The Right to Work campaign will be holding a conference on the 30 January in Manchester to organise resistance to job cuts. So far more than 50 union branches are backing it and more than 500 people have registered to attend.

Speakers include Mark Serworka (PCS), Sally Hunt (UCU), Jerry Hicks (Unite) and the NUJ’s own Jeremy Dear. There are plenty of other speakers and workshops.

Workers, students and unemployed are encouraged to attend

Full details of registration and the day itself, plus local transport are  here http://sites.google.com/site/righttoworkconference

Missed this the first time. But Newsnight’s Paul Mason blogs movingly about Contract Journal, the magazine where he started his journalistic career. Contract Journal was closed last November after more than a 100 years of printing.

A story that could be told about many magazines

The Southport ADM has given the NUJ a strong platform to build a sustained campaign for action to resist a further assault on jobs, pay and the conditions under which we have to work. Here, Alan Gibson gives the highs and the lows of the conference and identifies some of the key issues in the coming year.

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Photo: Jonathan Warren

NUJ vice president Pete Murray says the Labour party has “lost its will to fight” and only united action from the unions and others can defend jobs and defeat the far right.

Speaking on behalf of the NUJ at the Jobs, Education, Peace rally in Brighton on Sunday, Pete contrasted the protesters out on the streets in the sunshine with those shut up inside the Labour party conference centre opposite.

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By Dave Crouch

More than 100 trade unionists packed into the London Welsh Centre on Thursday night to hear the NUJ’s general secretary Jeremy Dear and a host of leading union activists call for a powerful protest in Brighton next weekend at Labour party conference.

Fresh from the TUC in Liverpool, Jeremy spoke about the government’s lack of political will – unemployment can be beaten, but it means a change of priorities from the banks to working people, he said.

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As trade unionists met in London this evening to help build for the Jobs, Education, Peace demo at Labour party conference on Sunday 27 September, father of the NUJ chapel at Express Newspapers, Steve Usher, sent this message of support:

Surviving NUJ members at the Express titles are currently going through yet another redundancy exercise.

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Branches and chapels will be urged to sign up to a campaign to put jobs and journalism at the top of the political and industrial agenda this autumn.

Activists met this evening to begin planning the NUJ’s involvement in what we hope will be a massive showing of union solidarity at the Labour party conference on 27 September.

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by Dave Crouch

We are living through the worst economic crisis for 60 years. No one has any idea how it will pan out or when it will end.

Unemployment is soaring. Yet where are the unions? We should be battering on the doors of parliament.

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Great news from the Birmingham Post and Mail that the chapels have secured an agreement there will be no compulsory redundancies.

Congratulations to the chapel members who mounted a solid, united resistance to these proposals, voting massively in favour of a strike.

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This time next week, journalists on Trinity Mirror’s titles in the midlands are likely to have staged a strike in defence of jobs and journalism in the region and be planning their next move.

After a massive vote in favour, the members at the Birmingham Post and Mail, Coventry Telegraph, Sunday Mercury and Midlands Weekly Media titles plan to walk out on Thursday 30 July.

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