Pickets and protests: May Day 2014 in London

Submitted by AWL on 1 May, 2014 - 10:36

On the morning of Thursday 1 May (International Workers' Day) 2014, the London Underground network was just returning to normal after a two-day strike as part of the campaign against ticket office closures and job cuts.

Workers' Liberty Tube workers had been busy picketing, and our members across London visited picket lines and distributed the Tubeworker bulletin we produce with other militants. We also organised with other left-wing students to take a solidarity delegation to picket lines.

On Thursday morning, South London Workers' Liberty members took part in the mass picket outside Lambeth College's Clapham site, planned to launch the UCU's all-out strike against attacks on lecturers' terms and conditions. But a court has ruled striking for more than one day illegal - so activists were discussing the way forward.

Unison members at the college are also balloting for indefinite strike action. One of our members is branch secretary of the Lambeth Unison branch, and she has been actively involved in supporting their organising.

On the picket line, AWL students and other members of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts made a special effort to talk to students, who were generally very supportive of their lecturers, and collected contact details to help start building a student campaign in support of the strike. We plan to continue this activity.

From 11am, AWL members gathered at Clerkenwell Green for the May Day demonstration. We collected many dozens of signatures for the Free Shahrokh Zamani campaign, and sold our paper Solidarity and the Marxist Revival journal we are producing with comrades in other countries.

As the march set off, some of us marched with own union contingents; the rest unfurled our Marxist Revival with pictures of Marx and Trotsky, and marched with our MR comrades from the Iranian Revolutionary Marxists' Tendency, and with the Worker-communist Parties of Kurdistan, Iraq and Iran. We distributed a leaflet for our 3 May Solidarity evening, with a strong anti-Stalinist, working-class socialist message on the back, and had a good discussion with the Iraqi and Iranian comrades as we marched. We also got into conversations with new people and collected contact details.

Some student activists from NCAFC and from campus anti-cuts groups and Living Wage campaigns also took part in the march.

(As in recent years, the march was relatively small - perhaps a few thousand - and dominated by Turkish and other foreign Stalinist groups. But this year there was a good contingent from the RMT, perhaps 500 strong. If other unions had mobilised proportionately, or really at all, it would have been a mass demonstration and the Stalinists would have been dwarfed.)

During the day, a comrade who works on producing Solidarity travelled to Cambridge, where she and a sympathiser visited the Lifeworks occupation by mental health service-users and interviewed some of them.

In the evening, some AWL members took part in the protest against Universities minister David Willetts at University College London, and then the demonstration by cleaners, maintenance workers and students at University of London. The demands of the demonstration included recognition of the workers' union IWGB, equality in terms of sick pay, holidays and pensions (the demands of their 3 Cosas campaign) and the cancellation of management plans to shut UoL's student union, ULU.

Around the same time, some of us attended the rally in Brixton for the Lambeth College campaign - packed out, with over a hundred people, and some excellent contributions. Far from being depressed by the judge's attack on their right to strike, Lambeth UCU members have been made all the more determined to fight. They plan to get their indefinite strike back on very soon, and meanwhile step up their campaigning.

Three AWL members, all young women, spoke from the floor - about Lambeth Unison's plans, about the Tube strike and about student involvement.

The meeting took a big collection, which it agreed to split between the Lambeth College strikers and Ritzy cinema workers' ongoing campaign for the Living Wage. Ritzy workers were on strike that night for the fourth time. After an inspiring speech from a striker, in which he explained about their push to spread union organisation to other cinemas as well as other retail employers in Brixton, the rally marched to join the Ritzy picket line before the majority marched to another Picturehouse cinema in Clapham. The protest was largely and lively enough to attract a lot of attention in central Brixton, particularly from young people.

The struggles mentioned here are all on a relatively small, but with larger groups of workers discussing taking action, we hope they will be the beginning of a renewed fightback. We will work to make that the case.

Throughout May Day, Workers' Liberty members did our best to build the campaigns and struggles we are involved in, while also making proposals, propagandising for socialist ideas and promoting the literature and profile of our organisation.

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