Workers' Liberty

Read it here. Read the special supplement on the fight for pensions here.

By Patrick Murphy, Leeds NUT

This year’s NUT Conference meets in Gateshead from Friday 25 March to Tuesday 29 March. The dominant issue is likely to be the campaign to defend pension rights, with a ballot for one-day strike action due to open the day before the conference starts. The NUT ballot will close on 11 April and the target date for strike action is 26 April. This date will be confirmed after discussions with other unions, particularly NATFHE, NASUWT, Unison and ATL, to encourage their involvement in action on the same day.

By John O’Mahony

The forces of militant obscurantism, bigotry, intolerance, and social regression, are on the march in Britain! Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has implicitly advised Catholics to vote for Michael Howard’s Conservative party in the General Election, on the grounds that the Tories support a lower limit for legal abortion — 20 weeks of pregnancy instead of 24.

Four hundred hospital workers employed by private contractor Serco are to strike following a ballot last week. Their demand for pay and conditions equal to that of staff directly employed by the NHS follows a similar deal in Birmingham last year at a hospital where non-medical services were managed by a different private contractor. Serco employs 400 staff at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, and is refusing to implement Agenda for Change pay rates (which would see basic pay rise from £4.85 an hour to £5.69, and holiday and sick pay entitlements nearly double) until it is re-imbursed by the NHS. But since Serco made a £57 million profit last year, the workers’ union Unison says it can afford to pay a living wage to their staff now.

Two hundred charities, trade unions, NGOs [non-governmental organisations], and religious groups have formed an alliance called “Make Poverty History”, and are organising for a big demonstration in Edinburgh on 2 July. The Scottish police predict 200,000 people will be there.

By Mike Rowley

The tragicomic saga of the Terror Bill has come to an end at last, after a marathon 31-hour session of the House of Commons. The Bill was passed in amended form, Labour MPs complaining, in a display of grotesque school-boy irony, of being held under “house arrest” in order to ensure the government’s majority.

By Annie O’Keeffe

When Mary Robinson knew she had been elected the first woman President of the Republic of Ireland in 1990 she famously began her first speech with praise and thanks to the “Mná Na h-Eíreann” — to the “women of Ireland” who had rallied to her. Sinn Fein/IRA shogun Gerry Adams might attribute the depth of the present Sinn Fein/IRA crisis to the “Mná”, not of Erin but of the McCartney family.

Five members of the Political Association of Iranian Refugees, who are marching from Birmingham to London to protest against the possibility of US intervention in Iran, spoke at a meeting of Oxford Labour Party on 15 March. Sara Frouzyar translated.

Parables for Socialists 17

By Nick Holden

One thousand five hundred women working at Cumberland Infirmary and West Cumbria Hospital have won a historic victory in their eight-year battle for equal pay with traditionally male jobs in the NHS.

At a time when New Labour and the Tories are competing to display the most virulent hostility towards asylum and immigration rights, you might expect the left to be united in its opposition to this reactionary filth.

Merseyrail guards, members of the RMT union, are to strike on Friday 25 March and for 48 hours on Friday and Saturday 8–9 April in a dispute over the implementation of a 35-hour week.

Ken does it again

This paper has reported before on Ken Livingstone’s strange admiration for the fundamentalist Kuwaiti/Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Now he has thanked an organisation set up to campaign against gay Muslims for supporting his pro-Qaradawi stance.

RMT members at Scottish ferry operator Caledonian MacBrayne will strike for 12 hours on 23 March to defend jobs, pay, conditions and pensions.

By Dale Street

Aslan Maskhadov, a long-standing Chechen separatist leader and one-time president of Chechnya, was killed by Russian forces on 8 March in the south-Chechen settlement of Tolstoy-Yurt.

By a lecturer

On Tuesday 15 and Wednesday 16 March thousands of lecturers in further education colleges took part in a national two-day strike, the second stage of industrial action being taken over pay.

By Stan Crooke

Pickets were out in force at Marshalls Aerospace in Cambridge last Tuesday 15 March as fitters — members of Amicus — staged a 24-hour strike in a dispute over regrading.

In June 1905 the International Workers of the World (IWW) was founded. Delegates from America’s most militant unions and workers’ organisations came together in Chicago to discuss the foundation of the “one big union”, an “industrial union”, organising all workers. The “Wobblies”, as the organisation became known, aimed to break down all the barriers between workers of craft and tradition put up by right-wing labour bureaucrats.

Solidarity spoke to Tony Osborne, Vice Chair of Aspland and Marcon Estate Tenants’ and Residents’ Association, Hackney about their campaign.

Harry Glass reviews “The Politics of Empire: Globalisation in Crisis”, Alan Freeman and Boris Kagarlitsky eds Pluto 2004.

On 4 March Ken Livingstone wrote a piece in the Guardian explaining where he stands on anti-semitism, what he thinks about the Israeli state, and why criticising the actions of that state is not anti-semitism. We wrote this letter in response. It wasn’t published.

By Tim Cooper

In Nottingham the council is proposing that a local small private Islamic school become a large LEA voluntary-aided school.

I’m not in the least bit concerned about Eric Lee being “harsh”, but I am concerned by what seems like a conscious attempt to misstate the historical facts and misrepresent my arguments (“Respect the Mensheviks”, Solidarity 3/68).

Though George Bush has been forced by a host of factors to abandon his “hands off” policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this does not mean that the United States is even considering using its power and prestige to advance a solution to this ongoing crisis. Instead of serious engagement and the mobilisation of its influence, the Bush administration has opted for a policy of “low intensity diplomacy”. Low intensity diplomacy can be recognised by a flurry of important people travelling back and forth discussing everything and anything and deciding absolutely nothing about the real problems.

Hannah Wood reviews Hotel Rwanda

Dan Nichol reviews the BBC’s China Week

This was perhaps the BBC’s way of recompensing for not adequately covering what was one of 2004’s biggest stories — China’s explosive economic growth.

South African trade unionists picketed the Zimbabwe border last week to demand democratic and labour reforms ahead of Zimbabwe’s 31 March parliamentary elections.

Workers at the Zanon factory in Argentina are appealing for solidarity after a series of attacks by thugs. The Argentina Solidarity Campaign reports that in February the wife of a Zanon worker was abducted by four men and suffered a beating and verbal threats before being released to “give the union the message”.

The following article, written by Lebanese socialist Ghassan Makarem, was published on Z-net before the latest (14 March) mass demonstrations in Beirut against Syrian troops, and against a government which is seen to be pro-Syrian. Under US/international pressure, which followed the assassination of former prime minister Rafic Hariri, Syria has begun troop withdrawal. Makarem argues that the opposition is very heterogeneous, and is dominated by reactionary elements, including the communal leaders of Lebanon’s Druze and Maronite Christian sects. Both resent the fact that they have lost some political power since the end of the civil war. All the religious sects apart from the Shia are over-represented in Lebanon’s cumbersome political system, organised on confessional lines. The pro-Syrian demonstrations, called by the Shia Islamist militia-party Hizbollah, have gained mass Shia support. The Shia population of Lebanon constitutes both the largest single group in the country (41%) and the most oppressed.

The fear now must be that the mobilisations in Lebanon will lead to renewed sectarian conflict.

Workers at Taco Bell in the US have won their struggle after a long campaign. Last week Taco Bell, the fast food industry leader in the US announced it had reached an agreement with farm worker organisation, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), to address the wages and working conditions of farmworkers in the Florida tomato industry.