STRIKE

having said this, Tube price have just been hoiked up yet AGAIN = a MASSIVE CHIZ.

wryly apposite cartoon in the sun today which sort of suggests that management's big ad-spreads are being taken w.a massive pinch of salt, even in quarters w/o sympathy for strike action evah. Two passengers looking up at a station arrivals board: line after line of TRAIN CANCELLED. Says one: "So more strikes then?" Says the other: "Hard to tell..."

so. barring the mother of all last-minute deals, today i'm going on strike. 3pm BST.

i don't know anyone else from my generation who's done this. i'm 1% nervous and 99% BRING IT THE FUCK ON. we're doing it, fundamentally, in protest at compulsory redundancies. maybe even just one compulsory redundancy, singular (although that's not yet clear). but i figure one job is a job worth fighting for.

and if we don't do this now -- if we don't take a stand -- we're fucked. we might be fucked anyway, but we're definitely fucked otherwise.

so. anyone got any light-hearted laughing-round-the-brazier stories to share? or, conversely, tales of abject woe about how they got locked out, then gunned down by their cackling boss?

Come gather round children it's high time ye learned
‘bout a hero named Homer and a devil named Burns.
We'll march ‘till we drop the girls and the fellas
we'll fight ‘till the death or else fold like umbrellas
So we'll march day and night by the big cooling tower
they have the plant but we have the power

Onimo's yer man for grumbling about a lack of brazier on the cold picket line. I shall probably be passing your work around that time on way to/from meetings, I would've thought, shall I toot my horn in solidarity at you? Or throw you a bacon butty to warm your cold placard-clenching hands?

grimly someone else i know - in publishing - was talking strike too. what's the story?

Mine was only a one day thing. It was fucking freezing and windy and wet and miserable and no fucker ordered a brazier - you'd think with the renumeration we were demanding for being such professional project managers and engineers one of us would have organised a wee heater and a fucking bacon buttie but no, we had soggy leaflets and soggy banners and cold fucking feet.

The highlight of the day was one of my staff (who was working, different union, not a scab) bringing me out a hot cup of soup at lunchtime.

The strike achieved the sum total of fuck all so far but I'm still a firm believer in the denial of labour as a means of fighting for better conditions.

I've been talking to vets of the year-long Aberdeen strike, and they make it sound grim as hell. Some of the scabs are still being ostracised, 17 years on.

no judgment on grimly or anyone else on the thread, but honestly i'm kind of a mixed mind about strikes -- the thing that bothers me most about corporate economics is not lower pay for normal employees but the exorbitant salaries and bonuses of executives. (ok, well, i also really don't like the massive outsourcing of jobs to temp firms and contract workers so that companies can save on/eliminate benefits).

stet - are you going on strike too?

ye

have been eyeing the scabs in the office, as they sit trying to prepare a paper ahead of time.

liveblog that shit, yo.

grimly someone else i know - in publishing - was talking strike too. what's the story?

understandably, there are a few reasons i'm not mad keen to post the precise details all over ILX. the knowledge that i work for a newspaper in glasgow should give you enough information to begin finding out a lot more :)

the thing that bothers me most about corporate economics is not lower pay for normal employees but the exorbitant salaries and bonuses of executives

this isn't about pay. it's about compulsory redundancies: redundancies for which there is absolutely no need, given the number of people who applied to leave voluntarily and were refused. (and given the company's profits, but that's another story.)

it's about jobs. and it's about saving three newspapers.

apparently royal mail workers went on strike last week! i didn't notice at all; not getting mail delivered on time, or indeed ever, is their default position anyway.

no judgment on grimly or anyone else on the thread, but honestly i'm kind of a mixed mind about strikes -- the thing that bothers me most about corporate economics is not lower pay for normal employees but the exorbitant salaries and bonuses of executives. (ok, well, i also really don't like the massive outsourcing of jobs to temp firms and contract workers so that companies can save on/eliminate benefits).

-- mitya, Friday, 20 July 2007 02:23 (6 hours ago) Link

strikes are not that often about pay and pay alone.

xpost

haha yeah indeed -- post in not arriving shock.

my mail -- i absolutely shit you not -- seems to have been more reliable recently. fuck. i hope our strike doesn't have the same kind of effect.

thing is, i want out of the whole game: after 10 years as a staff hack and two or three years' freelancing before that, i really have reached the end of the affair with journalism. so i'm strangely unworried about my own future within the paper. at the next round of voluntary redundancies, i will be champing at the bit (i applied last time but withdrew, and i still think that was the right thing to do in the circumstances; that said, looking at who they let go and who they didn't, i don't think i'd have been in with any kind of chance). but that doesn't mean i don't care passionately about this.

and i will fight for the principles at stake with every fucking breath i have.

the exorbitant salaries

I like what one highpaid manager said: "If you pay someone peanuts,you'll get a monkey (instead of me)."
Very funny.

royal mail workers still on strike here in oxford. the sorting office is right by my office. nobody picketing today (if you could see the rain here you'd know why)

I don't like strikes very much. Here they seem to be so random and the main victims are "us" lot. I know that's partially why they do it, but still I want to go on a strike myself once. Alas I'm self-employed so it wouldn't do me much good. ;-)

oxford post office has been strike-y for years. some weird racial stuff going on iirc.

I like what one highpaid manager said: "If you pay someone peanuts,you'll get a monkey (instead of me)."

Someone I worked with once compared the promotion ladder to monkeys climbing a tree. They fight for the top branches to assert their superiority then they shit all over the monkeys below them. The monkeys at the bottom look up and all they see is arseholes.

I'm in the civil service union which is rather fond of striking due to the hard left leadership - spookily strike dates always seem to coincide with annual leave that I've already pre-booked so I've never had to use my conscience over crossing the picket line. Also out of an office of about 40, only 3 of us are actually union members so even if we were to walk out there would be little effect.

There have been large staff reductions in the civil service post-Gershon but within our little outpost the reductions have been achieved through natural wastage and voluntary redundancies so I guess it's not bitten hard enough to spur us into action. Pay is a huge issue but without collective bargaining it's all just hot air.

If I could drive and lived in Glasgow I'd be sure to drive by and beep my horn in support but as neither is the case I'll just send my best wishes here.

I'd drive by and beep my horn if Stet didn't have my car.

Perhaps you can go on strike if you know what I mean

Hai guise, can I bring you hot soup when I get out of work at five?

I think the picket will be over by then. We're being all multimedia about it, and organising the walk-out for the benefit of the cameras, then going to the liquid office.

Will the scab edition cover the strike? Do you have scab photographers taking pictures of you?

No chance, they'll pretend it didn't happen. I wonder if the public will notice the difference? Photogs be taking pictures of the scabs!

I've been on strike in four different disputes in the nine years since I started full time work. They usually took the form of a series of one day stoppages, but there was a lengthy work to rule at one point.

We're on work to rule and have been for months, but I think many of my 'comrades' have forgotten. Many of them didn't waste much time getting pally with the scab boss when it came to bonus appraisals either.

Work to rule is unworkable for us, because done right it means hours of delay, and then you have to walk out at shift's end with the paper not done.

I'm a Civil Servant so it's likely, because the Government fucked the nurses over on their pay and the public actually give a shit about them, that we're going to be offered a pay deal so appalling that we'll actually end up owing them money.

I suspect that means we'll be out on strike again this year...

The Herald/Times strike was just trailed for the 1.30 BBC One Scotland news bulletin.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/6907764.stm

I notice the BBC have dropped TB's quote about the percentage vote in favour :)

The first five minutes of Reporting Scotland were devoted to the strike. Spotted on telly: Stet, Alba and a girl who was sick in RJG's sink.

hey! i was in there too. somewhere. stet said he saw my tie on the BBC news.

christ, i'm drunk. it's probably wrong of me to admit that being on strike was so much fun :/

I saw you the second time around - you were a bit blurry though.

Gd luck to the ILX/Herald three

Yeah, hope things go well for you guys (+ Tom/Graeme etc.). Need to meet up for a drink at some point soon.

I completely missed this. Go, guys! Stick it to the man!

I like what one highpaid manager said: "If you pay someone peanuts,you'll get a monkey (instead of me)."

Overpaid bosses in "spouting cliches" non-shocker :-)

Good luck with the strike, guys. I've never worked anywhere that I've had to strike, but I've stood up for principles, undertaken my own works-to-rule and resigned over things that have gone wrong when I know there's no way of changing it (I've never worked for a large, unionised, employer, basically), so I'm there with you all in spirit.

Nathalie, I think you are very much missing the point of strike action. No-one *wants* to go on strike, but pointing out the effects of pissing off your employees to the point where you don't have an effective workforce sometimes needs to be done. If it inconveniences "us lot", then perhaps the bosses might like to think about how to motivate and reward a workforce so that people continue to provide those services for us, be it a newspaper, a civil service, public transport, emergency services, a postal service or someone to collect refuse once a week. If you want to go standing outside your own shop for a laugh protesting about yourself, feel free. But I've heard enough first hand from a couple of people on this thread to know the principles behind their actions, and they are more than justified in doing so. And I don't think they'd be doing it if they didn't feel they had to.

Then again, gets you off work for a couple of hours, innit?

just back from my first-ever shift on a picket line (and just in time to see myself looking like a tit on the lunchtime news, hurrah). that's our first full day out (friday's only began at 3pm). the continuous work-to-rule is already starting to bite, too. not sure when the next walkout will be, but hey.

this is not going to be over quickly, though.

good job i have the stomach for a long fight.

Good luck with this. Strikes in Higher Ed have always been relatively civilized at the places I've worked, but I've been lucky in terms of the places I've worked.