Workers' Liberty

This article is scheduled for Solidarity 3/85.

Solidarity 3/85 is now online. Read it here.

By Colin Foster

Back in the 1960s, writers used to puzzle about how we would cope with “the leisure revolution”. New technologies were reducing the work-time needed to produce the necessities of life, and so we would all work less.

The unions should fight for an alternative of democratic social provision.

Old age pensions have been won by labour-movement campaigning, or granted by conservative politicians trying to pre-empt rising labour movements.

The Socialist Green Unity Coalition - an alliance including the Alliance for Green Socialism, the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, the Socialist Alliance, and the Socialist Party — has decided on a joint campaign about pensions, with leafletting, street stalls, petitioning, and public meetings.

This is the text of the basic leaflet for the campaign.

By Stan Crooke

Along with many other health trusts around the country Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) are currently running a deficit.

by Martin Thomas

The Bush government is slowly and clumsily moving towards accepting that Iraq will slide into sectarian civil war, and relying on US airpower to bomb it into a result acceptable to the USA without too many US casualties.

Barry Finger replies to Sean Matgamna (Solidarity 3/84)

Barry's initial article in (Solidarity 3/82)can be seen from this link

----------------------------------------

True to his third camp core, Sean rightly places the Iraqi labor movement at the centre of his concerns.

The Independent Labour Party (ILP) was founded by Keir Hardie and others in 1893 and “ended” some time in the 1970s, when what was left of it joined the Labour Party. For the first 25 years of its existence, it played a central role in British working class politics.

According to Metro, Minister for Women Tessa Jowell has claimed it will never be possible to fully close the gender pay gap, despite the progress that she says “the most feminist government in our history” has made.

This month Civil Partnership legislation came into force. Lesbian, gay and bisexual people can now register their partnership. Good, argues Maria Exall, but socialists need to fight for much more.

Irish Ferries workers are fighting back against the “race to the bottom” as their bosses are trying to mount a major attack on workers’ rights, replacing them with cheap foreign labour.

By Tom Haslam

GMB shop stewards representing 6,000 British Gas engineers have called a number of one-day strikes in the battle to defend their pension rights and the rights of future workers.

With health, teachers and civil servants having agreed a deal over pensions with the government, local government workers have been left to battle on alone.

UNISON and NUJ members in the Press and Publicity department of Tower Hamlets Council took strike action on Monday 28 November in defence of Eileen Short, who has been threatened with losing her job as a result of restructuring.

The Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) representative at Peckham bus garage, Andy Beadle, was reinstated last week after an appeal against his victimisation.

Workers for ipsl, a financial services company based in Bootle are threatening strike action.

By a Tube worker

Finally, RMT and London Underground are officially in dispute over LUL’s attempt to cut station staff under cover of re-rostering for the shorter working week agreement.

“The consequence of this cavalier approach to human rights, as witnessed from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib and beyond,” comments the Observer (4 December) on new revelations that the CIA regularly flies prisoners to foreign countries where they can be tortured with impunity, “is to undermine the very values that the War against Terror was supposed to encourage.”

On 15 November, Wandsworth Stop the War Coalition, in South West London, held a public meeting on civil liberties in Tooting Islamic Centre.

By Josh Robinson

According to figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mean global temperature has risen by up to 0.6°C since the late nineteenth century.

The French establishment was confused on 2 December about how to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz.

by Joan Trevor

The French ambassador to the US summed up the French government’s stance on the November riots in a speech: “What France experienced was social unrest, not riots.”

By Dale Street

Parliamentary elections were held in Chechnya on 27 November.

Bolivia

The Bolivian elections on 18 December are being hailed as the end of 20 years of neoliberalism.

By Becky Crocker

Around 200 workers, students and activists gathered for the fifth annual No Sweat conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London on Saturday 26 November.

By Dan Nichols

At the end of November, New Zealand saw the world's first ever strike at a branch of Starbucks.

Workers for the Michael Aram Export Company, which manufactures metal artware goods such as cutlery, vases and tableware for such top-end New York department stores as Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, are demonstrating outside their Okhla, New Delhi workplace against poor conditions and with-held pay.

By Visha Gopal

In a left-wing culture where the normal method of “debate” is either to slanderously misrepresent your opponent or ignore her existence, the discussion on Venezuela at this year’s No Sweat conference was a welcome change.