Workers' Liberty

“I can tell you that your courage and the sheer exuberant nerve with which you stuck it to your enemies, especially in New Labour ...

See here for draft text for Unite, and here for draft text for Unison.
Conference notes with dismay the decisions taken at the 2007 Labour Party conference to abolish the ability of affiliated trade unions to set or change Labour Party policy. Unions and CLPs are now barred from putting political motions to Labour Party conference.

More than 14,000 workers at Venezuela's largest steel plant, Ternium Sidor, were on strike last week in a dispute over their pay and conditions.

Venezuelan trade union leader Orlando Chirino has been sacked from his job in the state-owned oil company PDVSA.

Following the upsurge of action by French railworkers, students and others in October and November last year, a group of young AWL members and contacts visited the city for thee days in December. We joined up with two Workers’ Liberty members who are currently teaching in Paris as part of their university course. As well as learning about the ongoing struggle, we revived our ties with sections of the French revolutionary left. In the process we gained valuable ideas about the way forward for socialist activists in Britain.

TGWU/Unite members in the homelessness charity Shelter have voted by an overwhelming 87% to reject a raft of proposed cuts to pay and conditions, in favour of a strike ballot.

Gordon Brown has responded to the funding scandals by reopening the question of increased state funding for political parties, and curbs on trade unions' rights to fund political parties. His speech to the Labour Party National Policy Forum at the start of December is reproduced in full on the Labour Party website.

For informative background from Peter Kenyon's blog, click here.

After the “cash for peerages" row, the New Labour party of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair is now deep in another scandal about dodgy funding from millionaires, one which has already brought a police investigation and forced the resignation of Labour Party general secretary Peter Watt.

Long working hours are on the increase again in the UK, after a gradual ten-year decline in people working more than 48 hours a week, according to new TUC figures.

A "relaunch to achieve workers’ representation” — that is what supporters of Solidarity will be arguing at the conference of the Labour Representation Committee on 17 November.

The working class needs a voice in politics. Labour used to go some way to being a workers’ party: it had workers in it, unions could vote on and make policy at Labour conference.

Unions and local Labour Parties have voted to ban themselves from submitting motions on current political issues to Labour Party conference. All the formal powers that conference once held to determine party policy will be transferred to the leadership, which will only have to ‘consult’ with the National Policy Forum, itself a well-controlled and largely impermeable body. These proposals have finished off Labour Party conference as a serious political event. They are an attempt to finally destroy the Labour Party as a democratic political organisation based on the labour movement.

In response to Bournemouth, we should initiate a long-term consistent campaign to build or revive Trades Councils as political organs of the labour movement.

US labor in trouble and transition, Kim Moody, London: Verso 2007

THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT, NEW LABOUR, AND WORKING-CLASS REPRESENTATION: Class, union and party. By John Bloxam and Sean Matgamna. April 2004.

After a week of industrial action by militant postal workers, official and unofficial, dodgy deals, the intervention of the courts and some labour movement solidarity meetings, how does the left respo

At last month's Labour Party conference, Gordon Brown took away trade unions' (and local Labour Parties') right to submit resolutions to future conferences. Or rather, the unions gave away their rights - voting for Brown's proposal to gag themselves!

Union resolutions in recent years have been passed by Labour conference, criticising the Party leadership over issues including council housing, privatisation and trade union rights. But rather than build on those successes with a renewed fight for Labour to turn back towards socialist policies and genuine support for working-class issues, the unions vote to give up their right to submit anything at all!

What about the rail unions?

As the banker James Pierpoint Morgan said, everybody has two reasons for things they do: the good reason, and the real reason.

Dear Tony Woodley,

We hear that at a fringe meeting at Labour Party conference in Bournemouth (23-27 September), you invited a mild critic of your knee-bending before Gordon Brown to “come outside and say that!”

Dear Bro. Crow,

We have heard that the RMT in London is discussing an initiative for a slate of independent working-class candidates in the upcoming GLA and London Mayoral elections.

DALE STREET reviews The Blair Years — Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries

SWP chief mandarin Alex Callinicos has written a rather surprising volte-face on the Israel boycott debate in the UCU lecturers union.

On 23 September the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth voted to ban unions and local Labour Parties from putting motions on current political issues to any future Labour Party conference.

Sunday 23 September: a grim day in Bournemouth. The unions voted overwhelmingly to disenfranchise the working class - to ban themselves (and the local Labour Parties) from putting motions on current issues to future Labour Party conferences.

The front page of the new issue of the TGWU paper Record looks like an improbably heavy-handed attempt to satirise the new relationship between the unions and the Labour Party leadership after Bournemouth.

It’s all very quiet. You won’t have read a lot about it in the press, heard much about it on TV, or even been told much about it by your union, if you’re a union member. But at the Labour Party conference starting on 23 September, Gordon Brown plans to end 107 years of working-class political input through the Labour Party. Not just to add “a further attack on Labour Party democracy” to the many made since Neil Kinnock’s time. Not just to introduce “more of the same”. Not just to add a further ailment to the already very sick state of working-class political representation in the Labour Party. This is a death blow.

The new issue of Tubeworker asks: in the GLA elections - who speaks for you?, recommending that Tube trade unionists should stand candidates not as a single issue but on a broad working-class platform in allliance with other trade unionists and campaigners.

It also reports on the whopping vote for strike action by all three unions on Metronet, this week's strike action on the Bakerloo line, and the ongoing fight against ticket office closures. Plus the usual workplace reports.

Click 'download' to download it; click here to read Tubeworker's blog.

The 2008 Mayoral and Greater London Assembly elections are likely to offer little choice for working class people in London.

For mayor, there will be Ken Livingstone, who proved he'd turned his back on workers when he said that RMT members should cross picket lines - and he's supposed to be on our side!

There are signs of a revival in worker organising in Venezuela, but it is not clear whether it will be independent of Chávez.

Last week a “unification commission” of the two major factions within the UNT union federation met to organise elections for the leadership, which are long overdue. Leaders of the pro-Chávez Colectivo de Trabajadores en Revolución (CTR) and the more independent Corriente Clasista Unitaria Revolucionaria y Autónoma (CCURA) said they want to organise elections later this year.

Dean Mighell, leader of the ETU (Electrical Trades Union) in Victoria, is right: ""What we've seen [from the ALP leadership] is an incremental backing away of some fundamental union rights, and now we're going into something resembling 'WorkChoices lite'..." Kevin Rudd is becoming a "pale imitation" of John Howard.