Unions target City workers

Workers in the City of London need to get organised - that's the message from a campaign run by unions in the capital.

The Organise the City campaign, coordinated by the South East Region of the TUC in September, aimed to raise workers' awareness of employment rights and increase the profile of unions in the area. Unions leafleted numerous workplaces in the City, targeting cleaners, support workers, administrative workers, managers and professionals.

TUC general secretary John Monks said: "Every worker has employment rights and the TUC is working to ensure that we have modern rights for modern workers. And the best way for a worker to secure their employment rights is to be a member of a trade union."

The unions say City workers have endured bullying and harassment, discrimination, stress, excessive working hours, wrongly handled redundancies, unequal pay and wrongful deductions from pay. Recent surveys identify bullying as workers' top complaint, showing that a third of workers have suffered or witnessed bullying at work, but few had the confidence to challenge the bully.

The unions participating in the campaign are finance and manufacturing union Amicus, communication workers' union CWU, the T&G and GMB general unions, finance union UNIFI and shopworkers' union USDAW.