Category Archives: Unite

No 10 denies ministers seeking political fight with rail unions

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Denial comes as language toughens on both sides and head of RMT again warns of de facto general strike

Downing Street has denied that ministers are deliberately seeking a political fight with rail unions, as both sides toughened their language further and the head of the RMT warned the impasse could continue “indefinitely”.

Just 20% of rail services ran on Thursday, in a sixth day of strike action since June involving the RMT and TSSA unions, with further disruption taking place on Saturday, which is likely to affect trains throughout the weekend.

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Plans for eight-day strike at Felixstowe threaten UK supply chain

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Owners prioritise multimillion-pound shareholder dividends over paying decent wages, says union

Dockers at Felixstowe are planning eight days of strike action over pay that could cause serious disruption to the UK’s largest container port.

Nearly 1,900 workers plan to stop work for more than a week at the Hong Kong-owned port, starting on Sunday 21 August and ending on Monday 29 August, according to the union Unite. The workers voted 92% in favour of strike action last week.

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Labour party is ‘sticking two fingers up’ at working people, says Unite boss

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Head of party’s biggest union donor warns members feel ‘crushed’ and may vote not to pay millions to Starmer

Labour is becoming “irrelevant to workers” and it is now hard to justify handing the party millions in funding, the head of the party’s biggest union donor has warned.

In an interview with the Observer, Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite, said she felt Labour’s leadership was, in effect, “sticking two fingers up” at workers with its response to strike action and its abandonment of pledges to renationalise public utilities.

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Boris Johnson suggests he is digging in on rail strikes, telling cabinet they must ‘stay the course’ – live

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Prime minister signals he will not give in to RMT demands and says rail reforms must be pushed through to cut costs for commuters

In interviews this morning Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, reaffirmed the government’s intention to change the legislation to allow firms to use agency workers to fill in for staff who are on strike. (See 11.14am.) As we report in our overnight lead on the strike, Whitehall sources say No 10 and the Cabinet Office are pushing for this, rather than the business department.

Yesterday the TUC and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) put out a joint statement opposing the idea “in the strongest possible terms”. They said it was unworkable.

I don’t know how bringing in untrained, non-safety critical, inexperienced workers into a dangerous environment like the railway - with high speed trains, there are high voltage distribution systems, there are rules and regulations that have the power of statute - how that will help anyone, whether they are a passenger or a worker or manager or whatever?

I don’t see how the use, the deployment of students or people who have got no work experience that are working for an agency will help anyone to resolve this situation, so as usual [Grant Shapps is] just spouting nonsense given to him from some policy unit which doesn’t help to resolve the situations which are in front of us.

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UK airports, ports and roads under pressure as half-term getaway begins

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EasyJet cancelled 14 flights, while ferry passengers at Dover face queues, and jams await drivers

Half-term holidaymakers are navigating the busiest day at British airports since the start of the pandemic with some hit by further flight cancellations, while cross-Channel ferry passengers face long queues at Dover and drivers are warned to expect jams.

EasyJet cancelled 14 more flights at London Gatwick in the early morning peak, in the aftermath of IT problems on Thursday that took out 200 of its flights around Europe.

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Boris Johnson ‘choosing to let people struggle’ with cost of living says Keir Starmer – as it happened

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This live blog is now closed. You can find our latest cost of living stories below:

Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the international trade secretary, has warned that inflation will experience a further “bump” before prices are likely to stabilise.

In a Q&A after delivering a speech on green trade at Bloomberg’s HQ in London, she said countries around the world were facing a “a global battle against inflation”. She went on:

This is something we have to tackle across the board.

And the worry we always have is that inflation tends to have two bumps to it.

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Unite union seeks talks with Sturgeon over Grangemouth refinery

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Union says oil refinery’s ‘strategic importance’ means talks about possible threats are urgent

Trade union bosses are seeking an urgent meeting with Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon amid uncertainty surrounding the future of the Grangemouth oil refinery.

Grangemouth is one of just six oil refineries in Great Britain and supplies two-thirds of the petrol and diesel for forecourts in Scotland as well as large volumes for the north of England and Northern Ireland.

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Police examining contracts related to Unite’s £98m Birmingham hotel project

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Union’s offices raided as part of investigation into allegations of bribery, fraud and money laundering

A police inquiry involving a Unite union official is examining contracts related to the construction of a £98m hotel and conference centre in Birmingham, the Guardian has learned.

South Wales police and HM Revenue and Customs raided the union’s offices in central London on Thursday as part of an investigation into allegations of bribery, fraud and money laundering.

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Strikes in UK at highest in five years as pay is hit by inflation

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Country’s biggest trade unions are taking on scores of employers to challenge low wage and salary offers

Unionised workers are increasingly prepared to challenge inadequate pay offers and take strike action to ensure wages keep up with the sharply rising cost of living, amid signs that workplace militancy is growing in parts of the economy.

Some of the UK’s biggest unions are battling scores of firms at the same time, with the number of industrial disputes well above pre-pandemic levels. GMB members entered into dispute with 42 employers between October 2021 and March 2022 – seven times the number of disputes in the same period in 2019-20. Unite members are currently involved in 30 disputes in England – almost four times the reported number involving the union three years ago.

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Pizza Express waiting staff win back bigger slice of tips

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Workers took action after share of tips paid on credit and debit cards was cut from 70% to 50% in 2021

Pizza Express waiting staff have won back a bigger slice of their tips after a year-long campaign against a change that handed more to kitchen staff.

The restaurant workers were forced to take action after their share of tips and service charges paid on credit and debit cards was cut from 70% to 50% last year at a time when pay was already under pressure from social-distancing measures that limited the number of diners.

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Royal Mail told workers may strike over alleged ‘fire and rehire’ plans

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Union says company aims to sack nearly 1,000 managers and bring in lower rates of pay

Royal Mail is being warned it could be hit by strikes over plans to cut managers’ jobs.

Unite said the company was aiming to sack nearly 1,000 managers and bring in lower rates of pay in another case of “fire and rehire”, which Royal Mail denies.

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MoD under fire for spending almost £13m on hire cars for staff

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Unite union criticises ‘excessive’ figure while Labour says ‘Tory waste’ letting down taxpayers

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has come under fire after revelations that it has spent almost £13m on hire cars for staff this year.

A freedom of information (FoI) request by PA Media also showed that the Department for Transport spent more than £1.1m in the year to October, while other departments have spent tens of thousands of pounds. The total figure from responses to the FoI request was more than £14.2m.

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Unite launches inquiry into building costs of Birmingham project

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Following leaked accounts, union’s new general secretary says possible ‘significant loss’ must be investigated

Unite is launching an independent inquiry into how the building costs of a hotel and conference centre in Birmingham spiralled into a “potentially significant loss” for the trade union.

The inquiry follows reports at the beginning of the year of leaked accounts seeming to indicate that the union had overspent on the 170-room hotel and 1,000-person conference centre.

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Labour suspends Unite leadership nominee over ‘Patel should be deported’ tweet

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Howard Beckett, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, later apologised and deleted the tweet

Labour has suspended a leadership candidate for the Unite trade union from the party after he called for the home secretary, Priti Patel, to be deported on Twitter.

Howard Beckett, the union’s assistant general secretary and a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), has since apologised and deleted the message following criticism.

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Unite conference centre is a sensible investment | Letter

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Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite, on the union’s construction project in Birmingham

Endemic sleaze is indeed engulfing this government and degrading our public realm, but Jonathan Freedland does his case against Boris Johnson no good by including a cheap swipe at Unite (This is Tory sleaze. Don’t let Boris Johnson convince you otherwise, 16 April). Our Birmingham conference facility was authorised by our elected executive council. An employment protocol ensured that the workers were directly employed, with union members earning the professional rate for the job – no small miracle given the cowboy culture that bedevils the construction sector.

Despite Mr Freedland’s insinuations, I had no dealings with the awarding of contracts for the centre; nor did I need to, because our protocol, agreed by our executive council, dictated strict value for money and employment standards, overseen by independent property experts.

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Call centre staff to be monitored via webcam for home-working ‘infractions’

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Exclusive: Teleperformance, which employs 380,000 people, plans to use specialist webcams to watch staff

Thousands of staff at one of the world’s biggest call centre companies face being monitored by webcams to check whether they are eating, looking at their phones or leaving their desks while working from home, the Guardian has learned.

In a sign of potential battles ahead over the surveillance of remote staff after the pandemic, Teleperformance – which employs about 380,000 people in 34 countries and counts dozens of major UK companies and government departments among its clients – has told some staff that specialist webcams will be fitted to check for home-working “infractions”.

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Unite calls special meeting over alleged overspend on £50m building project

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Union denies wrongdoing after contracts for Birmingham complex given to firms investigated for bribery

Unite, Labour’s most generous backer, is organising a special meeting of its ruling body to discuss an alleged overspend on a multimillion pound construction project funded by the union.

The executive council will convene on Friday 29 January to discuss a seven-storey hotel and national conference centre in Birmingham funded by the union.

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Post-Brexit lorry queues could make Kent ‘toilet of England’

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Campaigners warn that roads and laybys are already littered with urine and excrement

Kent could become the “toilet of England” in less than eight weeks unless dedicated loos are provided for thousands of lorry drivers who could be held up in the county for hours by post-Brexit border checks, campaigners have warned.

They say Kent’s main roads and laybys are already littered with bottles of urine and bags of excrement and the problem could become much worse after 31 December.

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Starmer says he has ‘very good relationship’ with Unite boss

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Labour leader speaks after union reportedly moved to cut its contributions to party

Keir Starmer has said he has a “very good relationship” with the Unite boss, Len McCluskey, after the union moved to cut its affiliation money to the Labour party.

McCluskey, who was a strong supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, first ordered a review into Unite’s contributions in August following Starmer’s decision to pay damages to former party staff who became whistleblowers over antisemitism.

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Union calls for cash payment ban on UK buses over coronavirus

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Move will reduce risk of infection for drivers during pandemic, says Unite

Cash payments on all UK buses should be abolished for the duration of the coronavirus crisis to reduce the risk of driver infection, the union representing bus workers has demanded.

Unite called on Wednesday for an end to cash payments on all the bus systems still operating across the UK to help drive down infection rates, particularly as the country enters the predicted peak period of the outbreak over Easter and beyond.

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