“HCL has sent a threatening letter to 1,200 employees, telling them that if they don’t accept inferior pay and conditions they’ll face the sack. Management are pleading poverty, yet the firm was listed in the Belfast Telegraph’s ‘Top 100 Companies’ in 2009, with a pre-tax profit of £1.6 million!”
“The trade union movement should demand that the books of HCL NI and its parent company are immediately opened for inspection by the workforce and elected representatives of the labour movement. Let’s see where the money is going! The CWU should be giving HCL workers every assistance possible to organise to fight these attacks.”
“This is yet another example of the failed economic policies of the Assembly parties. HCL have been handed £5.5 million of public funds through Invest NI, but as soon as the subsidies dry up they want to throw workers on the dole queue. Instead of handouts to big business, we need investment in a public job creation scheme, to provide decent, stable and socially useful jobs.”
ICTU’S SO-CALLED "plan of action" to oppose the pay cuts imposed on public sector workers is vague and doesn’t outline a clear strategy as to how the cuts can be reversed.
The package does little or nothing to reduce the unsustainable debt mountain or stimulate economic growth
Over 40,000 people in Northern Ireland are now on the housing waiting list, making it the highest in 30 years. A further 20,000 people are officially described as being in “housing stress” where the cost of housing is high compared to housing income. There are also over 8,000 homeless cases in the North, most of them are single households, but a third are family households with children and 11% are elderly.
Tommy and Gail Sheridan’s perjury trial is now in its sixth week and is certain to be the longest case of its kind in Scottish legal history. And that’s just one of many precedents that have been set in this scandalous vendetta against Scotland’s best-known socialist.