Thursday, November 24, 2011

Strike video shot in New Cross

Less than a week to go until the biggest strike in the UK for many years, with public sector workers walking out on November 30th to defend their pensions. The basic arguments are set out at the Pensions Justice site: 'Public sector pensions are under attack. The government wants to make people pay more and work longer for a lot less... Few understand all the detail of pensions, but the issue is simple. Most public sector workers are modestly paid. Their pay has been frozen while the price of basics is shooting up. Now they are expected to pay an extra £3 billion a year for much worse pensions, by a government that cancelled the banker’s bonus tax that raised almost the same. It’s wrong to make public sector workers pay an unfair contribution to reducing a deficit they did nothing to cause'.

'Let's Work Together' by The Workers is a track put out in support of the campaign by a group of public service workers. One of the singers is Viv Gosden, a student midwife at Guys and St Thomas’s Hospital in South London who says: 'As health care professionals we spend our time caring and being advocates for others. As I am at the very beginning of my career in the NHS, I realise that we also need to be advocates for ourselves. I hope that people will understand our point of view and support us in what we believe to be the right choice'.

The video for the single was partly shot in the New Cross Gate area, the first half of it featuring street scenes from Camplin Street and Kender Street among others (I think the later scenes are somewhere in north London, round Highbury and Islington).



Locally there will be picket lines on the 30th at Goldsmiths College in New Cross from 8 am, and no doubt elsewhere.
(apparently Goldsmiths students last night occupied the Whitehead building in New Cross, where the finance offices are based. This is one of a wave of occupations in colleges around the country in the build up to the strike. Further report to follow).

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