Scotland
Postal workers stage unofficial walkouts in Dalkeith, Scotland
"Unofficial and unlawful" strike action was taken by postal workers at Dalkeith Delivery Office last week, according to Royal Mail.
Both postmen and office staff took unofficial strike action mid morning on Monday, June 22. They returned to work the next day and took unofficial action again last Wednesday. The strikers returned to normal working duties on Friday morning.
A spokesman for Royal Mail said: "The industrial action in Dalkeith was unofficial and unlawful.
Scottish teachers to ballot over class sizes
Scotland's teachers have moved a step closer to taking industrial action over the issue of class sizes.
Members of Scotland's largest teaching union, the EIS, have voted for a ballot on taking action in pursuit of classes with no more than 20 pupils. A majority also called for the cap to have statutory force.
The union's leader has claimed almost half of Scotland's councils have made no progress towards the government target of 18 pupils per class.
Beating the Poll Tax
Beating the Poll Tax was a widely distributed booklet that encouraged and analysed the rise of mass revolt against the Community Charge in 1989/90 as it was happening.
[i]It was first published by the Anarchist Communist Federation in March 1990, following 'The Poll Tax and How to Fight It' in October 1988. Scanned in and published online for the first time on the Anarchist Federation website in March 2006.
BEATING THE POLL TAX
by The Anarchist Communist Federation ( now, Anarchist Federation http://www.afed.org.uk )
Threatened Glasgow schools occupied by parents
Parents have seized control of the closure threatened Wyndford Primary and St. Gregory's Primary Wyndford in the Maryhill area of Glasgow.
School occupations of Wyndford Primary and St. Gregory's Primary Wyndford both now running through the night.
Both schools are threatened with closure by Glasgow City Council.
An originally tense situation with police - who had threatened to storm the buildings around 6pm - has been resolved through negotiation, and the peaceful protests are being allowed to continue unharmed.
Storione, Lawrence 1867-1922
A short biography of Lawrence Storione, miner and founder of the Anarchist Communist League in Fife.
Lawrence Storione was the son of the Italian stonemason Felix Storione and Philomena Moir (or Noir). He was born in Italy in 1867 and worked as a miner in Italy, France, Belgium and the west of Scotland before settling in Lumphinnans in 1908. It appears he had French citizenship, according to the 1901 census. He married Annie Cowan whom he met whilst living in Hamilton, Lanarkshire in 1900.
The battle for the Green - John Taylor Caldwell
The late veteran Glasgow anarchist JT Caldwell tells the story of a struggle to defend the right of open air speaking on Glasgow Green during the early 1930s. As well as legal conflicts, the events included rowdy mass demonstrations of up to one hundred thousand people.
Source; Workers City; ed. Farquhar McLay, Clydeside Press, Glasgow 1988.
THE SUMMER OF 1931 was a riotous season in Glasgow. There were demonstrations involving anything from forty-five thousand to one hundred thousand angry protesters, in scenes which Police Superintendent Sweeny of the Central Division described as "a disgrace to any civilised community". The focal point of these demonstrations was Glasgow Green.
Not a life story, just a leaf from it - Robert Lynn
A short account by a participant of the UK's largest working class anarchist movement (with the possible exception of the better known movement among London's East End Jews); in Glasgow during the first half of the 20th century.
Source; Workers City, ed. Farquhar McLay; Clydeside Press, Glasgow 1988.
The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour: we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently... One day it will be realised that Socialism is not the invention of anything new but the discovery of something that was always present, of something that has grown.
Gustav Landauer
Energy wildcats continue to spread across the UK
The wave of wildcat strike action that has swept across the UK escalated today as hundreds more workers walked out in the protest at the exclusion of British workers from jobs.
Contract workers from the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria, the Heysham nuclear power station in Lancashire and a site at Staythorpe, in Nottinghamshire, joined the unofficial action over the hiring of Italian and Portuguese workers, which local unemployed British workers were unable to apply for on a Lincolnshire power station project.
Long lost wildcat strikes in the UK, 1960s - 1990s
Interesting article with snippets of analysis and often personal anecdotes about a number of unofficial strikes in the UK since the 1960s.
An introduction…
Scottish Water workers vote on industrial action
Scottish Water workers are being balloted on industrial action after the employer imposed a below inflation pay rise which had not been agreed.
The imposition of a 3% rise over 15 months – worth 2.4% over a year – ended six years of partnership working between the company and staff.
"This pay cut is simply not acceptable when inflation is rising – recently reaching 5.2% - energy prices are rising by anything up to 30% and food by 11%," said branch secretary Steve Scott.
