A purchasing power parity index is often useful to cut through the guff...
They've managed to choose one of the most inflation-resistant items possible for that comparison as well.
There's rules about how many people can picket on hospital grounds. Think the limit is six.
As mentioned above, there's two different things going on here - picketing on any employer's property is usually banned so you have to stand outside, and there is the six-person limit which may now be legally enforceable but you can get around it. In my branch, policy is that you have six Official Pickets, identifiable by armbands, hi-viz or signs saying "Official Picket", and then if there happens to be another six, ten, twenty or hundred people standing near the pickets holding union flags or whatever, then they're just members of the public showing their support and solidarity for the picketers.
AFAIK you know you can strike if there's a mandate in your Trust for any union, even if you're not a member of that union. I'm not RCN but I was striking yesterday.
And employers aren't allowed to get you to reveal your union membership status either...
Am curious as to how that works with the more sectional unions - Unite/Unison/GMB all cover much the same groups of workers, so it makes sense that anyone who could be a member of one would be covered by the mandate, but does that still work if you have a more exclusive union like RCN, or indeed ASLEF, NEU, etc? I'm genuinely not sure how it works when there's a strike mandate for a union that only covers one section of the workforce, or how that's defined.
R4's just doing the whole 'care workers aren't striking and they get paid less than nurses/ ambulance workers' thing.
Oh aye, I'm sure they had loads of supportive coverage when care workers were striking at
St Monica's and so on. In more positive media news, looked like the front page of yesterday's Metro seemed pretty pro-strike/anti-tory on this issue, which I wouldn't necessarily have expected.
notesfrombelow.org
