Workers' Liberty

In early December, cabin crew working for British Airways voted — by a huge majority on a massive turnout — for strike action against job cuts and pay freezes. BA management went to court and, eventually, they got an injunction against the strike. The union has now announced a further strike ballot starting on 21 January. But it is a cumbersome process — the earliest BA workers will be able to strike is from the beginning of March!

Just like us, British Airways cabin crew are transport workers facing attacks on their jobs, pay and conditions.

Last month, an unelected, unaccountable, (probably) octogenarian, public-school-educated chap in a wig ruled that RMT's ballot for industrial action on EDF Powerlink was illegal.

If they win the election, the Tories want to privatise the whole of Royal Mail. They also want to change the law to ban many of even those strikes still legal under the current anti-union laws.

Redmond O’Neill, a leader of the Socialist Action group, has died aged 55 of cancer.

Ark Tribe, a building worker in South Australia, faces six months' jail for refusing to meet a special police force set up for the construction industry and give investigators names of other union members involved in getting up a petition on his site about health and safety concerns.

We have still seen no sign of RMT's re-ballot, but can only assume that the ballot papers will be coming soon and every effort is being made to get the notification legally watertight.

In 2001, at the height of our fight against the introduction of PPP, London Underground scuttled to its lawyers to get an RMT strike declared illegal. RMT members went ahead and walked out anyway.

83% of us have voted ‘Yes’ to going on strike. But we will have to do the ballot again. What’s happened?

The new issue of Tubeworker reports on the massive vote by RMT members for industrial action over jobs, pay and bullying, but also the fact that the union is re-balloting because of legal threa

London Underground staff have voted by a huge majority to fight back over job cuts, pay and management bullying.

A bit of Keynesian economics means that New Labour is no longer "New" Labour? Not so. On 12 December Gordon Brown was in Brussels... fighting to make sure that the European Union can't increase workers' rights in Britain.

By Riki Lane
Noel Washington, Senior Vice-President in Victoria of the Construction, Forestry, Mining, and Energy Union (CFMEU) faces
six months prison for refusing to talk to industrial police about what happened at a union meeting outside work hours.

Noel Washington, Senior Vice-President in Victoria of Australia’s big Construction, Forestry, Mining, and Energy Union (CFMEU) faces six months prison for refusing to talk to industrial police about what happened at a union meeting outside work hours.

Defend Noel Washington. Abolish the ABCC
30 July 2008
Riki Lane

Rising inflation and the government policy of wage cutting by keeping wage increases below inflation, is reviving active, militant trade unionism.

Workers are being faced with the choice to either fight or docilely let their living standards be forced down by a government whose pandering to the rich was a already, even before it adopted a policy of “fighting inflation” by cutting the real wages of low paid workers, a scandal and an obscenity.

In response to the impact of August 2007’s 12-hour strike, Justice Secretary Jack Straw announced plans for a strike-ban for prison officers on January 8. Tabled as an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, the measure will be discussed in Parliament as Solidarity goes to press.

The strike to get sacked UNISON steward Karen Reissmann reinstated is continuing. Karen was sacked for speaking out against cuts.

A member of RMT’s LU Engineering branch explains why it has relaunched the CFDU (Campaign for a Fighting Democratic Union)

French president Nicolas Sarkozy has hit the ground running, hoping to capitalise on the apparent mood for change that saw him elected in May. He will need momentum to push through the changes that will make France more like Thatcherite Britain; that is, to bulldoze the working-class opposition that thwarted his predecessors.

Yes, of course, we want Howard out at the federal election. Yes, of course we'll vote Labor where there is no working-class socialist candidate, and give Labor our transfers even when there is.

The text below is a translation of an appeal against French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s plans to attack French workers’ right to strike.

Metronet

By an RMT member

A new film exposes the special police force for the construction industry set up in October 2005 by the conservative Australian government as part of its recent slew of anti-union laws.

Workers' Liberty Australia no.39. Contents include:
It's time for unions to stand firm: Dean Mighell, Joe McDonald, and the ALP
Labor, the unions, and AWAs
Workers' Rights Coalition formed in Melbourne

Without reference to the upcoming Labor Party Conference Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, publicly announced the industrial relations policy he will bring to the federal elections at the National Press Club on 17 April. This new policy if implemented will continue the direction of John Howards’ year old WorkChoices legislation.

By a BT engineer

Apart from general statements assuring the bosses that there will be “no return to the ’70s”, the Labour Frontbench has not been keen to spell out what, if anything, they will do to remove the legal shackles imposed on the unions by the Tories.

Read this letter sent by the ABCC - the special construction-industry "police force" set up under the Howard government's Building and Construction Industry Improvement Act - to construction workers i