More money for school dinners

Travelling down to London today. Jamie Oliver is on the front of a few of the papers following his meeting yesterday with Tony Blair, and the subsequent announcement by Education Secretary Ruth Kelly that the government will commit another £220m to imrpove the quality of school dinners. You can read more here .

I think unions could learn a few lessons from this campaign - which managed to get over a quarter of a million people to sign an on-line petition, and tapped into an issue which obviously had a real resonance with parents, school meals workers and the wider public. Celebrity endorsement was one factor of course but I think the most important factor was that the campaign focussed on a real issue that mattered to real people. It showed what privatisation and outsourcing are doing to our public services in a way which a lot of union campaigning has perhaps failed to do. At the heart of the problem around school meals is the fact that this service has been outsourced and exposed to competition - effectively meaning that private companies make more profit by providing cheaper (and hence poorer quality) meals.

An extra £220m is a good start - let's hope it actually goes toward putting better meals on our kids plates, rather than increased profits for the privatised meals providers...

While I was over in the US earlier this year, I managed to meet briefly with Kate Bronfrenbrenner and her colleagues and students at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Cornell University.

Cornell is one of the main sponsors of a key conference taking place next year, bringing together unions and academics from around the world. Global Companies - Global Unions - Global Research, is taking place next February 9-11 in New York, and will include sessions focusing on multinationals including Wal-Mart, Kraft Foods, Siemens and Exxon Mobil.

The event is being sponsored by a huge range of US and international unions and federations, and the organisers are particularly keen to secure sponsorship to allow delegates from unions in the developing world to attend. You can find out more about the conference, by contacting Kate Bronfenbrenner, at klb23@cornell.edu .

Guilty of breaking more than a few of these rules (Numbers 3-10 at least!). Emily Wilson in 'The Guardian' about the dangers of turning into a 'baby-bore'...Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Life after birth

I use the Virgin Trains Service on the West Coast Mainline and so have first hand experience of what a disaster rail privatisation has been. Delays are commonplace, prices are sky-high, the trains are crowded and overpacked (except for the rows and rows of empty first class carriages) and there is virtually no communication and co-operation between the operators (TOC's). I constantly miss connections because of late running trains - and because the services are run by different operators there is never any chance that they will hold a train, even if it means one or two hundred people having to wait round for the next (hourly) service. All this despite massive public subsidies - which basically reward failure, and help the TOC's and others to keep paying dividends to shareholders despite their failure to deliver a properly functioning rail system.

Bringing the railways back into public hands should be a political no-brainer for the Government - and this report from Catalyst, which I received just before Easter, explains how this could be done in a potential third term...


THE RAILWAY IN A THIRD TERM
Catalyst pre-election briefing

Last year delegates at the Labour Party's annual conference voted to adopt a
policy of "introducing an integrated, accountable and publicly owned
railway". It has long been known that such a move would be highly popular
with the electorate.

Ministers have suggested that such a move would be too expensive and would
deprive the industry of private sector investment. Today Catalyst publishes
a special briefing paper showing that this policy could be carried out in a
third term without breaching the government's fiscal rules, and could
produce immediate cash savings for the government as well as delivering a
better railway.

Key points from the briefing include:

* any private sector investment in the railway must ultimately be paid for
by farepayers and taxpayers - with interest. Around £800m is taken out of
the industry every year as returns to private lenders and investors, a total
leakage of more than £6b since 1996

* the majority of passenger services could be taken into the public sector
by 2013 at no cost. Reductions in regulatory bureaucracy and in the
subsidies paid to private Train Operating Companies could save more than
£200m a year

* restoring network infrastructure and rolling stock to public ownership
would entail a one-off increase in public debt by, at most, 2.15 per cent of
GDP. This would not breach the government's Golden Rule or Sustainable
Investment Rule. This capital investment could produce immediate savings of
£300m or more a year in current spending

* rolling stock companies should also qualify for a one-off windfall tax
on excess profits. If this was calculated and applied in the same way as
Labour's 1997 windfall tax on privatised utilities, additional revenue of
£100m to £200m could be yielded

* overall, the most conservative estimates indicate that bringing the
railway system back into public ownership could produce immediate cash
savings of £500m a year or more through reduced bureaucracy and leakages to
private providers of finance. Over the medium and longer term, reintegration
would produce further savings and improvements as the post-privatisation
trend to waste and cost-escalation was reversed.


The full briefing is attached to this email and will be available to
download from the Catalyst website at http://www.catalystforum.org.uk/.

"Rail plan 'could save £500m'" - The Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,173-1538899,00.html

"Public railways 'save £500m a year'" - The Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?
in_article_id=342551&in_page_id=1770&in_a_source=

"What are we waiting for?" - Bob Crow, RMT General Secretary
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1443780,00.html

Good story in the Independent today about possible strike action by Amicus in HSBC, over possible cuts in bonuses for staff. Worth reading in the context that last year HSBC posted pre-tax profits of over $17 billion!

Update on the dispute between IFPTE/AUSES and the British Embassy in Washington DC, which I posted about a couple of weeks ago. Last week Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, wrote to the TUC confirming that the government was willing to discuss voluntary recognition, and the implementation of changes to staff terms and conditions due to come into effect on April 1, with the union. IFPTE/AUSES represent locally engaged staff working in the Embassy and consulates across the US.

Latest news is that the Embassy and union are due to meet later today - you can follow the progress of these talks and the wider campaign here.

Another Labour Start campaign - this one being run by the CWU at T-Mobile. T-Mobile became notorious a couple of years ago when it brought in a US union busting firm, The Burke Group, to help defeat a recognition campaign by the CWU and Connect. Now it seems the company is trying to drive through compulsory redundancies without properly consulting their staff.

You can send T-Mobile a message expressing your concern about this using the link at the end of this paragraph. (As an aside, the lead CWU organiser on this campaign is Nick Childs who is a graduate of the TUC Organising Academy).

UK: T-Mobile - stop union-busting, start negotiating

Interesting article in the Education Guardian today, featuring a round table with the leaders of the NUT, NASUWT and ATL. Together these unions represent well over half a million members. While formal talks between these unions are, as Chris Keates says in the article, not a high priority at the moment - its positive to see the three unions working closely together on a whole range of issues.

One area in this sector where a merger is definitely on the cards is between the AUT and NATFHE - who represent members in further and higher education. You can read more about the talks here. Both unions will take more detailed proposals to their EC's in April.

From 'The Onion' - What's your company's most important asset? The computers? Sure, you need those. The telephones? The office chairs? You need those, too. But your company has something a whole lot more important than any of them things. Your company's most important asset is your staff.... The Onion Unlock Your Employees' Profit Potential With An Improv-Comedy Workshop!

Excellent campaign and interesting approach to organising a really hard to organise group of workers, who deserve and need a union voice...SEIU.ORG

Not really union related - and I know he's annoying - but take some time out to support Jamie Oliver's campaign for better school meals. You can find out more about the campaign here.

Seems crazy that the government rightly invests millions more in education, but lets private contractors get away with dishing up rubbish to our kids at dinnertime...support the annoying geezer!

Just received this from Eric Lee at LabourStart.

OUR FIRST UK CAMPAIGN, EVER
Even though LabourStart has been based in London since 1998, no British union has asked for our help on a global campaign. Until now.
This week, the Merchant Navy officers union NUMAST has asked for our help in publicizing the anti-union practices of Hoverspeed, a cross-channel ferry company owned by a US-based multinational company.
It's important to turn this into one of our most successful campaigns not only to convince the company (Hoverspeed) to recognize unions, but also to convince British unions to recognize the importance of the Internet as a tool for global campaigning.
Please take a moment and send off your message to Hoverspeed here:

AFL-CIO's Sweeney Defeats Challenge From Dissidents (washingtonpost.com)

The New York Times > National > Labor Leaders Reject Rival Plan to Shift More Money to Organizing: "The unions backing the proposal vowed to continue fighting, saying they hoped to secure a majority before the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s quadrennial convention in July. Several also left open the possibility of a leadership challenge to John J. Sweeney, the federation's president, who has tried unsuccessfully to stem the erosion in organized labor's ranks.
On Tuesday, Mr. Sweeney proposed a cut of 17 percent, or $15 million, in individual unions' contributions, money that the unions would then use for organizing and match on a basis of four to one. "

The Nation 

Latest article from 'The Nation' on the ongoing discussions in the US about the future of the AFL-CIO. It looks likely that one of the key points of agreement will be some sort of rebate of per capita payments from the the AFL-CIO to unions which can demonstrate that they are investing in strategic organising. While on the surface this has a clear logic, I think the article correctly pulls out the fact that this is only likely to be something like $42m - small change when set against a total union income in the US of $5.5bn. On the flip side of this, a cut of $42m is likely to significantly impact on the work that the AFL-CIO currently does or is able to do in the future.

You can read more about the AFL-CIO's discussions this week here.