Solidarity 3/151
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Download as pdf (see "attachment").
Solidarity 3/151, 14 May 2009
Ideas For Freedom 2009
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The AWL’s annual event will this year focus on the capitalist crisis, and on socialist and working-class responses to it.
Barnet battles sheltered housing cuts
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If there had been a national debate on the fate of sheltered housing for the elderly, the cuts that are happening around the country could never have gone ahead!
Why? Because the vast majority of people want to retain sheltered housing and are appalled to learn that it is disappearing.
Council tries to bully workers into silence
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Members of Unison employed by Wirral council have been threatened with immediate suspension if they express their opposition to council cuts and job losses publicly.
Fight the cuts!
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A survey of 129 council leaders by the Local Government Association shows that half the councils in England have axed jobs in the last few months and seven in ten anticipate further redundancies.
In the south-west, 67% of councils have already made cuts in staff; in the the south-east, 57%; and so on down to Yorkshire and Humberside (37%).
Tube: vote yes for action (again!)
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The RMT is re-balloting nearly 10,000 of its members across London Underground and Transport for London for strike action around disputes centred on jobs, pay and breaches of disciplinary and attendance agreements. This ballot (which starts on 14 May) follows an earlier positive vote for strike action in a ballot which was subsequently ruled invalid by a court order from a legal action brought by Underground bosses. Management ‘s lawyers picked up on trivial errors in the balloting process.
Visteon: Gains won, but pickets continue
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Visteon workers who occupied or picketed their plants when they were sacked without notice on 31 March have won an important victory.
Many of the workers at the three plants in Basildon, Belfast and Enfield had been on Ford mirror contracts, since the company was spun off from Ford in 2000, but when Visteon UK went into receivership the company claimed it did not need to honour the contracts, even though the international company is still solvent.
Support Pakistan’s labour movement against both Taliban and army!
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More than 800,000 people have now fled fighting in the Swat district of Pakistan. They join a total of around 1.3 million refugees who have fled recent fighting in other parts of the North-West Frontier Province, fleeing, on the one hand threats of violence from the Taliban against people who do not join their “jihad”, and on the other the gunship helicopters of Pakistan’s army.
Higher Education: Build for strike on pay and job cuts
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Lecturers at two thirds of higher education institutions face the real threat of losing their jobs. The Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) has said that 100 institutions are planning collective redundancies.
Education Not for Sale action shuts down university bosses’ conference
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On 7 May, ENS and other free education activists shut down a conference organised by Universities UK, the government’s Higher Education Funding Council and the “Association for University Research and Industry Links” — a conference held to discuss how to best hand over our higher education system to profit-making businesses.