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Workers Memorial Day, HS2 Protest: Every year since 1989, April 28th has been International Workers’ Memorial Day, and on Monday 28th April 2014 I once more attended the event commemorating this at the statue of the Building Worker on Tower Hill in London, later going to Parliament Square where protesters called on MPs to vote against the HS2 Bill being debated in the House of Commons.

Workers Memorial Day

Tower Hill

One of the more hazardous industries in the UK is construction, and the annual Workers Memorial Day points this out. There had been over 50 deaths on construction sites in the previous year and the rally place around a coffin with boots, work gloves and hard hats.

Workers Memorial Day, HS2 Protest - 2014

A TUC report published for the day, ‘Toxic, Corrosive and Hazardous: The government’s record on health and safety‘ pointed out that since the coalition government came to power in 2010 it had “drastically cut Health and Safety Executive (HSE) inspections, cut funding to the HSE by 40 per cent, blocked new regulations and removed vital existing protections, prevented improved European regulation on health and safety, cut support for employers and health and safety reps, seen local authorities reduce their workplace inspections by 93 per cent, and made it much harder for workers to claim compensation if they are injured or made ill at work following employer negligence.”

The government was now planning to exempt many ‘self-employed workers’ from health and safety protection – despite them being twice as likely to be killed at work than other workers.

This attack on health and safety, carried out under the title of ‘reducing red tape’ also played an important role in providing the environment which allowed the disastrous fire at Grenfell Tower.

The theme for the 2014 events from the ITUC, the global union body coordinating the event worldwide, is ‘Protecting workers around the world through strong regulation, enforcement and union rights’ and it encouraged unions to use the slogan, ‘Unions make work safer’.

There were speeches including by Gail Cartmail, Assistant General Secretary of Unite, Tony O’Brien of the Construction Safety Campaign and Jerry Swain Regional Secretary for UCATT’s London and South East Region, after which wreaths and flowers were laid at the base of the statue by UCATT, Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman and Liliana Alexa who founded the Battersea Crane Disaster Action Group after her son Michael was killed by a falling crane as he walked past a building site near his Battersea home.

The event ended with the release of black balloons, for the 50 workers killed in the last year and a period of silence around the coffin with its boots, hard hat and work gloves and a hard hat for each one of them.

More pictures from Workers Memorial Day

Stop HS2 Rally at Parliament

Old Palace Yard, Westminster

HS2 is generally seen now as an expensive disaster, failing to achieve its aims and becoming something of a white elephant. It doesn’t go to where it was intended and will have to run rather slower than planned.

Despite the plans to run to Manchester and Leeds having been dropped the scheme has had a massive increase in costs. It still remains doubtful if it will ever actually reach its intended destination in London, Euston or simply serve its temporary terminus at Old Oak Common, six miles out in the middle of nowhere very much, where it will largely rely on a connection to the Elizabeth Line.

The project was almost certainly doomed from the start in 2009 under Labour, but its position was worsened by decisions by each successive government. There are various detailed studies of where it went wrong on-line, including by Graham Winch of the Productivity Institute.

The London to Birmingham section we may one day get was only a minor aspect of the original scheme and a part that offers relatively little gain – nobody really needs to get to Birmingham 20 minutes faster. Its route was poorly chosen and bound to result in the kind of local opposition that has greatly put up costs, and the whole project was severely over-specified – and in a way that makes it incompatible with the existing network.

Others, such as High Speed UK have developed much more coherent plans for the future UK rail network which governments have refused to consider seriously – and were one of those supporting and speaking at this protest. Their plans in 2014 would have avoided “damage to the Chilterns by following the M1 and would be 25% cheaper than HS2, while offering time savings on average of 40% for most intercity services – not just those on the high speed route.“

This was a relatively small demonstration with perhaps a couple of hundred people, but a colourful one, with a large inflatable white elephant and a couple of bears with a very large rail ticket about the £50 billion rip-off of HS2. There were speeches including from several MPs and campaigners.

More at Stop HS2 Rally at Parliament.

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3 Cosas at London University 2013: The protest around the University of London Senate House on Wednesday 17th July 2013 was part of a long running campaign to get all workers at the university decent pay and conditions of service. At it’s root was the attempt by the university to dissociate itself from any responsibility for many lower-paid staff – cleaners, security, catering – whose work is essential to the running of the university by employing them indirectly through outsourcing companies.

These staff work alongside others directly employed by the university who get good contracts with decent provision of pensions, holiday entitlement and sickness pay, but are on rock-bottom contracts, receiving only the statutory minimum requirements. Things are usually made worse by bullying managers from the outsourcing companies who overload the workers and often fail to provide proper safety equipment for the jobs.

Some Unison branches, along with students from the University of London Union and some teaching staff and others from neighbouring London Universities had worked successfully together to improve wages and conditions of these lower paid staff, with protests in 2010-2011 getting the London Living Wage for the workers. They had now joined together to campaign for ‘3 Cosas’ – the three causes of sick pay, holiday pay and pensions, with the Spanish title reflecting the background of many of the university cleaners in London’s Latin-American community.

Unison nationally had publicly dissociated itself from the protests by some local branches and had failed to support either for the successful Living Wage Campaign or the new 3 Cosas campaign. The Senate House Unison Branch had recently elected branch officers who supported the campaigns but the results of the election were annulled by the Unison union leadership.

This led to almost all of the outsourced workers and some of those directly employed leaving Unison in protest, joining the grass roots IWGB which had been active in its support and now represented a majority of the outsourced workers. Despite this the university refused to engage with the IWGB, continuing to recognise the far more submissive Unison who seem not to care about the low paid workers.

The protest on this day was larger and angrier than usual, as the University had called in police the previous day to handle a student protest – and police had arrested a young woman who had chalked a slogan on a wall plaque, charging her with criminal damage. Chalk was used by the protesters as it causes no damage and is easily wiped off.

The 3 Cosas campaign has received support from branches and officials of other trade unions, including the RMT and UCU, the university and college teachers. And among those who came to give their support was Green Party Leader Natalie Bennett who spoke briefly before have to rush off to a BBC interview.

The protest began just outside the Senate House and as Bennett left the protesters moved into the open lobby area underneath the bottom of the building for a noisy few minutes chanting ‘Sick Pay, Holidays, Pensions, Now!’ and other slogans, blowing whistles and horns and using megaphone siren sounds to the accompaniment of some highly dynamic drumming from the SOAS samba band.

They then walked out from there and marched around the street to the south of the building opposite the British Museum North Entrance where there was a brief rally mainly to make those going into the museum aware of why they were protesting.

They walked back onto the university site for another noisy protest outside Stewart House, then back underneath Senate House where they stopped to listen to a speech from the ULU Vice-President. IWGB organiser Alberto Durango then invited everyone to go across the road and make their presence felt in front of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where the IWGB is just starting to fight for the cleaners there to get the London Living Wage.

After a few minutes there they returned for a final session at the Senate House for some final speeches. The woman who had been arrested for chalking the previous day was one of those holding a No Justice No Peace’ banner in front of a line of security staff blocking the entrance, and there were calls urging the university to drop the charge of criminal damage, and some of those present chalked slogans on the tarmac in a show of solidarity.

Many more pictures at London University Cleaners Protest

Tag: workplace safety

Workers Memorial Day, HS2 Protest – 2014

Workers Memorial Day

Stop HS2 Rally at Parliament

3 Cosas at London University 2013