Join a picket line near you!

Dear comrades,

We urge you to join or visit picket lines near you. If you are involved please send us a report or photos. We can organise to interview you if you would like, to spread support for the strikes.

We are seeing a revolt against low pay. Many strikes have been successful. Bus drivers, dockers and biscuit makers have all been successful. The government would love to defeat this wave of strikes and to further impoverish workers. The government’s actions are not misguided, they are malicious. The craven response from the Labour leadership offers no hope.

Left Unity urges its members and supporters to support local picket lines. Please go and show solidarity. It is quite nice to be on a picket line on a bright sunny day but far harder on a grim cold one.

If you are not sure how to introduce yourself, then a packet of biscuits or a box of chocolates goes a long way to break the ice.

Solidarity is an awareness of shared interests, objectives, standards, and sympathies creating a psychological sense of unity in groups or classes. It refers to the ties in a society that bind people together as one.

Rail workers, postal workers, healthcare workers, the fire brigade and many workers in private companies are on strike. You can find your latest strikes on this map.

We need to show support for strikers who face this government. These are the rail workers, the posties and the NHS workers. These are not straight disputes between the employers and workers but are distorted by government attempts to break trade unions as Thatcher attempted in the 1980s.

Please look out for strikes of nurses and other hospital workers.

Our healthcare has been starved of money and resources as policy. The pay of staff has not seen real increases for a decade. Staff are leaving because of staff shortages, poor working conditions and poor pay. The structures of the healthcare system have been fundamentally changed in favour of profit-making for big business, both through outsourcing within the state healthcare sector and in private healthcare. The new ICB system breaks the national structures of the old NHS.

The NHS staff standing up for their wages is a key moment in the fight for decent pay in state employment and to fight poverty.

The NHS workers also are a key point in the struggle to return to a fully public universal healthcare service providing timely and comprehensive care to all. Left Unity and many health campaigns demand the return to the Bevan model of the NHS. This means ditching outsourcing and commissioning, both to protect pay and conditions and to improve the health care provided by these shoddy outfits, and the use of private companies in advising the NHS using US systems as their reference point. It means returning contracts to the NHS, and an end to the internal market. It also means that money from the government goes to public service healthcare and not the private sector

Please do send us photos and interviews from the picket lines.

You can download and print the poster here. Useful resources can also be found in Keep Our NHS Public.

Solidarity and keep warm on the picket line!

Left Unity.