Thursday 10 February 2011

Union backs Party that is attacking its members.

Unison representing workers at one of Wales' largest councils will ballot members over industrial action in a row about new staff contracts.

Rhondda Cynon Taf recently  issued redundancy notices to all 10,000 of their workers. In order to force the workers to accept new contracts.

Rhondda Cynon Taf is a Labour controlled council so I was surprised (Well I wasn't really) when I received a Newspaper type election leaflet from the Pontypridd Consistency Party (Monoglot English of course) which contained this advertisement. From the Public and Commercial Services Union (P.C.S.)>
 


So we have a Union that represents civil service and other other public sector staff  and who will be campaigning against the attacks on R,C.T workforce Paying to advertise in the Paper of a party that it is cutting wages in the very consistency 

And even Unison who are calling the strike Ballot you can bet their headquarters  will be festooned with Labour posters in May when they will back Labour in the Assembly elections for the R.C.T.consistencies.

For thirteen years under the Blair- Brown Labour administration the Unions remained largely silent as the Labour government  made very little effort to address the attacks of Margaret Thatcher on our Workers Rights.

The Unions are there to represent the interest of the Workers and not the Labour party. The leadership of P.C.S in Wales should be ashamed of once again putting the Labour party before the interest of their own members.

Incidentally there was no mention of the Assembly referendum . I suppose some would claim that this was not the medium to do so. But if the Labour party officially back the campaign would not this be the opportunity to do so?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This is a little unfair Glyn- PCS is not affiliated to the Labour party (or any party) and does not support Labour at elections- it pays to advertise in Labour materials but has also paid for advertisements or meetings related to Plaid, the Greens and the SNP in the past.

Not only is PCS disallowed from affiliating to any party, but it consistently opposed the policies of the last Labour government not only on workers' issues but also on things like immigration, the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan.

The PCS certainly didn't 'remain silent' during the Blair and Brown years! They were usually part of the awkward squad with the RMT and FBU. The PCS also supports a 'Yes' vote and there is an article in the latest Celyn about how they will be trying to get their members to vote 'Yes'.

glynbeddau said...

I stand corrected anthropologies to PCS but other Unions should follow this example.