Workers' Liberty

Hundreds of protesters in Italy occupied railway lines last week to stop military equipment being transported to American forces in the Gulf.

A small group of campaigners broke into the military zone near Pisa Airport. The protests coincided with a march against the war in the city. Politicians from Rifondazione and the Green Party say American forces based at the nearby Camp Darby have depleted uranium weapons.

By Mick Duncan

Littlewoods, a founder member of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), was bought for £750m in November by the Barclay Brothers. Three months later, it has just announced its resignation from the ETI.

The Hazards Campaign and the Centre for Corporate Accountability are calling on trade unionists to send a special email postcard to Tony Blair asking him why the Government has not introduced legislation creating the new offence of "corporate killing".

The Kenyan Tailors and Textile union is requesting solidarity action in support of 9,200 Kenyan garment workers, producing for a number of major international brands, who were fired after going on strike in January to demand better working conditions. The workers, employed at seven factories in Kenya's export processing zones, were producing for brands including Wal-Mart, Sears, and Target.

Kenya's Ministry of Labour issued an order on 11 February instructing the factories to reinstate the workers and recognise the union by 3 March.

Indonesia's House of Representatives passed the Manpower Bill on 25 February. The new law is a serious attack on workers' right to strike. Other bills are in the pipeline.

The new legislation states that workers must tell employers of an intention to strike. If they don't notify the bosses, the strike can be classified as illegal and a company can lock out workers and refuse to pay wages.

On 10 March Italy's biggest trade union, CGIL, will begin the next stage of its campaign for four referendums to put to the public an alternative to the policies of the Berlusconi government.

The CWU has informed BT that it will ballot the 16,000 engineers who work for Customer Service to halt the unagreed "Self Motivated Teams" productivity bonus scheme. BT have introduced a "voluntary" SMT scheme and are pressing members to opt in, despite union opposition. The CWU is demanding withdrawal of the unagreed scheme before any talks on ending the current standoff.

By a civil servant

A Manchester civil servant hit the headlines recently when he took his employer - the Department for Work and Pensions - to an Employment Tribunal, under the Sex Discrimination Act, over whether or not men at his workplace should be forced to wear ties.

By Kate Ahrens
(Leicestershire Health UNISON, personal capacity)

Candy Udwin and Dave Carr, Unison activists and SWP members, have been expelled from the union. The two were branch officers in the University of London Hospitals (UCLH) branch of the union and were finally expelled following a lengthy appeals process on charges relating to a leaflet that they produced during the dispute at the hospital over PFI.

The RMT rail union has accepted a rotten offer of a 4% wage increase from Arriva Trains Northern for conductors and guards, and the 13 month dispute in the company is now over.

The workers had taken a series of one day actions. A ballot on Arriva's pay offer rejected it, 295 to 165, though the biggest depot, Leeds, voted to accept. Union reps say that the deal will still mean workers are some of the lowest paid in the industry.

Members of the PCS civil service union have voted 31,322 to 18,926 in favour of annual (rather than two-yearly) elections for their union's National Executive, and 28,190 to 22,053 for annual (rather than two-yearly) union conferences. The ballot results were announced on 28 February.

By Martin Thomas

Over a hundred Labour MPs - not many fewer than voted against the Government on war in Iraq - have signed a House of Commons motion opposing New Labour's plans for "foundation hospitals".

By Mark Sandell

Alan Johnson, the New Labour Minister for Employment Relations, used to be general secretary of the post and telecom union CWU. Johnson left the CWU after failing to sell Royal Mail bosses' agenda to his members. He was almost universally hated by the union's members by then. Labour's leadership paid him back for holding off a major national dispute before the 1997 General Election by imposing him as a candidate in Hull weeks before polling day.

By Mark Osborn

Vietnamese and Chinese workers are being recruited to work in sweatshop factories in America's Pacific territories. Attracted by the promise of good wages, the workers find themselves trapped in brutal sweatshops to make designer clothes for the US retail market and where they are beaten and starved.


Last week a court in Washington found one boss, Lee Kil-soo, from the Daewoosa Samoa factory guilty of human trafficking.

By Jim Byagua

Five hundred students met on 5 March to protest outside Parliament as part of national walkouts/action against war. Around two-thirds of the protestors were school students.

A powerful international labour-based movement for democracy and international solidarity can defeat both George W Bush's war for oil and Saddam Hussein's bloody dictatorship. In the immediate term, we want to consolidate a democratic, secular and internationalist pole in the British anti-war movement.

By Sean Matgamna

What is the attitude of Marxists to "backward" and "underdeveloped" countries and peoples who are being assaulted, occupied, or colonised by a more advanced but predatory civilisation?

By Angela Paton

The Scottish Socialist Party held its annual conference in Glasgow on 22-23 February, with numbers down to about 250 because of a move to a delegate system rather than "one member one vote".

Rose and Mercy, two asylum seekers living in Glasgow with their children are facing deportation. They fled from Zimbabwe and Rwanda, where both had been raped while in custody. After arriving in the UK both women found they had been infected with HIV.

• New Labour circular: "Meeting our targets"

• Nobody does it better
• Boo hoo hoo
• From Leeds to, er, Kiev

The Stop The War Coalition is calling a 'People's Assembly for Peace' on Wednesday 12 March (Central Hall, Westminster, 10am to 5pm). Publicity for it suggests that it is modelled on the 'People's Convention' called by the Communist Party to oppose World War Two, in the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact.

After Hitler invaded the USSR on 22 June 1941, the Communist Party would become fervently pro-war, and oppose any strikes or trade-union action which it thought might hinder the war; but before then it argued that Hitler really wanted peace and that all 'progressive' people should unite to press Britain to make peace with Germany.

Trotsky knew:
"I see the bright green strip of grass
Beneath the wall
And the clear blue sky
Above the wall
And sunlight everywhere
Life is beautiful
Let the future generations cleanse it
Of all evil oppression
And violence
And enjoy it to the full."

Trotsky knew:
"I see the bright green strip of grass
Beneath the wall
And the clear blue sky
Above the wall
And sunlight everywhere

Liam Conway made the closing speech at conference.

"Comrades, the mainstream labour movement is dominated by people who have nothing in common with the aspirations of the working class - who care nothing for the idea of human solidarity.

Is war now certain?

Despite the vast scale of the world-wide opposition to war, a US/UK attack on Iraq seems a certainty. Small-scale air attacks on Iraq have been routine for years. Already they are being escalated. Soon the US and Britain will launch what they call Operation Shock and Awe - total war on Iraq. The first two days will, they say, see 800 cruise missiles rain down on Baghdad, so as to destroy "the enemy's will to fight". Vast numbers of civilians are certain to be slaughtered. The Pentagon says plainly that "there will not be a safe place in Baghdad". Tony Blair and his cabinet plan to commit mass murder in Iraq!

1953 was the year Stalin died, and a year of revolt in several Soviet bloc countries, in the first place, East Germany. This article by Jean-Michel Krivine, at the time a member of the French Communist Party, is from Rouge (2 January 2003), the paper of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire in France. In it he describes some of the momentous events that followed the - very partial - Soviet thaw after Stalin's death.

So far Ken Livingstone's congestion charging seems to be working. Does this mean socialists should give three (or even two) cheers and adopt it as part of our response to pollution, traffic congestion and other environmental problems?

Dr Neve Gordon, a critic of Israeli economic and political policies, teaches at Ben Gurion University. In an article published in The Nation on 19 February 2003 and abridged below he argues against the boycott of Israeli academics.

The organisers of the boycott in the UK include left-wing academics Steven and Hilary Rose. Noam Chomsky has also recently criticised the boycott.

By Mick Duncan, Secretary, No Sweat

After Mexican workers' action against poverty-pay and anti-union management in Matamoros Garment, and a massive international campaign in support of their struggle, a victory has been won for militant, independent trade unionism.

By Gerry Byrne

One voice has been surprisingly absent or muted in the debate on the coming war. Women are probably the majority of the anti-war movement. Women and children are the main sufferers under the UN-imposed sanctions. Women and children will feature hugely among the predicted half a million direct and indirect casualties, and the millions who will be forced to flee the destruction of their homes once the bombs start to fall. US military strategists are planning on a short hard war. This is code for not counting the cost in civilian casualties. Hundreds of Cruise missiles are expected to be dropped in the first few days of the war. The lie of smart bombs and surgical strikes in the last Gulf War was revealed in all its hideousness only long after that war was over.

By Colin Foster

Workers' Liberty forums in London, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield over recent weeks on "The USA as hyperpower" have produced lively discussions around questions on the shape of the modern world raised by the current drive for war in Iraq.

Today's US "hyperpower" is fundamentally structural power within a world of more-or-less free trade, different from the old colonial empires of the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century and their more-or-less organised trade blocs.