Wigan AFC and JJB Sports owner and premier-league wanker Dave Whelan wins this month's Supreme Corporate Arsehole Award, as far as the hundreds of people at today's Organising for Fighting Trade Unions conference are concerned.

Dave treats his staff in the JJB Sports distribution warehouse in Wigan like garbage. Their salaries stink, and their reasonable requests for better money and terms continue to fall on Dave's deaf ears.

So, they have begun to organise. Paid - if we can call it that - an average of £200 a week, JJB Sports distribution staff have taken several days of strike action to try and convince Whelan to raise and standardise their basic wage, and to put a fair bonus scheme in place for staff at the Martland Park warehouse distribution depot.

They nearly got it, too, says GMB organiser and JJB Sports staff member Chris Riley. They'd been negotiating with JJB CEO Tom Knight, who could see the sense of having distribution staff on the same pay and terms across the organisation. At the moment, some staff members are paid more than others - what you get, says Riley, tends to depend on the health, or otherwise, of your relationship with management.

'He [Knight] could see that it [equal pay] would work. If we were all on the same pay, he could move staff when he wanted in the organisation and he would have that flexibility.' Unfortunately, Dave Whelan got involved in the negotiations at that point. He 'came in and tore the whole thing up. He says if we go for union recognition, we will shut and they will replace us with agency workers.' JJB Sports made a pre-tax £18.2 profit in the six months to July this year.

Riley, who has two sons, earns about £180 a week. He says that kind of wage is impossible to live on. 'If it wasn't for the family tax credit, I don't know what I would do. I don't think I could do it.' He's been working for JJB Sports for four years. 'That's the part of it that is difficult. We don't know why Whelan is being like this about it. The majority of people [at JJB Sports] live and work in the area and they are long-term staff. They are from the area and they are committed to the area.'

About 270 distribution staff took part in the recent strike action. Riley, meanwhile, has been suspended from work for his union activities. Another union convenor was sacked.

Riley praises his union and says that he's been 'inspired' by the help JJB Sports workers have had from others. 'People are organising collections for us. Billy Bragg is going to do a support gig. The GMB has been great. They've helped us with hardship payments and they have been very, very supportive at every level - here locally, and on the national scale.'

Which is a lot more than can be said for Unison - the union, today's audience is told, that actively working with management at the Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Trust to flatten union activist Yunus Baksh and his attempts to resist millions of pounds of cuts in the NHS in the North.

Baksh, a health worker and Unison branch secretary, says that he was suspended from work for his point-blank refusal to accept the cuts programme, and very likely for other fights put up to save health services in the North. 'We have stopped them closing old people's homes, and forcing women to work in dangerous conditions, alone on reception areas with patients with no support.' He says that management has enjoyed pay rises of 36.7% while all this has been going on.' He says management is trying to sack him.

Unison bureaucrats, meanwhile, have proven their usual hideous, New Labour-loving selves, and have sided strongly with management. 'They have placed our branch into regional administration,' Baksh says furiously. 'We can't have a ballot [on striking to resist the proposed cuts] without it going to a new shadow group that has been set up. My union,' he says, to an audience that is some way into the standing ovation by now, 'seems to have forgotten what it's for.'

Unison certainly appears to have forgotten that it's purportedly spearheading a national campaign to save the NHS from the endless profit-mad private companies that have distinguished themselves in the Blairite era by winning NHS contracts to provide half the service at twice the price. Recent government announcements of massive NHS deficits have led already to estimates of 22,000 job losses in the NHS, and the impact that this is having, says Geoff Martin of campaigning group Health Emergency, 'is catastrophic.'

He gives a few examples. In Tooting, he says, five neonatal cots are now out of service, because there aren't enough staff to keep them open. Premature babies are trucked around the country until somebody finds available cots. Staff in the Royal Free Hospital in North London are saying that there's nobody around to feed elderly people in wards, which means that those people aren't eating. Mental health services at the vital Maudsley Hospital in South London are also threateed. 'That is typical New Labour,' says Martin. 'They spend ten years driving you nuts, and then there's nowhere for you to go.'

There's plenty of money in the NHS: investment in the last five years grown at about seven percent per annum. The problem is that it leaves the NHS just as quickly, trousered by private contractors who win contracts to build hospitals and provide health services and then make an amazingly expensive shambles of both. Karen Reissman, a nurse from Manchester and a member of Unison's Health Service Group Executive, tells the audience that she can barely stand it anymore.

'PFI has cost more than £45b more than if they had done these building programmes in-house. That money is going right to the privateers. This is causing great bitterness among staff.' She says that there are 16 nurses in her mental health team, and that management want to cut this number to four. She says that management also 'wants to close our elderly assessment unit.'

Reissman says there is also talk of putting all mental heath care provision in Manchester out to tender, which means that the likes of BUPA 'could be in charge of mental health provision in Manchester.' This is the very same BUPA that was the subject of damning reports on care standards in at least six Bromley care homes for the elderly, and was recently fined £90,000 after an elderly woman in a care home died in a hoist accident ... just the crew to look after your vulnerable relatives.

'I think that the union leadership has let them [the government] off the hook,' Reissman says. '[The recent strike by] NHS Logistics showed that strikes are possible, that we could win the publicity and embarass the government.'

Solidarity action is the only answer to all of this John McDonnell tells the crowd. The Trade Union Freedom Bill he wants to put before parliament aims to lift the present ban on solidarity strike action. The big fights are only won if a whole workforce can stop the economy in its tracks. He says the various powers that still fancy themselves around Westminster have already been on the phone, to ask if he'd mind watering the bill down. 'I got this call when they said Look, can't we just do a deal around balloting [to relax stringent laws around balloting for strike action]. Can we bollocks, I said.'

He admits that the bill doesn't go as far as many activists would like. 'It is a minimalist bill - this is what the lowest common denominator would agree to.' Sadly, he says, the lowest common denominator doesn't include the New Labour Cabinet. 'Not a single member of the Cabinet has signed up to this [bill]. Solidarity is a concept that New Labour has forgotten about.' He describes his challege for the leadership of the Labour party as a demonstration of solidarity - a Gordon Brown coronation, after all, would hardly give people confidence that the so-called socialist arm of the Labour Party really cared.

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