It's always good to read a blog post that just seems to cross a job off my own to do list.

I've been thinking for a while that I ought to write something more about the rank and file screenwriters' use of online video in their dispute with the studios, and maybe draw some conclusions about what is possible for UK unions. But then it turns out that John has already written it. I can do nothing other than quite his concluding paragraphs. For the videos themselves, and the exposition, you need to read the whole thing:

While the political world is having a mini-fuss about whether or not private schools should be able to operate tax-free it is left to a playwright to speak the simple truth. Private schools shouldn't be taxed. They shouldn't exist.

Speaking on the Today programme, Alan Bennett said abolishing private education would be unpopular, but it was worth it because the schools cause "a fissure running through British society". He added: "Buying advantages for your children over and above their abilities is wrong."

He's slightly wrong, I think, in that the advantages parents are buying are not necessarily 'above' their children's abilities. Fee-charging private schools (laughably called 'public schools') can't make children achieve above their abilities. But they can make it much easier, and therefore more likely, to reach their potential. In a world where the state education system for "the rest of us" spectacularly fails to do this, it can look a lot like children in private schools are over-achieving. They're not. They're just giving us a glimpse of what all children could achieve if they had small classes, lots of research material, access to musical instruments and science equipment, and many, many more adults per child than any state school can offer.

A temporary repreive appears to have been won in Derby, where nursing staff of all grades were threatened recently with pay cuts.

I attended a meeting in Derby a couple of weeks ago where nurses reported being forced to re-apply for their existing jobs, and having their job descriptions re-written, as the Trust tried to justify plans to 'review' the skill mix and pay grades for many hundreds of staff across the hospitals.

Southern Derbyshire Health UNISON, which had called the meeting, had registered an official dispute with the Trust, together with the RCN, and this does, at least, seem to have dragged the Trust back to the table for further talks. No changes will be made for the next three weeks, while talks continue.

Yesterday I attended my first SGE working group since being elected to the SGE a year ago. Unlike the NEC, which seems to have many meetings of its many sub-committees, meetings of the Health SGE working group are infrequent at best.

Yesterday, the 'Conference Review' working group met. There was some discussion about what we met for, though, as some members felt we should be making an initial stab at preparing the SGE for the conference - reviewing the preliminary agenda, considering whether to recommend the SGE supports or opposes particular motions and drafting possible amendments. Objections that the SGE as a whole had to make the decisions missed the crucial point, I thought, that all that preparation is done already, but done by officers of the union, and not by lay members. It did seem reasonable to me that a lay member working group might do some of it, but we didn't. We are going to suggest that the SGE give clear terms of reference to its working parties for the future though, so maybe next year we will.

The UNISON Service Group Executives - the closest thing UNISON has to an industrial leadership for the various sections of our membership - are being re-elected this spring.

In the Health SGE, I've held the 'General' seat for the East Midlands for the past year or so, since winning in a by-election. So this year I will be defending my seat for the very first time.

I hope health service UNISON members in the East Midlands feel I'm worth another 2 years - I've tried to be an accountable and representative voice for the region on the SGE, making sure that branches and individual members in the region know what the national level of the union is doing, and speaking up for democracy and an active, combative strategy in defence of members' interests and the NHS as a whole.

Distracting himself from writing a report of Wednesday's UNISON NEC meeting, Jon Rogers has written a commentary on the current state of the trade unions in respect of equal pay - possibly the most important issue facing our unions, and their members, and one we are almost completely prevented from debating because of the fear that something someone says or writes might be used as evidence in litigation directed against the unions at a later stage.

It's a big problem, and one that I don't think the trade union rank and file activists have even begun to get a grip on. Since we can't ever talk about it, it is difficult to see a way out of the blind alley the unions have walked in to.

Staff at the Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals Trust (one of the first wave of Foundation Trusts) are having to take strike action in a dispute caused by the Trust's refusal to pay them a recruitment and retention premium - despite the R&R payment being part of the national Agenda for Change handbook, and already having been proven in a test case to be a contractual entitlement for the relevant staff groups in the NHS.

Recruitment and Retention Premia are supposed to be paid to any staff groups for which the NHS would otherwise struggle to fill vacancies or retain staff. Some R&R payments are agreed locally, but others - for staff who are in short supply right across the NHS - are written in to the national agreement which created Agenda for Change. It is just such a national R&R payment which the Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals are refusing to pay. It sounds like Scrooge is alive and well, and living (well, working, anyway) in Doncaster. Step forward Mr Joe Brayford, HR Director at the Trust, who is also chair of the national Pay Negotiating Council - the body with responsibility for agreeing Recruitment and Retention Payments on a national level! So it's alright for other hospitals to be made to pay it, but presumably Mr Brayford thinks his own staff don't deserve it?

According to the Press Gazett, journalists at the Leicester Mercury have voted for industrial action. They are not happy with a reported three percent pay offer. Health workers know what they mean.

I don't know whether this dispute will actually lead to a strike, but I hope it will lead to the paper covering the plight of underpaid health workers more sympathetically in future if we have to resort to industrial action in order to win a decent pay rise.

I was carried through my night shift last night by the buzz from attending the demonstration to defend Karen Reissmann held in Manchester yesterday. It was a truly inspiring event - lively and loud.

Over one thousand people, by my estimate, came to join the march despite the rain and to shout and clap and sing in defence of the right of trade union activists to carry out their basic trade union duties of defending the jobs and services of their members.

Karen was suspended and has now been sacked by her employer and, unusually in these cases there isn't even the pretence of it being about anything other than trade union victimisation. Karen was sacked for speaking to the press in her capacity as a trade unionist against the privatisation of mental health services. In fact, her "offence" was to truthfully point out that voluntary sector organisations pay less well than the NHS and can therefore not attract the same highly experienced staff to stay with them.

I had the good fortune to be at the Barnet Fremantle workers' demonstration on Saturday 10th November. As well as a pleasant time meeting up with old and new friends, I found a great deal of inspiration in the struggle that these low-paid workers are waging against their “third-sector” employer.

The slogan of the dispute: Older People Matter, shows precisely how the struggle of workers for better terms and conditions at work and the struggle to win the public services that people need are complimentary and intertwined. Too often, the government portrays public sector workers as greedily taking money out of public service delivery – just look at the coverage over health service pay rises or public sector pensions.