Solidarity 154, 25 June 2009

Blue skies, zero wages?

Whoever it was that said capitalism has reached the limits of ‘innovation’ should be asked to think again. We can be sure that in an effort to reduce the impact of the economic crisis on their own pockets, the capitalist classes and their teams of blue-sky thinkers will be cooking up ways to make workers pay for their excesses. If proof be needed, just take a look at British Airways. BA Chief Exec Willie Walsh is urging the airlines’ 30,000 workers to take a whole month’s pay ‘holiday’. In return for not being able to feed themselves, BA workers can play a part in their employers “survival”...

A living wage for cleaners!

On Wednesday 17 June, tube cleaners and supporters, including Feminist Fightback, Campaign Against Immigration Controls, and MPs John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn, demonstrated outside City Hall to demand that London Mayor Boris Johnson keep his promise of a living wage for all tube cleaners. Johnson has been in the press with the publishing of the study he commissioned into an amnesty for migrant workers. Yet his real approach to migrant labour can be found in how he has dealt with the tube cleaners’ campaign: promise a living wage, fail to deliver and preside over cleaning contractors who...

Democracy still the key in Unison

In his speech to this year’s conference of the public services union Unison, in Brighton in mid-June, general secretary Dave Prentis called on the “Labour Link” section of the union to stop funding constituency development plans, and to work only with Labour MPs who abide by the union’s values and objectives. He also called on them to campaign to ensure that the manifesto the Labour Party draws up for the next general election does not continue privatisation. The conference gave him a standing ovation, reflecting the anger delegates feel about the Labour Party. But in Unison all activity...

Victory to the solidarity strikes!

Solidarity strikes have spread across Britain to beat the union-busting attempted by oil multinational Total and its contractors on their construction site at the Lindsey Oil Refinery site in Lincolnshire. Many thousands of workers have struck over a principle, though the immediate bread-and-butter issue concerns just 51 workers. Such solidarity is the muscle-fibre of all working-class strength and dignity. That is why the Tories made it illegal in the 1980s, and why New Labour has kept the Tory laws. But the engineering construction workers’ solidarity has been so powerful that, so far...

Can you have more? Of course you can!

Industrial action over pay by the National Union of Teachers was one of the first casualties of the economic crisis. After winning a concrete mandate for action in a ballot, the union took a single day of action to demand the government meet a pay claim. When the union came to ballot for a second time, the turnout was lower and the majority in favour of action was paper thin. The dispute was called off. According to reports from activists, union members were expressing “reservations” — even embarrassment — about demanding higher salaries when so many others were having their pay cut and jobs...

Cuts battles will shape an epoch to come

If the Government puts out £1100 billion in cash, credit, and guarantees to the banks, as it has done, then someone is going to foot the bill. On current plans, both Tory and New Labour, it is public services and public service workers. A lot of the £1100 billion has been guarantees given on the principle that, if the guarantees are in place, they will never be called on. But a lot is actual loans or actual cash, to buy shares in the banks. The Financial Times summarises the results: “[Government] borrowing is set to rise to £175 billion a year, or 12.5% of national income... Public debt is...

The regime against the people

Iran’s population is about 70 million. The population doubled between 1975 and 2000; about half the population is aged under 25 and two-thirds under 30. This helps to explain why a large mass of the population is at odds with the theocratic regime’s severe restrictions on people living normal lives. Iranians are not against having a good time, but Iran is a socially conservative country, disapproving of homosexuality, female sexuality, etc. And, this can’t change while, for example, gay people are persecuted by the state, with homosexuality punishable by death, and young women are obliged to...

Bus workers speak out

It is clear to all that the demands of the majority of Iranian society go far beyond economic demands. During the past few years, we have emphasized that so long as the principle of freedom of organisation and choice is not realized, any talk of social freedom and economic rights is more of a joke as opposed to reality. On the basis of this reality, the Vahed Bus Workers Syndicate supports those who are giving their all to build a free and independent civil institution. We condemn any kind of suppression and intimidation. In order to recognize economic and social rights in Iran, Friday 26 June...

Khamenei blames “Zionists”

Khamenei spent a lot of his speech on Friday 19 June attacking those he sees as Iran’s historical and current enemies. Iranian Islamist populism has always relied on evoking external threats and whipping up nationalism. The speech was also strategy for strengthening the internal crackdown — attacking America, the UK, the UN, and trying to link those powers to the opposition movement in Iran. The anti-western discourse of Khamenei’s speech wrapped up religious piety with tirades against “materialism” (his fear for the youth) unspecified “enemies”, specified plotting enemies (critics of the...

Who is Ahmadinejad?

As an organiser for the “Organisation of Student Unity”, Ahmadinejad played a key role in the Islamist counter-revolution of 1979-80, establishing control of the universities by purging left-wing and dissident lecturers and students, many of whom were later executed. Following a period as an engineer and military commander in the Iran-Iraq war, he worked in “internal security”, earning notoriety as an interrogator and torturer. Ahmadinejad was elected mayor of Tehran in May 2003, after a widespread boycott of the city council election brought the ultra-conservative “Alliance of Builders of...

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