Privatisation

Dear friends from the European Network for Public Services, This message is sent to all people registered on the list we made during the last saturday session. The RAS (an activist Host ) is ready to contribute by hosting our collective tool . We propose to name our mailing list "athens-sp@ras.eu.org". We will use it to discuss the Athen's statement, to send informations, to exchange on the public services issue in the future etc. When a message is sent to this adress, all people registered behind it will receive the message. In the same time, we propose to each organization who took part to...

At this year's Communication Workers’ Union conference (Bournemouth, from 21 May), there is an issue that will not go away - the proposed privatisation of Royal Mail in the form of share options for staff. Royal Mail boss Allan Leighton has sent a semi-legal letter to all staff asking them to register an interest in share issues. This is despite no final decision being taken by the Government and the necessity of an act of Parliament in order for shares to be issued at all. Over 200 Labour MPs have signed an Early Day Motion opposing the sellng off of any part of Royal Mail. The CWU has been...

Trust the BBC to come up with a particularly absurd example of the privatisation craze . Many jobs in the corporation’s human resources department are being “outsourced” to notoriously incompetent and anti-worker contractor Capita. But staff who are worried about this can contact a special helpline set up by BBC bosses, for the good of their mental health (isn’t that kind?) A couple of problems with this, apart from the obvious. Firstly, workers worried about Capita will have to be referred to the help line by their (Capita) managers. Secondly, the helpline has itself been “outsourced” and...

Last month New Labour’s latest privatisation, Qinetiq, was floated on the Stock Exchange. Qinetiq consists of most of the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Research Agency, all except the most “sensitive” areas — these were split off in 2001 to prepare for privatisation. Despite this precaution, “Qinetiq” still deals with some dangerous stuff, like anti-missile programmes and guided weapons. What is more, the privateers do not have the resources to safeguard their secrets; and they themselves warn that they may not be able to “deter misappropriation of its confidential information.” In other words...

By a postal worker The Communication Workers’ Union held a national meeting on 27 October in Leeds to discuss its campaign against the threat of Post Office privatisation. So far 153 Labour MPs (and nine others) have signed Parliamentary Early Day Motion 548, calling for the Post Office to remain 100 percent in public ownership. The union needs a campaign of mass activity if they are to make a succes of it. This is particularly important since both Royal Mail chairman Allan Leighton and Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Alan Johnson are proposing giving postal workers shares in the...

The Communication Workers’ Union is holding a national mass meeting against privatisation, in the face of postal regulator Postcomm’s decision to open up all parts of the service to competition in January 2006, Competitors will be able to pick and choose which of the Royal Mail’s services they will offer, but strict regulation of Royal Mail will leave it weak in the face of competition, leading to job losses. The decision to allow this to happen was taken by Postcomm, which was created by the government in order to push through the Blairite privatisation agenda. Tony Benn said at a rally on 20...

By Gerry Bates Roman tourists who went to Greece 1900 years ago would watch as the brutal glories of the ancient Greek city state of Sparta were evoked for them by courtesy of local showmen, by flogging a slave to death. There were contemporary people who opposed such horrors. But at that time most people took it as “normal”, as “given”. Slaves had no rights. And what you take as “natural”, as just how things are, you don’t question. That fact is one of the great psychological props of the gangrenous conservatism which, in history, has protected so many horrors for so long. Something like that...

Possible privatisation of Royal Mail, and the union’s link to the Labour Party, were the big issues at the General Conference of the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) in Blackpool from Sunday 12 June. On Sunday the Executive’s emergency proposition, calling for a strategy to defeat privatisation and a review of the Labour link at conference 2006 if privatisation happens was narrowly passed. The alternative was a demand to withdraw from the Labour Party in November 2005 if the Government will not give a restatement of its commitment in the general election manifesto to keep the Post Office...

By Amina Saddiq For three weeks in May and June Pakistan saw an upsurge in class struggle, with the military regime forced to seize physical control of the country’s state-owned telecom corporation and arrest over a thousand telecom workers in order to force through its privatisation plans. The Employees’ Union has now signed a deal with the government allowing privatisation to go ahead, but a rank and file organisation of telecom workers is still opposing the privatiation. A strike started in May at the Pakistan Telecommunication Company (PTCL) against plans to sell off 26% of the corporation...

By Rhodri Evans One hundred and fifty trade Iraqi trade union activists — members of the General Union of Oil Employees, other trade unionists from the southern cities of Nasiriyah and Amara and Basra, and representatives of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions — came to a conference in Basra on 25-26 May to start organising a campaign against US-imposed plans to privatise the Iraqi economy. Shortly before the conference, the Beirut Daily Star had reported (17 May): “Iraq’s Industry Ministry plans to partially privatise most of its 46 state-owned companies as part of the government’s plan to...