We pay more on our side of the tracks

Daily Telegraph article below, which was flagged up to me by the RMT Bristol branch e-newsletter.

Apparently Britons pay more per mile for their rail journeys than anyone else in Europe. Whereas £10 will buy you just 38 miles on the train in the UK, it'll buy you 3 times that in France, 200 miles in Italy and 100 miles in Spain.

On my way to Glasgow at the moment on 'Branson Rail' so will be keeping an eye on the 'meter'!

Fight (or you can just march if you want too) for your rights

Think its wrong that people at work in the UK enjoy fewer rights than most people in the rest of Europe? If so you can actually do something about it.

On May Day the TUC and the TUC and Britain's unions are marching for a Trade Union Freedom bill .














See you there!

Thanks for helping us win the war....now go home

Fascinating Daily Post article about the 5,000 Chinese merchant seaman forcibly repatriated back to China from Liverpool at the end of the war.

Despite the fact that many of the men had settled in Liverpool - marrying and starting families - the Government rushed through a special directive which altered their 'landing rights' and, as a result, hundreds were 'rounded up' by Special Branch snatch squads and shipped back to China. The men left behind at least 450 children, many of whom grew up thinking their fathers were dead, or had abandoned them.

This story is of special interest to me as my grandad ('Jimmy' Tsang), who died some 2 1/2 years ago, was a Chinese merchant seaman who came to Liverpool during the war, and ended up marrying a Liverpool girl. He and my grandmother raised 11 children in a flat on Pitt Street, just off China Town in Liverpool. His brother, Man Suk, also settled in Liverpool (and still lives there today).

Looking at this article it looks like they were the lucky ones. The Government's stated aim was to reduce Liverpool's Chinese population from 2,000 or so to its pre-war level of around 300. The whole story has faint echoes of the dispute around the right of Ghurkas who have fought in the British army to claim British citizenship. It seems that as a country we are often quite happy for people to die on our behalf, but we don't necessarily want them to live alongside us.

Today a plaque remembering the contribution of Liverpool's Chinese sailors during the war, and the families that many were forced to leave behind is unveiled at the Pierhead in the city.

The plaque in English and Chinese and reads:

"To the Chinese merchant seamen who served this country well during both world wars. For those who gave their lives for this country. Thank you. To the many Chinese merchant seamen who after both world wars were required to leave. For their wives and partners who were left in ignorance of what had happened to their men. For the children who never knew their fathers. This is a small reminder of what took place. We hope nothing like it will ever happen again. For your memory."

Confused Evertonian seeks advice...

Does this make sense to you?

1) In summer 2005 you refuse to give a long-standing defender a two year contract on the grounds that he's getting on a bit

2) Sign a young Danish international for £5m to take his place

3) Start the aforementioned Danish player once

4) Sell Danish player for £2m less than you bought him for six months ago (are you keeping up here?)

5) Replace him with 34 year old player you let go a few months previously







Only at Everton...worth £2m less than he was 6 months ago.

Off-shoring is becoming passé

That's according to this Business Week article flagged up to me by Dave Whalin who is based in the US.

The article looks at the rise of so called 'Home-shoring'; people (mainly women) working from home covering call-centre style functions.

Of course homeworking is nothing new in the UK. According to the National Group on Homeworking (NGH) there are over 1m industrial homeworkers in the UK already, and their isolation, uncertain employment status and reliance on 'middle-men' mean they are often vulnerable to exploitation and abuse from employers.

As a trade unionist my first reaction is to cry foul and bemoan the rise of home-working and home-shoring; but my experience of working with the NGH a couple of years ago made me realise that as uncomfortable a truth as it may be, some women -particularly those with caring responsibilities - see this sort of pattern of working as a godsend. The problem isn't homeworking itself, the problem is that employment and health and safety legislation (in both the US and UK) just isn't robust enough to protect these workers.

Unions too have struggled (for good reason - its not an easy or straightforward task) to organise these workers, or more to the point, to help these workers organise themselves. However according to the NGH four out of ten 10 homeworkers would actively welcome some sort of trade union involvement, with only 5% of those surveyed feeling that unions have nothing to offer them. Indeed, there is some international experience, most notably that of TCFUA in Australia, which shows that unions can effectively organise and represent this group of workers.

These sort of trends pose a lot of hard questions for unions. Can we stand Canute-like and try to reverse these sorts of trends in employment, or do we instead try and develop flexible models of trade unionism which ensure that workers, wherever or however they are employed get respect at work. On the other hand is this sort of approach the thin end of dangerous wedge?

Any thoughts or opinions on this?

There are some good employers...

And then there are employers like Irish retailers Dunnes.

In November of last year Dunnes sacked a young woman (and union steward) with 4 years service. The reason? Wearing a union badge on the job! This sort of crude union bashing is probably what Irish union organisers have in mind when they refer to Dunnes as the 'Wal-Mart of Ireland'...

You can show your support for Joanne Delaney, and her union Mandate, by taking part in LabourStart's on-line campaign to secure her reinstatement.

Food for thought....(any bids for a lamer pun?)

Leading Change - Jan 2006
Originally uploaded by unionblue.

Over the last couple of days I've been helping facilitate the TUC's Leading Change programme.

Will Hutton joined the group for dinner last night, and we had quite an involved and interesting discussion on a whole range of issues from the emergence of China, the future of public service reform and crucially, what more unions can do to organise the 19m or so people at work who aren't members of a union.

You can tell we were working as they is definitely more water on the table than wine in this photo.

Is anyone still out there?

Things have been a bit quiet on the blogging front for me over the last week or so.

Partly this is because I've been really busy (Liverpool, London, Newcastle & Birmingham last week alone - oh the sheer glamour of it), and partly its because in the 'post-Galloway pretending to be cat world' (purr, purr), I've decided that sometimes the real world defies description by mere blogging mortals such as myself.

Anyway - hope to get the blog back on track over the next few days, so please stick with me.

PS - One thing I meant to blog about during the last week was this BBC report on growing calls for soldiers to be allowed to set up a 'trade union like' organisation. One of the paradoxes about the current situation unions find themselves in, is that while our traditional membership base declines more and more 'unusual' groups of workers are seeking a union voice - from squaddies to football managers in the health service, bouncers to vicars.

Galloway loses Respect?

Do I really have to say anything more about this other than 'Oh dear'.....?

Murder Incorporated

Thanks to the marvels of Freeview I got to watch The Corporation the other night.

Pretty long and at times over-worthy, but still quite a powerful film; and a good reminder of the impact that global capitalism has on some of the world's poorest people. The film featured interviews with, among others, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Elaine Bernard, (all of whom lectured at the HTUP which I attended this time last year), as well as some real beauts (step forward Milton Friedman et al), who would have made excellent pantomime villains apart from the fact that they play that role in the real world with such consummate ease.

Thought one of the film's strongest points was the section showing how companies 'externalise costs'; or to put it another way, leave it to you, me and anyone other than themselves to pick up the tab for pollution/poverty pay/unsafe working etc etc.

Why pay a decent living wage when the state will subsidise low pay through the benefits system; why make products safely when its cheaper to pollute and let the tax-payer pay for cleaning up afterwards? Why put the interests of the wider community first when your over-riding legal responsibility is to maximize profit for your shareholders?

This article in yesterday's FT reinforces these points - companies are happy to pay out paltry fines to retain their 'right' to pollute or work unsafely, simply because it makes economic sense for them to do so. According to the article, "The average fine for breaking health and safety laws is less than £10,000" - and when you factor out the small number of larger fines, it actually breaks out nearer to £6000. Not the sort of figures which cause CEO's of multi-national companies to lose much sleep at night.

And they say crime doesn't pay!

How much do you owe after this Christmas?

Good feature in yesterday's Independent looking at the scale of personal debt in the UK.

Apparently 2/3rd of the EU's credit card debt is British, and collectively we owe a staggering £1.13 trillion - 1/5th of which is unsecured.

This debt mountain has helped keep the UK economy relatively buoyant, supporting increased consumer spending, but you don't have to be a Nobel prize winning economist to be a little bit worried about how sustainable all this is.

On an individual level the The Independent points out that, "In 2005, an estimated 110,000 people reached the haven of bankruptcy, sequestration, a CCCS debt management plan or insolvency. That compares with 71,000 in 2004 and 54,000 in 2003 - a doubling in three years." Any significant increases in interest rates would presumably see this figure increase further.

Of course one reason why we are so addicted to cheap credit in the UK is the fact that property prices are so out of kilter with the rest of the economy that many people have seen the 'value' of their chief asset soar. Of course, the reality is that spiraling property prices create not a jot of additional 'wealth' - but they do allow us to borrow increasing amounts of cheap credit. Presumably any significant fall in the housing market would leave lots of people exposed to negative equity (again). Mortgage repossessions are already up "by 66% in the 3rd quarter of last year".

All this doom and gloom and the Christmas credit card bills haven't even arrived yet...Warned you I was going to get back to the boring/worthy stuff after the Christmas break!

Back to reality....

Back to work tomorrow, and back to some proper blogging as well. Hasn't been much in the way of 'Unions and Politics' on this blog over the last couple of weeks - they've taken a bit of a festive back seat to the 'and more' stuff instead, but back to business as usual this week.

But before that I thought I'd give you a bit of a taste of our festive highs and lows...

The highs

• The kids' faces on Christmas morning
• The fact they still believe in Father Christmas
• Vicky doing her James Herriot bit with the remaining goldfish
• Taking Joe to watch Everton and they actually win (3-1 today against Charlton - 3 goals count 'em, 3!)
• Christmas Day - our house in the morning, Vicky's mums in the afternoon, my mum and dad's in the evening and completely and surprisingly stress free
• New Years Eve - quiet but great
• Blackberry breaking down (for Vicky)

The Lows

• Goldfish fatalities
• Everton vs Liverpool on the 28th (have blocked it out already)
• Our local swimming pool being shut on the 29th of December - Welcome to the brave new world of public services....you can shop till you drop from Boxing Day onwards but don't expect your local sports centre to be open during the School Holidays, after all surely no one actually wants to take their kids swimming then, they want to go 9-5 during the school term times don't they?
• Crawling down the M6 in the middle of a snow storm
• Blackberry breaking down (for me)

Hope you all had a great Xmas and New Year - please keep reading in 2006!