Solidarity 081, 6 October 2005

The other America

By Peter Burton I spent three interesting months in the US between April and the end of June this year. I was last there in 1992. Post 9/11 there are a lot more American flags around on houses, buses, trains etc. Airline workers have suffered in the fallout. One pilot I spoke to told me he had taken a $ 75,000 pay cut last year, the justification being less people travelling post 9/11. He told me “Retirement could not come quick enough for the older pilots”. In California, Big Arnie has united public sector workers in opposition to him and his policies. Lacking the guile of many other...

Where is the ESF going?

The fourth European Social Forum (ESF) will take place in Athens on 6-9 April 2006. The ESF has come a long way since the first, chaotic event in Florence in 2002, and the Athens event will be big, vibrant and inspiring. Vicki Morris asks what more we should be getting out of the ESF With many lessons learned, there is now a permanent framework of organisers and timetable of meetings for the European Social Forum (ESF), and the events are the better for it. The main forum for organisation is the European Preparatory Assembly (EPA); this met last in Istanbul on 22-25 September. The personnel of...

Pensions: mobilise now!

by a unison member The Government, via the local government employers, has put down its new proposals for cutting local government pensions. They are worse than the proposals on the table earlier this year, when the main local government unions scheduled strike action, only to cancel it when the Government promised further talks. The employers want negotiations completed by 15 October to give the Government time to prepare its distribution of funds to local authorities for the financial year 2006-7. According to Unison, the biggest local government union, the employers propose to: • From 1...

Unquiet waters for French government

By Joan Trevor On 4 October all the main national trade union federations in France called a joint day of strikes and demonstrations. The first reports suggest that this has been well supported by workers — including many non-union members. The unions are demanding an increase in pay — the spending-power of French workers has been falling behind price increases; defence of public services; and against unemployment, which currently stands at almost 10%. The unions estimated that more than a million workers went on demonstrations; 350,000 in Paris. The actions have been well supported by the...

BA pursues retreating TGWU with court action - Gate Gourmet activists sacked

By Alan Porter Under a deal negotiated by the TGWU — and announced to the press before consulting its members — just 187 of 713 workers sacked by Gate Gourmet the airline catering company based at Heathrow, back in August will be reinstated. 382 are set to accept voluntary redundancy, and 144 to suffer compulsory redundancy. The 144 include seven workers, two of them stewards, whom the company to as the most militant union activists. This deal was accepted by the vast majority of the workers at a mass meeting. Many workers will feel vindicated in their action — some workers have been...

Sinead O’Connor or the pseudo left?

The political sage and religious thinker Sinead O’Connor has recently had the grace to describe her pro-Provisional IRA politics of the 1990s, not elegantly but accurately, as “bollocks”. We still await similar, milder, or indeed any, self-criticism from those on the British left who in the same period refused to criticise the Provisional IRA, even when it was shooting Northern Ireland Protestant workers for such “collaborationist” crimes as fixing a lavatory or a broken window in an RUC police station. The IRA’s was, they said, an “anti-imperialist struggle”. Ours was not to reason why - or...

Support SPD over PDS in the East

David Broder takes a strongly critical view on Die Linke.PDS Most of the British left responded with uncritical celebration to the German Left Party’s strong election results. While it cannot be doubted that their tally of 8.7% of votes was a huge achievement, we also need to examine whether we actually call for a vote for such a group. The Left Party, a lash-up between the ex-Stalinist PDS and the WASG, an SPD split, had what was in many ways a flawed agenda for the 18 September election. Often populist, in tune with WASG leader Oskar Lafontaine’s quasi-racist comments about foreign workers...

Walter Wolfgang's Reply

Walter Wolfgang, the Richmond constituency Labour Party delegate who was thrown out of Labour Party conference by stewards for shouting “Nonsense!” when Jack Straw spoke about Iraq, and was then initially refused readmittance to the conference by police citing anti-terrorist legislation, spoke to Solidarity. Labour Party leaders have increasingly controlled Conference over the last few years. We used to have a very inclusive culture in the party. But New Labour has damaged that. We must reclaim it before it is too late. The way it started was that, though Conference was being ignored, it was...

Challenge for German left

Germany's new left party, Die Linke.PDS, will be the largest left opposition in Parliament to a probable "grand coalition" government of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the main right-wing opposition, the CDU/CSU. In the country's 18 September general election, the SPD got 222 seats, the CDU/CSU 226. The press speculates that the "grand coalition" which they are likely to be form will not be able to carry through the hard-edged Thatcherite programme that CDU leader Angela Merkel offered in the election. But it may. In any case, it will certainly carry on the more gradual neo-liberal...

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