The campaign against Progress operating as a party within a party stepped up a gear today as the GMB Congress passed without dissent a motion highly critical of Progress which it compared with the Militant tendency, and calling for “the national political officer should monitor the factional activity of Progress, and report to the CEC [...]
Posts Tagged ‘GMB’
Winning Labour sets its sights on winning back Labour’s lost 5 million votes
May 23rd, 2012 by Richard Burgon.Last weekend Yorkshire-based trade union-backed Labour campaign, WinningLabour, held its first national day conference. Set up last year, it aims to promote radical and practical debate about how to win back the 5 million votes Labour lost between 1997 and 2010, embracing three core themes. Bookmarks Hide Sites
Guess what Stephen Twigg is up to on Academy Schools
May 10th, 2012 by Jon Lansman.The GMB has drawn our attention to what Stephen Twigg is up to on Education policy. And you won’t like it. Remember Liam Byrne? Now that he’s got no job to go to in Birmingham, we’re stuck with him “running” the policy review until the next reshuffle. Buried on Liam’s Fresh Ideas website is an education [...]
GMB Congress to consider investigating party-within-a-party “Progress”
Apr 24th, 2012 by Jon Lansman.The preliminary agenda for the GMB Congress, due to start in Brighton on 10 June, is now available on its internal website. The agenda reveals significant disaffection with the stance taken earlier this year by Ed Balls on public service cuts and pay, with motions from seven out of nine regions, some of which also [...]
GMB calls on Ed Balls to reverse position on public sector pay
Feb 21st, 2012 by Newsdesk.GMB, the union for public sector workers, commented on the restatement of Labour’s economic policy made by Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls over the weekend. Brian Strutton, GMB National Secretary for Public Services, said: Bookmarks Hide Sites
Where the real division lies
Feb 16th, 2012 by Richard Leonard.Politics is a choice between left and right – tackling inequality, injustice and poverty and a redistribution of power on the one hand or relying on trickle-down and the free market on the other. And the goals of the wider movement of which my own union GMB is proudly part have always been international. We are [...]
GMB Congress to give Labour’s leaders a roasting over public sector pay freeze
Feb 14th, 2012 by Jon Lansman.It emerged today that no fewer than one quarter of the motions to the GMB Congress — eighty in all — relate to the political stance of the union. This comes after comments last month from general secretary Paul Kenny who warned that Labour support for real cuts in pay could have a “profound impact” [...]
Andrew Fisher on Trade Unions: Wrong, wrong, wrong
Jan 22nd, 2012 by Andy Newman.It is hard to imagine a more ill-judged intervention into the debates about the public sector pensions dispute than that of Andrew Fisher, joint secretary of the Labour Representation Committee, and I was therefore surprised to see it reproduced at Left Futures, and praised by Gregor Gall, who is usually an astute commentator on trade union affairs. [...]
The Pensions dispute and the way forward for trade unions
Jan 19th, 2012 by Andrew Fisher.The November 30 strikes saw unprecedented unity in the union movement but the speed of its collapse illustrates just how tenuous it was. Despite claims to have extracted significant concessions from the government, unions that sign up to the government’s offer are really guilty of selling short not only their members but millions more whose [...]
Is it time to review the Bridlington agreement?
Jan 11th, 2012 by Andy Newman.The dispute over recognition for GMB with Carillion Facilities Management at Great Western Hospital (GWH) in Swindon raises important issues related to privatisation of services in the NHS, and the relationship between sister trade unions. GMB is a general union that organises all grades in the NHS, and has a national recognition agreement with the NHS. [...]
