News and views for trade Unionists and supporters in the Green Party
MOTION PASSED BY LONDON FEDERATION OF GREEN PARTIES AGM 24/10/2020
Title: In support of respect, dignity and
equality at the Sage Nursing Home
Synopsis:
This motion expresses support for care
workers at the Sage Nursing Home in Barnet; it highlights the importance and
value of the work done by all carers across London; it highlights the
unacceptably poor pay and working conditions that care workers face, including
at Sage Nursing Home; it welcomes the unionisation of workers at Sage Nursing
Home and supports their demands for union recognition, as well as improved pay
and working conditions; it resolves to participate in their campaign by taking
steps outlined in 7).
Motion text:
The London Federation of Green Parties:
2.
Notes with alarm that the domestic staff and care assistants at Sage -
who are recognised by the government as “key workers” and provide essential
services - receive poverty pay rates ranging between £8.72 and £9.60 per hour;
that the lower rate stands at nearly 20% below the London Living Wage, and over
40% below the UK’s average hourly wage of £15.
3.
Notes that these workers only receive Statutory Sick Pay; that
‘unsociable hours’ payments for weekend work and nights were removed in Spring
2019.
4.
Welcomes the rapid unionisation of these workers, the majority of whom
identify as women.
5.
Supports the workers' call for a voice at work, noting that their union,
United Voices of the World (UVW), a grassroots and militant union for
precarious and migrant workers, has reached out to Sage management repeatedly
since 20th July 2020 requesting that they recognise UVW; that UVW has yet to
see a commitment from Sage to reach an agreement on recognition.
6.
Stands with workers at Sage and backs their call to be treated with
respect; supports their demands for a £12 hourly wage, parity with NHS in-house
annual leave and sick pay, and fair pay for ‘unsociable hours’ worked; asserts
that this is necessary to ensure that workers can live a dignified life in
London.
7.
Resolves to participate actively in the campaign for dignity, respect,
and equality at Sage by:
a.
Addressing a clear message of protest from the London Green Party to the
co-chairs of Sage’s board, Adrian Jacobs (adrian@adrianjacobs.co.uk)
and Stephen Goldberg (stephen@nmholdings.co.uk).
The following motion was passed by a large majority at the London Federation Of Green Parties AGM today.
The innovative
thinking and political campaigning of Mike Cooley, who has died aged 86,
influenced generations of trade unionists and advocates of a sustainable, green
and socially just economy.
It was while
working as a highly skilled design engineer at Lucas Aerospace during the
turbulent 1970s that Cooley, who was also a mililtant trade unionist, first
made his mark. He believed that a radically different relationship between
technology and human skill was needed for social transformation. At the heart
of his philosophy was a conviction that the supposed conflict between these
forms of labour should be transformed into a mutually reinforcing partnership.
At that time, when
strike action in defence of jobs and pay was commonplace and workers on the
Clyde occupied their shipyards, Lucas workers faced the loss of many hundreds
of jobs. Cooley, who then chaired the local branch of the technical trade union
Tass (the Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section of
the AUEW), and was a member of the Lucas group’s national shop stewards
committee, was instrumental in the formation of the Lucas Plan – that aimed to convert
Lucas production from arms to the manufacture of a wide range of socially
useful products.
Appalled at the
contradiction between society’s potential and unmet social need, Cooley later
wrote, in his first book, Architect Or Bee? The Human Price of Technology (1980):
“We have, for example, complex control systems which can guide a missile to
another continent with extraordinary accuracy, yet the blind and the disabled
have to stagger around our cities in very much the same way as they did in
medieval times.”
Through
consultations with community groups and health service users and workers, the
Lucas shop stewards came up with proposals for a hybrid road/rail bus and a
radically new kind of portable kidney machine. Following a visit to a centre
for children with spina bifida, a vehicle was designed to help children with
this condition to be independently mobile.
After realising
that 30% of people who die of heart attacks die before they reach the
intensive-care unit, union members at another Lucas plant developed a
lightweight, portable life-support system that could be taken in an ambulance.
Cooley subsequently wrote: “The workers involved were encouraged to think of
themselves in their dual role, both as producers and consumers.”
Without the backing
of government and with the decline of trade union power the campaign failed.
But some of the socially useful prototypes were subsequently developed and
produced by commercial companies in other countries.
Born in Tuam,
County Galway, to Eddie Cooley, a garage owner, and Frances (nee Browne), Mike
went to the local Christian Brothers school. Due to his love of design and
engineering, he was allowed to study one day a week at the nearby technical
college. He then worked as an apprentice welder and fitter for the Tuam Sugar
company. He began learning German at that time as well, then studied
engineering at Bremen Mechanical Engineering University in the mid-50s.
After a period
working for a specialist manufacturing company in the Oerlikon district of
Zürich, Switzerland, Cooley moved to London in 1957 and gained a PhD in
computer-aided design at the North East London Polytechnic (now the University
of East London). That marked the start of a lifetime devoted to a better
understanding of the role of the replacement – in Marxist terms – of living
labour by dead labour.
He became a
visiting professor at Umist (the University of Manchester Institute of Science
and Technology) and, in 1961, married Shirley Pullen, who proved a lifelong
kindred spirit and was his first publisher, of Architect Or Bee.
Fired from Lucas
for his activism, in the 1980s he was appointed director of technology at the
newly created Greater London Enterprise Board, where I
worked with him. There he helped worker co-operatives and other small
enterprises to develop 33 new ways for workers to interface with computer
technology, rather than their skilled work being replaced by machines.
Cooley drew
inspiration from the historical precedent of the builders of the great medieval
cathedrals who – he never tired of pointing out – were their own architects. In
1981 he received the Right Livelihood award for “designing and promoting the
theory and practice of human-centred, socially useful production”.
He continued to
lecture at universities across the world, and produced a series of books
outlining his ideas for restoring decision-making power to workers in the
production process. His output was compiled in the 2020 reader The Search for
Alternatives: Liberating Human Imagination.
In Delinquent Genius – The Strange Affair of Man and His
Technology (2018), Cooley disputed the “inevitability” of ever
greater de-skilling of human labour, writing: “I disagree. The script for this
finale can still be rewritten. And I do mean ‘man’ and not ‘humanity’, for it
is a relationship from which women have been largely excluded and this to
disastrous effect
The president of
Ireland, Michael D Higgins, wrote in a foreword to the book: “Mike Cooley may
well be the most intelligent Irishman, the most morally engaged scientist and
technologist Ireland has sent abroad.”
Cooley is survived
by Shirley and a son, Graham. Another son, Stephen, died in 2009.
• Michael
Cooley, engineer and author, born 23 March 1934; died 4 September 2020
ADL branded ‘disgraceful and deceptive’ over Guildford production
closure and Falkirk and Scarborough redundancies
Alexander Dennis (ADL), the UK’s largest bus and
coach builder, has been blasted for its ‘disgraceful and deceptive’ behaviour
by Unite following the shock announcement that it will close production at its
site in Guildford, Surrey, with the loss of 200 jobs, as well as making
swingeing redundancies at its plants in Falkirk and Scarborough.
Staff were told today (20 August) that production at Guildford will end during
a meeting called to provide more details of the 650 job losses across the
firm’s sites at Falkirk, Guildford and Scarborough, which were announced
earlier this month. The company has told staff at Falkirk that 160 jobs will
go, with more still to be announced, while 90 jobs will go in Scarborough.
ADL has ostensibly blamed a drop in business due to coronavirus for the cuts.
While the acknowledging the impact on orders, Unite said ADL is using Covid-19
as an excuse to accelerate restructuring plans developed before the pandemic
(see notes below).
Earlier this week, Unite exposed the plans by
ADL’s parent company, the NFI Group, to potentially close a UK site and
outsource a large bus building contract for Berlin to a company in Turkey,
despite using the decline in orders to try and justify planned cuts.
In a recording from an NFI investors meeting on August 6, the group’s chief
financial officer Pipasu Sinui said that NFI‘s strategy is about
generating 'significant returns for
shareholders’ and was developed before the pandemic.
NFI CEO Paul Soubry also stated that many bus orders have been ‘shifted’ from 2020
to 2021, rather than being cancelled, and said that bus markets ‘will recover and will be a
critical driver for economic recovery for the long term’.
Unite has been calling for the prime minister's promised order of 4,000 new low
emission buses to be brought forward to help the bus and coach industry to
recover from Covid-19, but says any support must now be conditional on ADL
ending job cuts and outsourcing and committing to the long term
future of each site.
Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner said: “While the
coronavirus crisis has undoubtedly impacted ADL’s short term operations
following a collapse in orders from UK bus operators, the firm’s Canadian
parent company NFI has exposed the true extent of its betrayal of UK workers,
their families and communities.
“Pre-Covid plans, identified by Unite following disclosure of information
requests, are now being accelerated to use the pandemic as an excuse to bring
forward the ending of production at Guildford and attack jobs across the group
while outsourcing work abroad in order to line shareholder pockets. The fact
that all this is being done after the company took full advantage of UK
taxpayer’s money through the job retention scheme, and after our help has been
sought to secure government funding for advanced manufacture of green
buses, is a gross betrayal of a loyal, world class workforce.
“ADL and NFI’s disgraceful and deceptive actions are devastating for
workers and communities across the UK. If ADL believe that Unite will not
organise workers and communities to fight these cuts they are sorely mistaken.
ADL’s workforce is rightly incandescent at the way they have been treated, they
will not stand for it and their union will be shoulder to shoulder with them at
every step of this fight.”
Unite national officer for automotive Steve Bush said: “These
disgraceful cuts are an acceleration of the footprint reduction outlined in
NFI’s pre-Covid strategy – a strategy that until this week was hidden from
ADL’s UK workforce.
“The company has made no attempt at a proper consultation with Unite and
has attempted to pass off these cuts as an inevitable result of the pandemic
downturn. Unite has received no official confirmation of the job losses
announced this morning and staff are still in the dark as to where many of the
redundancies will fall.
“ADL and NFI’s actions are naked corporate vandalism driven by greed and
will not go unchallenged by Unite. The union continues to call for the
government to bring forward its order of 4,000 new low emission buses, but any
public money including new orders, must now be conditional on the company
retaining jobs and keeping work in the UK."
ENDS
The Green Party Trade Union group sends a message of support to UCU Solidarity Movement and Students Before Profit UofG for their day of action for an immediate reduction in FE class sizes, an increase in staff to make colleges safer, social distancing rules to be applied, regular deep cleaning and more funding to fully implement safe blended learning. GPTU also supports your rejection of attempts to blame staff and students for the chaos inflicted on education by the governments bungled response to the cv pandemic coming on top of years of deliberate underfunding of education in general and FE in particular.
