There was a strong Trades Council presence on the May Day march. Banners were prominent on the Match and a large number of Trades Council activists assisted with the organisation and stewardfing of the March. GLATUC President and regional TUCJCC rep Linda Kietx co-chaired the Rally at the end.

For more details od London May Day go to www.londonmayday.org

GLATUC supported the Workers Memorial Day march to HSE HQ then City Hall on 28 April. President Linda Kietz attended with representatives of Islington, Brent, Croydon, Hammersmith & Fulham and Battersea & Wandsworth TUCs.

Download PDF here

 

At GLATUCs monthly meeting yesterday it honoured 2 trade unionists who had died. Steve Sinnott the NUT GS had died suddenly and Greg Tucker, long time activist in the RMT and the South London trade union movement had died after a long illness. NUT General Secretary, Steve Sinnott, died suddenly on 5 April, 2008. He was 56. His loss will be keenest felt by his beloved wife Mary, his son, daughter, grandchildren and extended family. Steve was General Secretary from 2004, having served the Union previously as member of the National Executive, President and Deputy General Secretary. Francis Beckett Monday April 7, 2008 The Guardian Steve Sinnott, who has died suddenly aged 56, was elected general secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) in 2004, and was regarded as the best leader the union could have for these difficult times. In a union which has always had warring factions, he was a unifying figure. He was about to lead the NUT into strike action over a pay rise of 2.45% with inflation running at 4% - the fourth annual pay cut in a row, he said. The last NUT strike, 21 years ago, was not a success, losing the NUT both members and prestige: Sinnott, as president, deputy general secretary, and then general secretary, played a considerable part in winning them back. He was determined that this one was going to be different, and there is no doubt that his calm, reasonable, thoughtful personality would have helped make it so. It would also have defused the inevitable sneer that the NUT did not care about children, for the charge would never have stuck to a man so transparently committed to the job he had done for years before he became a full-time union official. Born into a working-class Liverpool family with strong socialist traditions, he was the son of a worker at Ford's Halewood car plant and went to West Derby comprehensive school, Liverpool. He graduated from Middlesex Polytechnic with a BA in social sciences in 1974, and trained as a teacher at Edge Hill College in Ormskirk, where he joined the NUT. He taught humanities and was NUT school representative at Shorefields comprehensive school in Toxteth, Liverpool, before moving, in 1979, to Broughton high school near Preston, where he was head of economics and business. Website tributes from former pupils recall his effectiveness and friendliness as a teacher. In 1986 he was elected to the NUT's national executive, and, in 1994, he became the union's president - the first former comprehensive school pupil to hold the post, as he proudly pointed out. The presidency is held by a serving teacher, but during his year of office he was elected to the full-time post of deputy general secretary, from which he stood for the top job 10 years later. He was the first general secretary for many years to be on good terms with the union's hard left, and able to work with them. Though he was not their candidate for the job, they took to him, and the campaigns the union supports - for non-selective education and against academy schools - benefited from his tenure. At the same time he forged an equally good relationship with colleagues in the office, including those who had been rivals for the job. He set in train useful but undramatic reforms in the union's organisation that did not require redundancies. He addressed the longstanding problem of regional officials having too high a load of casework by providing them with assistants at a lower grade who could handle the more routine cases. A warm tribute from Gordon Brown, the prime minister, confirms that, despite the looming strike, he was also successful in ending the angry standoff which had started under his predecessor, Doug McAvoy, when Charles Clarke was education secretary. One result was that the NUT conference in Manchester last month was the most united that anyone can remember. Sinnott had taken trouble to make sure none of his members felt under attack. He found a way of so arranging union policy that it did not offend, for instance, either faith school teachers or those whose pupils went into the army. He was also able to establish himself on the international stage. He claimed that "teacher unions in both Israel and in Palestine have no closer friend than the NUT" and was active in bringing the two together, chairing Education International's advisory committee on the Middle East. Fred van Leeuwen, the EI general secretary, yesterday also drew attention to the key part he played in drawing up a protocol about teacher recruitment designed to prevent Britain from asset-stripping Commonwealth countries of their teachers. But the strike would have been his biggest challenge so far, and he had prepared meticulously. He took every opportunity to hammer home the message that a reduction in teachers' pay is bad for children: it leads to recruitment and retention problems, and people teaching well outside their subject areas. He is survived by his wife Mary, herself a talented teacher, his son Stephen, daughter Kate, and two grandsons. · Steve Sinnott, teacher and trade unionist, born June 24 1951; died April 5 2008   GREG TUCKER 1953-2008   Greg Tucker – who died yesterday from throat cancer – was no stranger to hostile media coverage; it’ll be interesting to see what some of the mainstream press obituarists come up with. But he never had any difficulty with being described as ‘an unreconstructed figure of the hard left’, because that is essentially what he was. Greg (pictured) and I got to know one another in the South London branch of the International Socialist Group in the early 1990s, and later worked together in the London Socialist Alliance. In the 2001 general election, he stood as a Socialist Alliance parliamentary candidate, polling 906 votes against Keith Hill in Streatham. He also served as a Labour councillor in Lambeth throughout the period in which that local authority was controlled by the hard left, achieving a certain amount of notoriety, including this mention in the House of Commons by a Tory former cabinet minister. As Michael Heseltine made clear, Greg lost his council seat not because he was voted out by the voters or democratically deselected by Labour Party members, but because he was deemed unacceptable by the Walworth Road machine: Mr. Heseltine : But there is a consolation prize for the Labour party. It will win the vote of no confidence that was passed today in its Labour candidates in Lambeth. The House is entitled to the latest up-to-the -minute information. Today the Labour executive kicked out 13 of Labour's councillors in Lambeth. The Labour leader, Joan Twelves, is out. The mayor, George Huish, is out. The deputy leader, John Harrison, is out. The chief whip, Julian Lewis, is out. Greg Tucker, Mrs. Twelves's partner, is out. I leave it to my right hon. and hon. Friends to interpret that for themselves ; whatever he happens to be, he is out on his ear. As all those great luminaries of the Labour establishment get the chop, they have given a new political significance to the meaning of the Lambeth walk. [Interruption.] It is a long way to Tipperary and it is quite a long way to Sheffield as well. As if all of this didn’t keep him busy enough, Greg went on to achieve notoriety all over again for his activism in the RMT transport union, playing a leading role in several strikes. In 1999, he stood for the position of general secretary on a rank and file ticket, and picked up around one-third of the ballot, a highly credible vote for a revolutionary. The Daily Telegraph headlined one story about him ‘Left-winger at the heart of the dispute'. It's almost a pity that Greg will be cremated rather than buried, because that would have made the perfect epitaph. Condolences to Joan and to Greg’s son by an earlier relationship. Posted at 13:09, 7 April 2008 from www.davidosler.com

Glatuc

 Bill Greenshields, incoming president of the National Union of Teachers has called for the private education system to be nationalised. Hesaid such a move would improve state education and make it fairer.

The NUT has long been hostile to independent education and to Labour’s programme of setting up academies with private-sector sponsors to replace failing schools.

But Greenshields’s comments to the union’s annual conference in Manchester yesterday (22/3/08) went one step further.

“Let’s consider our own direction of travel – from private to public, towards bringing all schools into the state sector,” he said. “Then we would soon see some urgent improvements in our state system.”

In a further sign of confrontation with the government’s education policy, teachers at the conference have also threatened industrial action over class sizes and inadequate pay.

Greenshields, an English teacher from Derbyshire, said the union was monitoring Gordon Brown’s “aspiration” of bringing funding for state schools into line with the levels enjoyed by the private education sector.

Click here to download the PDF.

Click here to download the PDF.