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With workers facing across-the-board cutbacks, members of Brighton SolFed today hit the streets to talk to retail staff about their rights. After the UKUncut protests have shifted attention to the multi-million pound tax dodging of several high street names, we went to talk to retail workers, encouraging them to get organised to prevent bosses cutting costs by cutting their conditions. We’ll be back again in a couple of weeks to keep the issue topical, and keep local bosses on notice that attacks on workers’ conditions won’t go unnoticed!

You can download a copy of SolFed’s basic workplace rights leaflet, 'the Stuff Your Boss doesn’t want you to know' here.

Comments

This sounds like a great initiative. It's something that I'm interested in proposing to Thames Valley comrades. What did you do in the various retailers? I'm assuming you handed out copies of 'Stuff Your Boss', did you have much time to talk to the shop staff? If so, how did they react?

As I say, sounds like a great initiative and I hope you keep it up!

We basically took a slightly modified/localised Stuff Your Boss in and chatted to staff/gave them a copy. Mixed reactions - some seemed a bit bemused, others had a good chat and passed it round. The idea is it's something relatively easy we can do to try and normalise the idea of discussing workplace terms & conditions etc. We wanted to do something to situate ourselves as part of the anti-cuts stuff so we tweaked SYB to link cut-backs to casualisation and rights not being adhered to. Best case someone gets in touch and we help them organise something, worst case it's good practice talking to other workers and gets some targetted advice out there. On balance it was positive and it's something we can repeat fairly regularly if we want.

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This article was published on 15 January 2011 by the SolFed group in Brighton. Other recent articles:

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