Are strikes out of step with modern Britain?
| 09:08 UK time, Friday, 19 June 2009
Unions say thousands of workers walked out yesterday in sympathy with a dispute at an oil refinery in Lincolnshire.
BBC News: Total sacks 900 oil plant workers
Rail unions caused problems for millions of commuters last week in a dispute over pay and postal workers are striking in London and Edinburgh.
But are strikes a modern day solution to modern day disputes?
Should they be confined to the bad old days of industrial relations?
Or do workers in Britain have enough rights?
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Bob Crow is a relic of the past. No company can be expected not to make some changes in the work force. Some cutting of the work force is necessary to remain in business.
In my experience most strikes are designed to inconvenience the public despite the union's mantra that it is not intended to do so.
Of course unions are necessry to protect the labour force but with all the legislation to protect workers from the UK and the EU strikes are becoming less and less a tool to resolve differences.
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Ask are mass sackings and redundancies out of step with modern Britain? Should unemployers have the right to throw people on the scrap heap ?Why talk and act as if British workers have no rights in our own country? Hit with so much, why should we be hit yet more by unemployment and an attack on pay-rates by those who've enriched themselves and who despise workers and customers alike as ripe for exploitation, rip-off and con? In what sort of fantasy land do class enemies reside that they imagine the mass of people would just shrug shoulders and accept it?
Recent and current disputes like those on London Underground, Royal Mail, and various trades working or seeking work on major projects like oil refineries and power stations, all concern proposed or actual redundancies. So notwithstanding the disapproval of varieties of liberal and conservative commentators for the British working class sticking up for ourselves, most people in this country understand the integrity of our concerns for our future.
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'Lindsey oil refinery'
cant be a real protest the 'tweeters' havent left any 'tweets' on 'twitter' for the 'twit's .
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Springbox versus the Lions?
I call it restraint. The headline seen on the Internet and heard on the radio yesterday.
Mother of All Wigs for Lembit Opik's fancy dress?
Restraint on my part I mean.
No disrespect to Mr Opik no cheek intended but look at the first four words and imagine what I could have done with them in my famous lauding of the legal profession overall.
Perhaps a single mother plus several absent fathers suggested and jeered at. Plus the parental status of ALL lawyers alluded to.
But no. I am above that sort of behaviour so will resist. Resistence is not always futile, Seven Of Nine.
I feel a better man for it. I will be wearing my South African tee shirt today. I couldnt resist THAT!
Let the battle begin = Lent Bale bet get hit
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Strikes are a natural occupational hazard within a system based on profits and exploitation.
The whole purpose of the Tory anti-trade-union laws of the 1980's which have been disgracefully continued by a supposed Labour government, in particular the ban on taking secondary industrial action in support of other workers was to hinder workers from becoming politicised and understanding the exploitative nature of capitalism generally.
This is why for example many workers at the West Lindsey plant in Lincolnshire think think that foreign workers have stolen their jobs when it is in fact the 'bailed out' bosses economic system that have stolen them.
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