Hat tip to MJ for the latest from Southampton's rolling programme of strike action against cuts in pay and conditions, and for providing a link to email addresses to send messages of support and vitally needed donations to the local UNISON branch.
Calling out traffic wardens, as is planned in Southampton, hits the Council's income whilst being popular with motorists - I recollect parking staff as some of the most effective of the selective action taken in the ill-starred London Weighting dispute some years ago. According to the Morning Star, the Tory Council Leader says that parking raises the Council £100,000 a week - in some London boroughs that figures is a lot higher.
Given that we need to plan for sustainable programmes of industrial action if we are to deliver sustained industrial action, activists need to be debating tactics for selective action. Certainly in the London Weighting dispute we found an unfortunate lack of fit between those groups we thought would have the most impact and those groups willing to take action. This reflected the experience at national level in the 2002 pay dispute, when many Regions struggled to deliver meaningful selective action sufficient to put pressure on the employers.
However we can't conclude that members will respond to calls for action in one dispute in exactly the way that members previously responded, some years before, to similar calls in different disputes. Although detailed plans for industrial action would never be permitted on the agenda of our forthcoming National Delegate Conference, it is vital that delegates use our being gathered together in order to have the detailed and serious discussion of tactics for industrial action which we now need.
This is what we will need those "fighting funds" for - for fighting.
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4 comments:
one of our biggest problems was outsourcing Jon. It meant some boroughs like my own could hit cashflow hard (we were very popular with the motorists in Haringey ;) ) and others had long since seen contractors take out services such as parking, cashiers etc. Also selective becomes harder due to technology in terms of stopping payment in.
We need to explore the extent to which we can involve contractors' staff who are members in the forthcoming pensions dispute, but I very much take your point.
I suppose we need to consider all action from the point of view of its political impact upon the Coalition Government rather more than its financial impact upon particular employers in any case?
Thanks for the hat tip ;)
certainly in many of our boroughs the LGPS gives a massive opportunity to do so in a way most other disputes do not (well until the ConDems actually end fair deal) So for example in our case it brings our rubbish collection into the equation in others it could do so for Parking and Council tax for example. Having spent a large chunk of my saturday updating RMS with other Branch colleagues I hope we can put it to good use
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