Shamelessly stolen from Barnet UNISON's excellent blog is this image, perfect for illustrating the price of accepting a below inflation pay rise. Every healthworker should print this off for workplace notice boards, I think.

Colleagues in local government have been made a final offer for this year's pay rise and apparently it's not very good. At least one UNISON branch has already decided to ask the national body responsible for leading their strategy to reject it and organise a campaign of industrial action.

Meanwhile, confusion reigns over our pay rise in the NHS. We're supposed to already have it, but while some in the media are saying an announcement is due imminently (although no-one who is waiting for the pay rise would consider the end of the month to be imminent) others are reporting that the NHS Pay Review Body hasn't even reported to the Government yet.

Yes, it's true. Better days are on the way. Well, episode one is, anyway. Everyone at 4 Glengate is rather fond of Joss Whedon's space pirates, and if we can't have a second series of Firefly or a sequel to the movie, then at least we'll enjoy the comics. The latest installment of Buffy series 8 arrived this morning, and brought with it an advert for a new run of three Serenity comics. The first issue has already been published, but of course it takes thre

On Thursday night I attended a presentation to GPs by the Virgin Healthcare group - a new company set up by Branson's money-making empire to seek out ways of exploiting the NHS for profit. Before going in, I met up with members of Keep Our NHS Public and the local UNISON branch, who were protesting outside (see picture).

The Virgin Healthcare proposals sound a lot like Lord Darzi's polyclinics - lots of different 'services' under one roof, centred around a GP surgery (or several GP surgeries combined together in some unspecified way). In the Virgin Healthcare model, the additional services would include things like laser eye surgery, dentistry (only private dentists, though, it was made very clear) and pharmacy.

George Parr on NHS privatisation, courtesy of YouTube and a recent book launch...

Meanwhile, because the irony of the above video is lost on some people, Richard Branson's Virgin Group has set up Virgin Healthcare - to try to find ways to make money out of primary care. Their plans appear to be to run clinics, in which GPs can rent space, where all the non-clinical staff (receptionists, and so on) will be employed by Virgin, and therefore not get NHS pay, terms and conditions, or pension rights.

Friends and regular readers of the blog will know that I'm more of a cricket fan, and the showy, glitzy, cheerleader-led frenzy that defines American sports doesn't really do it for me. However, when younger I did used to like to watch American football, and the regular late night to watch the superbowl became a bit of a habit. Don't watch it much now that I have 'parental sleep disorder' but last night found me installed on the sofa, sorry, couch, with a big pot of coffee. The fact that the game was on BBC2 without adverts helped, but crucially the game was superb.

For anyone who doesn't know the sport, American Football is a cross between rugby league and a maths lesson. I know that doesn't sound very exciting, but the game offers occasional bursts of athletic and spatial brilliance interspersed with tactical play around field placings and calculations that is almost on a par with cricket. Whereas in football, English-style, much of a game can be spent making irrelevant moves (back-passes to the goal keeper, for instance), in American Football, like basketball and cricket, every play matters. Every 'down', like every drive to the basket or every ball in a game of cricket, is an opportunity to score, or a chance for the other side to steal a breakthrough. Perhaps that goes some way towards explaining why I find those three sports, above all others, interesting enough to keep me hooked over the years, even though they seem so different on the surface.

On 12 December 2007 Vladimir Demyan, a trade union leader and the chairperson of Protection of Labour [Zahist Pracy] a Kyiv independent union, technician for electrical installations at the Commercial Centre 16 of METRO Cash & Carry Ukraine (part of the METRO Group multinational holding company headquartered in Dusseldorf, Germany) was unlawfully dismissed in Kyiv.

Following a campaign by workers locally, and international pressure through the UNI global union, Mr Demyan was yesterday guaranteed his job back. The local union, Zahist Pracy, will be able to organise unhindered by such union-busting efforts by management.

Not sure how I missed this at Christmas, but it's truly stupendous.

I'm scouring the schedules for 'Bonaduce and the Christmas Monkey' already. I think it won't be long now.

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.