Good to see this little victory for GMB members - they’ve waited long enough for the case to come all the way up to the House of Lords, and well done to them for staying the course.

A group of 36 dinner ladies employed by St Helens Borough Council took out an equal pay claim back in 1998, originally as part of a wider group who settled separately. As a result, they were all sent letters by their employer, warning them that the cost of equal pay for them could result in the kids going without food. A disgraceful blackmail attempt that I’m glad to hear they never gave in to.

Worse still, similar letters warning of cuts for children or redundancies if the claim went ahead were sent to the women’s colleagues - seeking to isolate them from the rest of the workforce.

No-one ever hopes to take a greivance, go to court, or go on strike and thereby risk damaging the business, and hence risk their jobs or undo the hard work they’ve put in (regardless of the lost wages and soured relations) - it’s a last resort when faced with a persistently unreasonable employer. It’s often doubly hard for staff in the public sector though, as they also have a strong emotional connection to the people who clearly need the service they supply.

By playing on their dedication to the children in their care, the employers in this case hoped to swindle the dinner ladies out of what was rightfully theirs - a terrible dilemna for them. Hopefully this small case will have a big effect in curbing any future cases like this. Dedicated staff will already be wracking their consciences over taking action, without such irresponsible blackmail from employers.

Last day’s work at the Burberry factory in the Rhondda. Good luck and best wishes to the GMB members there as they plan to march out of the factory after work today to a Welsh choir and with their banners and heads held high.

Even though it will be an extremely difficult day for the 300 workers and their families, I hope they can still manage to be very proud in what they achieved by standing together. A much better redundancy package, retraining opportunities, community investment, and the possibility of further smaller ventures are a lot more than they would have got without their campaign.

They’ve shown other unions the way for future actions too. Celebrity involvement, brand engagement, international links, and even blogging have pulled together in the hands of a strong community to make a positive, compelling, and modern campaign.

At the Speak Up For Public Services rally back in January, I heard an interesting point made in a speech by Doug Nichols of the CYWU. He said we often forget that the reason we have public services, run by the state, is that most of these originally started as voluntary efforts. After a while, it became obvious that you couldn’t coherently run a national system from a hundreds of local voluntary endeavours, so the state stepped in, and we got state-run policing, education, hospitals and so on.

This, he said, gave him pause whenever he heard of more and more local state services being transfered out to be managed by the voluntary sector. He worried that fracturing services in this way (along with more obvious privatisation) would result in services losing the scope to be consistent and efficient that nationalisation had brought them so long ago.

I was thinking of this whilst reading Jon Rogers‘ post on the ongoing dispute at Fremantle. Whilst not wanting to tar all voluntary or private sector provided services with this rather simplistic brush, the debacle going on in Barnet at the moment certainly highlights this potential for losing the service’s much needed consistency and efficiency.

Care staff have been TUPE’d over from Barnet Council to the non-profit Fremantle Trust, but have been told to sign away a huge chunk of their pay and conditions, or face the sack. Had the work stayed public, care work across Barnet would have had consistent conditions, and the same high standards of motivation and care could have been expected. If the Fremantle staff lose their dispute, they are going to be paying for the inefficiency of the new system, directly out of their own pay packets.

Good luck to all the staff at Fremantle, and the Unison & GMB colleagues representing them. If you’d like to chuck in your 2pworth, the woman to email is Fremantle Trust Chief Exec, Carol Sawyer. carole.sawyers@fremantletrust.org

I like shopping at the Co-Op as a rule - it still has that feelgood connection to the labour movement that you don’t quite get with ASDA-WalMart. However, funny things seem to be afoot at the company, whose funerals wing has taken the monumental step of de-recognising the GMB, and ending a relationship over 100 years old.

The Co-Op got their rebuttal in early, issuing a press release before the GMB could react to the news. They claim it’s merely a plan by the Co-Op Group as a whole to rationalise their relations with unions. The wider group has extensive USDAW, T&G and NACO (natch) membership, and the GMB is only operating in Co-Operative Funeralcare, as the smallest of the three non-specialist unions recognised there. Apparently the GMB are just one union too many to deal with, and things would go much more smoothly with fewer groups to talk to.

My guess is that this is a bit of window dressing (Surely a joint shop isn’t too difficult for management to deal with? In my experience, the unions in a joint shop do most of the extra co-ordinating work themselves), and as the GMB section have been the biggest pain to management, calling a company boycott over their current pay campaign, they’re hitting back by dealing only with those unions who aren’t in dispute. If so, it’s a pretty low act to try to disenfranchise by the back door those workers with a grievance - even if they were being rash in their tactics.

GMB General Secretary Paul Kenny said: “It is indicative of a senior management lacking the principles upon which the co-operative movement was founded”. I reckon he’s right. Co-Op may be playing by the letter, but most definitely not the spirit.

A bit of a barney is breaking out over Labour conference lanyards (those little strings that hold your pass round your neck). In an attempt to plug holes in the coffers, sponsorship of anything that moves is vital, and the organisers have pulled off a coup in getting a company to splurge their name all over these yokes around our necks, hurrah!

The company in question… Mr Murdoch’s Sky. Hmmm… not going down so well with some of the comrades, and the GMB union have decided to offer delegates a nice red GMB campaigning lanyard (advertising their AA dispute campaign), rather than the white Sky ones. A dilemna for delegates. Ordinarily I’d rather have a nice red union one (I generally pack a red tie, so it’d match!), but in usurping the official lanyard, would you be downgrading the value of the sponsorship, and hence the likelihood of scooping the party another big wadge of easy money next year (Don’t know how it can be worth the cash - will anyone be subliminally convinced over the week to go home and buy a Sky dish)?

So, which side are you on - white or red?

I’ve been amused by the developments in lanyard technology over the last few conferences I’ve been to - no longer a humble bit of string, but an increasing waste of time and plastic. They get more and more complex, and now they all seem to have little plastic safety break points to stop strangling you, a plastic-reinforced Y shape join, and metal swivel toggle, to let the pass hang straighter, and a plastic and metal quick release belt loop attachment, so you can stick it somewhere else if you’d rather. Plus they’re getting fatter to accommodate the sponsorship. I fully expect them to be wi-fi enabled by next year’s round of conferences.