“No doubt they will start saying our strike is stopping people from getting a passport, but we are striking because workers are being stopped from getting food. We need to show the government we are not going away until they put money on the table, for a wage people can live on.”
Andy Bain, PCS branch secretary
- Tuesday 18 April 2023
- 12:30pm
- The Barrelman, 100 Commercial Street, Dundee DD1 2AJ
SINCE LAST SUMMER, workers have staged the biggest strike wave in 34 years. Building solidarity with strikers has been and is critical to the battle for inflation-proofed pay, job security, and defence of the right to strike.
The Tories want to turn workers into slaves, with their misnamed Minimum Service Level legislation designed as a sackers’ charter.
The Tories’ mission to destroy trade unions is driven by the hunt for ever-increasing profits by capitalist employers. Since COVID-19, the profits of the UK’s 350 biggest companies have rocketed by 89%.
Meantime, the average worker’s wage is now £11,000 less than if wages had kept pace with their levels prior to the bankers crashing the economy in 2008.
This is undisguised class war. Maximum workers’ unity in action is urgently required to halt the slaughter of pay, jobs, workplace safety, and the public services at the heart of any civilised society.
The SSP has been at the heart of building solidarity with strikers — and initiated the call for a united STUC demonstration in support of all strikers which led to the successful march on the Scottish Parliament last September — helping to force the Scottish Government into conceding a much improved (10%) pay offer to local authority workers.
Attend this public meeting to meet striking Passport Office workers and others, and discuss building solidarity with the strikers.
“PCS members are fighting doggedly for inflation-proofed pay, as tens of thousands of them get a pay rise this week to drag them up to the paltry new statutory national minimum wage! And in common with the Scottish Socialist Party, they are demanding a £15-an-hour minimum wage.”
Richie Venton, SSP Workplace Organiser
CUT PROFITS, NOT PAY!
Central to all the strikes is the battle between pay and profit; the interests of the working class as against the ruthless profiteering of the capitalists; the age-old struggle between labour and capital.
The case for public ownership has never been so obvious.
We need democratic public ownership of all forms of transport to combat poverty, social isolation, and the escalating climate catastrophe.
We need public ownership of all forms of energy to eliminate the obscene profiteering which lands millions in fuel poverty — and to ensure a worker-led transition to clean, green energy production and distribution — to combat poverty, pollution, and create tens of thousands of new, skilled, unionised jobs in a green industrial revolution. We need public ownership of construction to retrofit every home free of charge and build 100,000 new eco-friendly council houses for affordable rent.
Attend the public meeting. Hear RMT Scotland Organiser Gordon Martin, at the forefront of last year’s strikes; PCS NEC member Liz McGachey, as 133,000 civil servants strike back; and the SSP’s national trade union organiser Richie Venton, who was sacked by a multinational for being an effective union convenor in defence of workers’ lives and livelihoods during COVID.
Discuss the case for democratic public ownership to put people before profit, and for a Socialist Green New Deal which could create at least 350,000 new, green jobs in Scotland.
Solidarity with the strikers!
People not Profit!
Struggle, solidarity, socialism!
