Have you had a go at LabourSpace yet? It’s a sort of Big Brother for NGO campaigns. Every month there’s a new theme, and relevant lobby groups add their favourite campaigns. Users to the site vote on the campaigns, and the winner gets to have tea with Tony and Hazel and bend their ears a bit.
Anyway this is ‘work month’, which means unions are up for the prize. And so far there are 3 union campaigns in the house, two from the CWU and one from the TUC. They are:
Fines for work safety breaches are stupidly low in comparison with other corporate offences (compare £980,000 for Nationwide’s slip up in potentially revealing customer information with Granite Ltd’s £10,000 fine for not securing slabs which crushed an employee to death). Hundreds of people are still being killed at work in the UK every year, for want of some very simple safety measures. But bad employers will look at the tiny fines they might get and decide they can swallow lots of those rather than just pay up to play safe. Raising the level of fines will be simple, quick, uncontroversial with any decent employers, and save lots of lives.
Justice for Agency Workers (CWU)
Labour has done a lot of good in upping the UK’s stautory minimum working conditions, but there’s a gaping hole in this otherwise excellent work, which temp workers often fall through. A lot of people like agency work, but it’s also the case that many do it because so many companies are shirking their employer responsibilities by outsourcing that they can’t get a full time job. Whatever the reason, people working as temps shouldn’t be forced to take a huge hit in rights that everyone else now takes as a minimum standard. The Government has put back legislation on this recently, so this is an opportunity to keep up the pressure.
Save Gloucester Mail Centre (CWU Gloucestershire)
A reminder that unions are about standing together to protect their members in local disputes comes from the third campaign, which is seeking to get Royal Mail to reconsider plans to close a mail centre that would affect 400 staff working there. Instead they want to see the company conduct a proper study into the stated reasons for the closure, which look to be a smokescreen for cost cutting, or at least provide more serious support than is currently proposed for affected staff. The branch fear that this could be the start of a round of cutbacks in regional mail provision.
So if you’d like to see some tanks on the No10 lawn (or at least some union campaigners in the Cabinet Office), pick up your mouse and get clicking at LabourSpace.com