Labour MP John McDonnell today welcomed the candidacy of leading
Yorkshire trade unionist, Paul Holmes, to replace Dave Prentis as
General Secretary of UNISON, the largest public sector trade union.

Last Friday February 5th members of the CYWU Unite trade union in
Coventry staged another one-day strike to defend jobs and conditions
and to try and stop the savage cuts being imposed on the Children and
Youth Services budget.

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On the 4^th February 2010, the
Student Union at the University of Greenwich called a demonstration at the
Maritime campus, outside the Vice Chancellor’s office. This was in response to
the recent decision by the university management to increase tuition fees next
academic year.

Marshalls
is a leading company in the design,manufacture and maintenance of aerospace and
military vehicles. Family owned, it is one of the largest employers in Cambridge employing around
1,700 staff at it’s site, including it’s airport. Unite are the union that
organise in the plant and reps there have been supportive of Jerry, since he
fought his unfair dismissal by Rolls Royce. Matt Wells spoke to a Unite
member who works at the plant

At a
so-called disciplinary hearing Lancaster Cleaning Services have sacked UNITE
shop-steward and leader of the Latin American Workers Association Alberto
Durango.  The company took over the
contract for the Union Bank of Switzerland on Monday 1 February; they suspended
him on the Tuesday and sacked him on Thursday 4 February.  This premeditated act is part of their
efforts to break the union at UBS. A demo has been organised for Friday 12th Feb in London.

General Motors, implementing its restructuring programme has commenced a brutal
campaign of plant closures and job cuts in Europe. The first to go is
the plant in Antwerp, Belgium where 2,600 are employed at the
Vauxhall/Opel plant. The plant, producing the Vectra and Astra models,
will be closing down over the next few weeks and the production of
those models will be allocated to other plants across Europe.

The post of UNISON General Secretary is one of the most important jobs
in the whole of the Labour and trade union movement in Britain and the
north of Ireland. UNISON is a decisive force in the public sector and
is potentially extremely powerful. UNISON is also one of the biggest
unions affiliated to the Labour Party and the leadership of the union
is intimately tied up with the Labour Party. As such this election is
as important as the UNITE General Secretary Election, and in the public
sector perhaps more so.

Ireland: While
the public sector workers might not be all out on the streets or on all
out strike, it would be a big mistake to think that the government is
out of the woods on the question of the wage cuts and the attacks on
the public sector. 70,000 SIPTU workers joined the work to rule
yesterday and the CPSU have escalated their action and are balloting
for full strike action.

January 26th saw ‘Glasgow Uni Left Society’ hold a successful first
meeting of the year. More than twenty people came to hear Scottish
Socialist Party National Spokesperson Colin Fox and Sherry Shamasi of
The Struggle, the Pakistani section of the International Marxist
Tendency, speak about the war in Afghanistan.

Long
discussions into the small hours, shuttle diplomacy and the combined
weight of Gordon Brown and Brian Cowen and still the deadlock continues
over the devolution of policing and justice in the North. The process
is meant to have been agreed years ago, but the deep contradictions in
the North mean that every issue and every syllable has to be fought
over. The “peace process”, far from solving the problems of the working
class has enshrined sectarian division and entombed the leadership of
Sinn Féin and the DUP in Stormont, presiding over the minutiae of what
is more or less an overblown County Council.