Solidarity 123, 6 December 2007

PERVEZ Musharraf has stood down as head of the armed forces and been sworn in a civilian President. Thus he has achieved what he set out to do by imposing a state of emergency on 3 November and sacking the judges who ruled his continuance as President was unconstitutional. Many opponents of his regime remain in jail. Although Musharraf has called elections for 8 January, he has not ended the state of emergency. Before the state of emergency the socialist party, the Labour Party Pakistan, wanted to stand as part of a loose coalition, the Awami Jamhoori Tehreek (the People’s Democratic Movement)...

At the time of writing, Glasgow City Council daycare strikers are about to begin their eighth week on strike. All the signs are that they will still be on strike over Christmas and the New Year. The indefinite strike action is in response to the City Council’s implementation of “Single Status”, which is meant to end sexually discriminatory rates of pay in local authorities. But here “equality” is being financed by levelling downwards rather than upwards. Under the proposed regrading of the careworkers’ jobs, workers stand to lose up to £3,000 a year and managers stand to lose up to £6,000 a...

I work in a social services department, where we are constantly fighting to provide the best service we can to their service users, with very scarce resources. Like most councils our department is plagued by “performance indicators” (PIs) and the “star” system. The PIs work like targets in the NHS and league tables in schools. They put forward laudable aims — giving timely services, in a flexible and appropriate way — and that is what we all want. But in practice they skew the work done so that the limited resources are put into getting the appropriate box ticked, rather than prioritising, on...

As we go to press the publication of the School Teachers’ Review Body recommondation on teachers’ pay for 2008 is imminent. The STRB passed their report on to the government at the end of October but there has been no announcement yet. Meanwhile the Government has reaffirmed its intention to restrict teachers’ pay increases to no more than its 2 per cent public sector pay target. Teachers’ pay increases for 2005, 2006 and 2007 were all below inflation, and the union is committed to ballot its members if the 2008 pay award is also below inflation.

A small group of postal workers met on Sunday 2 December to assess the result of the ballot which has now ended the CWU’s long-running dispute over pay and working practices, and discuss the way forward for militants who opposed the deal. The meeting was organised by the same people who led the “No” campaign under the name “CWU Rank and File”, though unsurprisingly it was considerably smaller than the launch meeting they organised at the start of the ballot. Under pressure from management, the union leadership and their bank balances, postal workers voted 64%, on a 64% turn out, to accept the...

Remploy workers have vowed to fight the government’s plan to close 28 out of 83 factories in the publicly-subsidised network employing disabled workers. A few weeks ago government minister Peter Hain was promising sincerely to look seriously at the trade unions’ plan to improve the running of the factories in order to stay within their £111 million subsidy. But at the end of November Hain took out his axe and brought it down on a third of Remploy’s factories and the jobs of 2,000 workers. The government say the workers should find jobs in mainstream employment. They dress this up in anti...

A two day strike has called for 6 and 7 December in the Department of Work and Pensions by the civil service union, PCS. The PCS leadership in DWP have rightly called for all members to receive at least the rate of inflation (currently 4.2%) as an increase in year 1 and want talks about years 2 and 3. Under current arrangements 40% of DWP staff will get no consolidated increase in year 2 and 74% will 1% in the final year. Unfortunately the necessary preparatory work for the dispute has not happened. Two days before the strike started branches learnt there was to be a two week overtime ban...

AT the Extraordinary NUS Conference on 4 December, the NUS leadership narrowly managed to pass its wide-ranging Governance Review. The Review will seriously damage NUS as a democratic institution that represents and campaigns for students, replacing its already bureaucratic structures with layer upon layer of inaccessible conferences and committees. Throughout the day the right wing steadfastly refused to actually discuss the proposals contained in the review, preferring instead to focus on general calls for “change”. This was just one example of the Newspeak that was so noticeable throughout...

Don’t let revelations about Paul Abrahams’ £664,000 donations to the Labour Party overshadow Scottish Labour Party leader Wendy Alexander’s own outstanding contribution to the Labour Party sleaze scandal! For our readers’ benefit, we attempt to answer the outstanding questions. Isn’t the amount involved a paltry £950? Yes — but that’s the point! When Alexander stood for Scottish Labour Party leader in the summer, her campaign team had the brilliant idea of soliciting donations a fraction under £1,000. (The sources of donations beneath that figure do not need to be publicly disclosed.) Ten...

After the “cash for peerages" row, the New Labour party of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair is now deep in another scandal about dodgy funding from millionaires, one which has already brought a police investigation and forced the resignation of Labour Party general secretary Peter Watt. As in the previous scandal, Labour Party treasurer (and TGWU deputy general secretary) Jack Dromey says he was kept in the dark about the donations made to the party through stooge intermediaries by businessman David Abrahams. According to BBC News, Peter Watt consulted the "officers of the National Executive...