TRADE unionists meeting in Glasgow today will call for an immediate halt to the Conservatives’ “ill thought out” plan to close half of the job centres across Scotland’s largest city.
Civil service union PCS, which represents 50,000 staff in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), has warned that closures will put thousands of jobs at risk and make it more difficult for unemployed people to apply for jobs.
PCS national president Janice Godrich urged the DWP to “stop and think about the impact some of these closures on local communities and how they will undermine the support to members of the public who rely on them to help them get back to work.”
In the final part of a serialisation of his new book, JOHN McINALLY explains how in 2018, after years spent rebuilding the PCS into a leading force against austerity, a damaging rupture emerged from within the union’s own left wing
Labour will find increases in the state pension age are unacceptable, just as cuts to the Winter Fuel Allowance, personal independence payments and universal credit are — it needs to change direction immediately, writes PCS general secretary FRAN HEATHCOTE


