Manager Members of CMA/Unite to Show Solidarity to strikers

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Well in a way - read full article below:

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Unite union cash call to raise £700,000 for British Airways strikers

The trade union Unite is raising £700,000 in a cash call on its membership to keep the British Airways strike going. The money is the equivalent of about two days’ strike pay for BA workers who have walked out.

The industrial action, which today enters its fourth day in the current stoppage and its seventh this month, is costing Unite nearly £350,000 a day in strike pay. Union officials said that the cash was likely to help finance a hardship fund for 11,500 striking cabin crew who are struggling to cope on the £30 a day that Unite is paying them.

The extra money is being raised by a mandatory levy on the funds of Unite’s 3,000 branches around the country over the next three months. A union official said that Unite’s 1.5 million members, who pay up to £132 a year in subscriptions, will not be asked to put their hands in their own pockets.

It is the first time since its creation in 2007 that Unite has raised such a levy to support industrial action. “This is an unprecedented move and it shows that Unite is absolutely determined to give our members all the support they deserve in winning this battle against the BA bullies,” said Tony Woodley, Unite joint general secretary.

“We continue to search for a decent settlement in this dispute but cabin crew are not going to be driven back to work for lack of resources.”

Trade unionists said that they could not recall such a level of support since the strikes of the 1980s, when unions were smaller and calls for financial support from across a whole union or from other unions were more prevalent.

Officials played down the suggestion that the cash call was a sign that the super-union, which has donated £11 million to the Labour Party over the past five years, was running short of funds. “On the contrary, this is a signal from Unite that the whole union is behind it,” one official said. “It is a show of solidarity. Branches of Unite with nothing to do with the BA cabin crew have already been sending in cheques and offering donations.”

But at a time of falling membership, Unite’s finances are not in as good health as when it was formed from the merger of the Transport & General Workers with Amicus three years ago.

At the end of 2007 the union, which then had a membership of nearly two million, showed an operating surplus of £5.6 million. For 2008, the last year for which Unite has reported annual accounts and before the recession fully bit, it had an £18.5 million deficit. That followed a dive of nearly £20 million in the value of its investment and stocks and shares to £85 million and a fall in current assets of £10 million to £51 million.

In 2008, members’ fees helped bring in revenues of £149 million but since then Unite’s membership has fallen by around 500,000.

The decision to expose itself financially to prolonged industrial action was taken at a meeting of Unite’s Executive Council last May, which raised Unite’s strike pay rate by 130 per cent from £13 to £30.

A statement by the union’s leaders said that the increase “recognises the need to provide members with the ability to ‘fight back’ against unscrupulous employers using the excuse of recession to attack members’ wages, pensions and other terms and conditions.”

[noggin1969]

Manager Members of CMA/Unite to Show Solidarity to strikers must be a differance between BA and RM staff then

[geoffum]

Strike pay??

[brunswick]

probably a good idea to cease paying to the labour party and keeping that money for any future disputes,come to think of it, the same should apply to the cwu.