As the Care Bill works its way through Parliament, one particular part of it, Clause 118 aka ‘the hospital closure clause’ is causing huge concern among NHS campaigners, unions and clinical staff. When clinicians who have been through years of training and have marked up decades of clinical practice put the words ‘risk’ and ‘patient…
Yesterday I blogged about how US workers need unions to get fair pay. Then in his State of the Union address last night, President Obama devoted a whole section of the speech to low pay, reproduced below. In particular, and as expected, he announced that he would be ordering a unilateral increase in the minimum wage for…
Last year US trade union members were $200/£125 a week better off than non-members, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics, released on Friday. That stark figure explains why our sister organisation in the USA, the AFLCIO, is calling on President Obama to make the promotion of collective bargaining rights a key element…
We’ve written before about the Fiji military dictatorship’s appalling human rights record and its harassment of trade union leaders. Most recently, the regime extended the ban on strikes (and effective ban on freedom to join a union) to cover the wood chip industry which is one of Fiji’s biggest export industry (as well as fire prevention, local…
As Sean Bamford wrote last week, the Turkish state’s war on the KESK public sector union entered a new phase with the opening of the trial in Istanbul of dozens of activists arrested in early 2013. I had the privilege of joining with trade unionists from across the European Union as well as a representative…
Last night I attended a debate about the role trade unions can play in tackling poverty in the global south. The discussion was well-timed given that political leaders from across the globe are this week making decisions in Davos which will undoubtedly impact on the development of global south nations. One Davos attendee, billionaire and…
Every terrorist attack is a tragedy for the victims, their families and communities. But in the personal stories about such deaths, we often lose sight of the fact that many people killed in such attacks are workers going about their daily business. Unions in conflict zones are often the only organisations to point out the…