Blair gives the unions bigger role

[legin]

Tony Blair angered business leaders last night by agreeing to give trade unions a greater role in the reform of public services.

As the most powerful union bosses emerged from talks with the Prime Minister at Downing Street, the Confederation of British Industry condemned the deal as unfair. It said that business was being denied an "equal opportunity to have a say".

John Cridland, the CBI's deputy director-general, evoked the Sixties and Seventies when deals were stitched together in private between Labour governments and union leaders.

<<snip>>

The argument blew up after Mr Blair, in the hope of avoiding damaging defeats at the forthcoming TUC and Labour Party conferences, bowed to union demands for greater involvement in reform.

He agreed to establish a public services forum at which ministers and union bosses would debate policy on the public services.

<<snip>>

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/09/03/ntuc03.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/09/03/ixportal.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=24746

[w4rma]

1. union leaders are "powerful bosses" in Murdoch's rag (n/t)

[legin]

2. I hope the TUC don't allow themselves

to bought off with sop.

Last year they passed some resolution on I/P, which meant that blair had to have some talks with the Palestinians, which because there was a recent bomb, Netanyahu would not let the palestinians leave the country, so that they had to do the talks over a satelite link. I'm sure they were very productive.

The question is have they got the balls to stand up to blair and take the hard road, or are they going to allow their conciences to be sedated by some tasty scraps thrown from the table and take the easy way out ?