The public sector unions have responded aggressively to the City Councils plans to privatise front line services, with threats of strike action.

UNISON, GMB, Unite, and UCATT are the unions that represent the cities 17,000 council workers. They are getting together to fight these plans, and have threatened "massive opposition and ballots for action".

Kevin Duguid, the secretary for the coalition of unions, said, "we are facing unprecedented cuts which will tear the heart out of our local services".

Council bosses revealed last month that they plan to make £92million of cuts closures and privatisations over the next four years. The plans include private profit making businesses coming in to manage and reorganise the services. Many services will be put out to tender, allowing private companies to compete with each-other for contracts, which critics say will be a race to the bottom, to provide the cheapest service possible.

There are around 20 services that the council has marked for privatisation. Including council local offices, bin-collection, school meals, buildings maintenance, street sweeping and museums and galleries. Job losses have also not been ruled out.

The recession is a good excuse to cut public spending, and to further a UK-wide neo-liberal agenda to privatise services. It is also a good opportunity to destroy one of the few remaining bastions of union power. Privatised companies inevitably use non-unionised labour, and have working conditions hostile to workplace organisations that can fight for the interests of workers.

Kevin Duguid continued: "it is time to get back round the table and talk sensibly about how we can work together to protect jobs and services".

A national ballot on strike action by the University & College Union has been postponed, an email from a University president announces.

Workers at the occupied Visteon (a Ford Motors tax dodging shell) factory in Belfast are facing a court order to leave, which is expected to be granted on Friday.

The occupation at Prisme Packaging continues. Information about the way in which the shutdown was managed is coming to light and it looks dodgy, in a "but it's all perfectly legal" way. This report is republished from the Solidarity Scotland website.

A private detective (Ian Kerr) who made a living from running a "blacklist" of construction workers who had been involved in industrial activity, has been forced to shut up shop after a raid by the Information Commissioner.

The existence of "blacklisting" by major engineering and construction firms has been long suspected and came to the fore once more in the recent wave of wildcat strikes on construction sites.

• The Guardian

A Motherwell-based engineering contractor, Motherwell Bridge, is reported to have fired workers at Staythorpe Power Station in Nottinghamshire for refusing to cross a picket line.

Community Service workers employed by Glasgow City Council have been out on indefinite strike since Monday 5th January. The dispute is over "regrading", giving the workers less money for more work. The following text is from a leaflet distributed by strikers at last Saturday's Gaza demo.

Sheriff Sean Murphy who heard 23 days of evidence in the Fatal Accident Inquiry into Grahams death found that Allied Bakeries who owned the lorry had failed to properly maintain the tailgate mechanism.

On the 27th of December we occupied the headquarters of ISAP (Athens Piraeus Electric Railway) as a first response to the murderous attack against Konstantina Kuneva on the 23-12-2008. Sulphuric acid was thrown at her face as she was returning home from work.

Konstantina is in the intensive care ward of Evangelismos hospital suffering serious sight and respiratory system problems.

Since 8AM Greek workers have been occupying the headquarters of the GSEE (their equivalent of the TUC), declaring it a LIberated Workers' Zone.

They released this statement.