Wabtec Rail Limited is part of the Fortune 500 Wabtec Corporation headquartered in Pittsburgh, US. The corporation employs around 27,000 people across 50 countries supplying components and services to the rail industry, with an annual $8 billion turnover.
Princes’ threat to impose a de facto pay cut or transfer production is a confirmation of the warnings made by the World Socialist Web Site. Workers should form a rank and file committee and mobilise internationally.
In opposition to Princes, workers must develop their own international strategy, and this means rejecting Unite’s plea for negotiations and a “fair slice of the pie”. No such thing is on offer from Princes or any other global conglomerate.
Sixth form colleges that have transformed into academies (state-funded but privately run) have been granted funding for a paltry teacher pay rise through the post-16 schools budget grant. But the remaining non-academised sixth form colleges have been given nothing at all.
The 354,000 homeless would fill Wembley Stadium in London almost four times over. The number of homeless children alone in England is not far short of filling the national stadium twice.
The Social Metrics Commission's data is more accurate and detailed than the UK government’s current definition of poverty, which measures only average income and housing costs.
Publication by the University and College Union bureaucracy of information exposing the shoddy wages, terms and conditions of academics only adds insult to injury to its 120,000 union members, as all this was enforced with the complicity of the education unions.
London is the epicentre of a national emergency, accounting for over half of England’s homelessness figures.
A report predicts that the Labour government will fail to deliver their election manifesto promise to end the “moral scar” of food banks unless they raise the household incomes of the poorest--approximately one in seven of the UK population struggling in a state of deep and extreme poverty the Trussell charity terms “hunger and hardship”.
The strike was suspended by the UCU because Hallam’s University Executive Board made a renewed offer the union will put to the membership. No details have been released about the renewed offer.
This looming defeat for workers without any fight organised by the unions illustrates how the union bureaucracy operates as an arm of management and the government to suppress the class struggle.
Working full-time, it would take the average paid UK worker approximately a decade and a half just to earn the same amount UK CEO’s have enjoyed as their yearly increase.
Action had been planned against Tata Steel UK’s plans to cut 2,800 jobs at the plants in Port Talbot and Llanwern, South Wales, announced last September.
The rate of material deprivation rose from 15 percent to 19 percent between 2019–20 and 2022–23, corresponding to an extra 2.8 million people. The rate of food insecurity increased from 8 percent to 11 percent over the same period, approximately 2.1 million additional people.
The newspaper noted the “dwindling appeal of the London Stock Exchange”, while “New York, with its lighter regulation and higher company valuations, has become a more attractive destination for a flotation.”
The Institute of Health Equity confirms that life expectancy for the working class is stagnating and falling, while the life expectancy of the wealthiest rises.
Even if industrial action is called, this will be of a token character with no call for support from other steelworkers in Britain, Europe and internationally. And without such an appeal workers will continue to be played off against one another in an endless race to the bottom.
In a February 18 interview with the Sunday Times, Staunton claimed he had been told to delay compensation pay-outs to Post Office sub-postmasters by the most senior official at the Business Department, former permanent secretary Sarah Munby.
The collapse in incomes will only worsen whichever party takes over after this year’s general election, with Labour under Sir Keir Starmer positioning itself as the party of business and “iron discipline” on public spending.
The job losses are an indictment of the trade union bureaucracy whose pro-capitalist campaign, calling on workers to defend “our industry”, has yet again ended in failure.
