories going to out do them?
Why, by offering less of course!

Following the break down of negotiations aimed at resolving the long
running dispute over shift changes and threatened job loss by the South
Yorkshire Fire Authority hundreds of firefighters are set for another
round of industrial action.

When New Labour came to power in 1997, Tony Blair stated that his top
three priorities were “education, education, education”. 13 years
later, and figures from a recent poll 
show that over two-thirds of people in England believe that the
government has failed to deliver the improvement in education that it
promised.

The bankers are celebrating their orgies.  Wall Street banks are set to
shell out $65bn in bonuses to the speculators who fouled up so
spectacularly and brought the credit crunch down on our heads. Some of
this largesse will drop into the laps of dealers in the City of London
and Canary Wharf. Goldman Sachs alone will lash out $20bn and JP
Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America will stump up
another $65bn

The University of Leeds has proposed cutting up to 700 jobs, according
to the University and College Union. This is part of the university’s
attempt to cut its annual budget by £35 million. The Vice Chancellor,
Michael Arthur, has engineered these cuts, and the student union
refuses to oppose them. Leeds University is just one of dozens of
higher education institutes that will be crippled by a reduction in
funding. These attacks on jobs and education are the most severe since
the Thatcher years and must be resisted.

Socialist Appeal recently published an appeal from IT workers at
Japanese-based multinational Futitsu, who have been taking strike
action up and down the country in Britain’s first ever national strike
of IT workers.  The workers and their union, Unite, are incensed that
the highly-profitable IT services provider is attempting to scrap the
pension scheme and putting thousands of staff at risk of redundancy.

The
trade union campaign against the wage cuts announced in Lenihan’s
December budget will begin to escalate over the next few weeks as
different groups of workers across the public sector take action in
what is being portrayed as an ongoing campaign of selective action.
Today 20^th January, the air traffic controllers are coming out, which will have a dramatic and very public effect on air travel.  It’s
likely that the workers concerned in the various selective actions will
receive strike fund support in many cases and as such the campaign
could continue for a considerable time. But what is the underlying
situation and what are the issues for the movement?