Momentum is growing for the trade union movement to take its anti-public sector cuts message to this year’s Conservative Party conference in Birmingham. Unite, Britain’s biggest union, is preparing to send a delegation to protest outside the conference building as proceedings open on October 3, while other unions are also planning delegations through their national and branch offices.
The Right to Work campaign – supported by the National Union of Journalists, the University and College Union and the Public and Commercial Services Union, as well as Labour leadership candidate Diane Abbott – will also be holding a protest.
The “big three” unions are close to agreeing a position on campaigning against the cuts at next month’s TUC Congress. Unison is preparing to support motions brought by Unite and the GMB, which would commit them to a “co-ordinated campaign across the labour movement and local communities for progressive means of ensuring the recovery”.
But the major unions have yet to agree dates for national demonstrations on which they will join each other. The PCS supports a day of action on October 20, the day Chancellor George Osborne presents the Comprehensive Spending Review, when he is expected to announce further cuts to public spending.
Unite proposes to send 3,500 activists to London the day before, while the TUC’s general council has planned joint action for March. Both Unite and Unison are expected to support a demonstration in Brussels called by the European Trade Union Confederation.
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development recently estimated that public sector job losses could reach 750,000 as a result of planned departmental spending cuts. Meanwhile, a coalition of unions has promised to survey the entire population of Jersey in order to gauge support for cuts.
Unite, the National Union of Teachers, the Communication Workers Union and seven others are hoping to find opposition to treasury minister Philip Ozouf’s plans to permanently cut £50 million from budgets by 2013. All public sector workers have been offered redundancy as part of the exercise.
