🔴 UNION NEWS | 31 OCTOBER 2026
Workers fight back as jobs come under threat and new trade union rights take effect.
This week’s Union News looks at the issues that matter to working people across Britain.
We examine new rights for trade unions, the threat to 12,000 jobs at Poundland, and industrial disputes involving refuse workers, university staff, offshore workers and public services.
There’s also encouraging news for British manufacturing, a significant pay victory following 66 days of strike action, and a look at the growing campaign against driverless cars threatening workers’ livelihoods.
Why should working people pay the price for corporate decisions, poor management and decades of industrial decline?
As ever, we bring you the news from an independent, pro-worker perspective. No corporate spin. Just the issues that matter to working people.
Here is the full transcript:
Hello, and welcome to Union News for Saturday the thirty-first of October.
This week: new rights for unions, retail jobs under threat, strikes across Britain, and some encouraging news about manufacturing.
First, the new right of access to workplaces. From Friday, independent trade unions in England, Scotland and Wales have a statutory route to ask employers for physical or digital access to workers. If an agreement can’t be reached, the Central Arbitration Committee can step in. Businesses employing fewer than twenty-one people are exempt.
It’s welcome. But the law alone doesn’t change the balance of power. A union still has to persuade people to join. It still has to organise, elect representatives, and earn the confidence of workers. You don’t achieve that by issuing a leaflet and hoping for the best.
There are limits, too. The access arrangements are for meeting, supporting and organising workers, not for organising industrial action. Other restrictions remain. The test of this reform will be whether working people actually become more able to speak and act collectively.
Now, to Poundland. Around twelve thousand jobs are at risk after the retailer filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators. Its shops are still trading, and a rescue remains possible. Administration is a threat, not yet a completed outcome.
Imagine working there, heading towards Christmas, uncertain whether your wages will continue. The company’s owner rejected an offer for the whole chain, while interest in buying parts of the business continues. Usdaw is pressing for jobs to be protected. Quite right. Staff built the business through their work. They should not be treated as an afterthought when owners and potential buyers decide its future.
On Wednesday the government announced new minimum wage rates for next April. For workers aged twenty-one and over, the National Living Wage will rise to thirteen pounds and twenty-one pence an hour. That’s fifty pence more. Eighteen- to twenty-year-olds will get a lower minimum of eleven pounds and twenty-seven pence.
Of course, any increase is welcome. People need it. But I have never been persuaded that doing the same work should attract a lower minimum wage simply because you’re nineteen rather than twenty-one. An hourly rate alone doesn’t guarantee a decent living. You need secure hours, affordable housing and public services that work. Those matters are political choices, not forces of nature.
In Havering, east London, more than forty refuse workers employed by the contractor FCC Waste Management have been on strike this week. Unite says they face long rounds, fatigue, safety concerns and poor pay. A new refuse loader in Havering earns twelve pounds and eighty-eight pence an hour. Across the boundary in Redbridge, the comparable rate is fifteen pounds and seventy-two pence.
Same essential service. Very different pay.
Havering Council says it is pressing for a negotiated settlement and has been monitoring the service. But the dispute exposes a familiar problem with contracting out. The public pays, a private company runs the service, and workers fight over wages and conditions. If outsourcing was supposed to bring a better deal for everyone, the people doing the job are entitled to ask where that better deal went.
There is a related dispute in Barnet. Care, housing and support workers at the council-owned Barnet Group took action on Tuesday over what Unison calls a two-tier workforce. Staff say they do not enjoy the same pay, sick leave and pension arrangements as colleagues directly employed by the council. These aren’t luxuries. They affect illness, time off and retirement. A public service shouldn’t be built on dividing the workforce into first- and second-class employees.
At the Victoria and Albert Museum, planned strikes on Thursday and Friday were suspended after an improved offer from management. PCS and Prospect are taking part in further talks. That’s movement, but not yet a settlement. The issues include pay, London Living Wage accreditation and basic conditions such as seating, drinking water and coping with excessive heat. For a great national institution, these seem remarkably modest demands. Staff make the V&A worth visiting too.
In higher education, the picture is troubling. At London South Bank University, UCU members have further action planned for Monday and Tuesday. The union says proposals could see sixty-six academics dismissed and re-employed on inferior contracts. At Nottingham, strikes continue over proposed redundancies and course closures. And at Edinburgh, staff have just completed five weeks of action against major cuts and the threat of compulsory redundancies.
Universities face financial pressures. Nobody sensible denies it. But cutting the people and courses that give a university its purpose is a dreadful response. Students suffer too. Their education depends on experienced staff with the time and security to teach and research properly. A university is not simply a property portfolio with a lecture theatre attached.
Offshore, more than one hundred and sixty Unite members employed by Apache are due to strike again next Wednesday, the fourth of November. The dispute is over pay. Unite says an offer rejected by workers would mean a real-terms cut for many, and warns that disruption could affect the Forties Pipeline System. These workers do demanding, sometimes dangerous jobs. Negotiation ought to be possible.
Here’s another dispute to watch. At Rushey Green Primary School in Lewisham, NEU members have announced strikes for the fifth and sixth of November. They allege bullying, poor management practices and union victimisation. Those allegations must be considered fairly. Staff should be able to raise concerns without fear.
There’s another battle about the future of work. The Independent Workers of Great Britain are challenging plans for driverless cars in London. I am not against technology. New machinery and new methods can make work safer and more productive. But who makes the decisions? What happens to professional drivers whose livelihoods are threatened? And what of safety and accessibility? Workers should be involved before the decisions are taken, not invited to comment when it’s all been signed off.
Now for some good news. The CPBML’s (Communist Party of Britain Marxist Leninist) Workers website has reported on two new manufacturing sites in Southwark. Isembard is producing engineering components, while Rivan Industries is developing synthetic gas technology. Together they employ about one hundred and sixty people, with plans to grow.
London once made an extraordinary range of things. We allowed too much of that industrial capacity to disappear. So I welcome new factories, but two openings don’t amount to an industrial strategy. We need skills, reliable energy and long-term investment. Britain should be a country that makes things, not merely one that imports them, sells them and hopes the finances add up.
And a workers’ victory worth remembering: more than three hundred Unite members at the Institute of Cancer Research secured a pay settlement after sixty-six days of strikes. The reported average increase is seventeen point two per cent over two years, with particularly substantial gains for the lowest paid. It wasn’t handed to them out of generosity. They organised and stood together.
Finally, Strike Map is preparing a delegation of trade unionists and students to France for strike demonstrations planned for the fifth of November. Its latest Striker newsletter also reports that the Independent Workers of Great Britain has become its thirteenth national affiliate. Solidarity doesn’t stop at a workplace gate or a national border.
That’s it for this week’s Union News. We won’t agree on every tactic, and not every dispute is easily won. But workers are in a stronger position when they’re organised, informed and willing to stand by one another. For more about our work, visit the Solidarity union website. Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back next week.
Script by Maria Camara
