Health & safety

The keys? You'll have to share

In January a person was stabbed at Woolwich station on the Elizabeth Line. Fortunately the victim only sustained minor injuries and the perpetrator was later caught by police. As for staff who witnessed the scene, they were given special leave to process an understandably traumatic experience. The situation has got staff even more concerned about our own safety. In case of an attack, we have a designated “place of safety”, usually the lockable Assistance pods you see by gatelines. Yet many staff do not have the requisite keys to access them. We have been told for months that more keys are...

Myanmar migrant workers

More than a million Myanmar working-class people are unemployed, according to data given by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), 18 months after the brutal military takeover. According to fresh figures made public by the ILO, employment for both men and women is down by 1.1 million, and the quality of work is declining compared to 2020. Thus, workers from Burma (Myanmar) have no choice but to become migrant workers in neighbouring countries. However, the Burmese expatriate workforce is also purportedly being targeted by the military junta in Myanmar as well. The Myanmar military regime...

Revolt against Foxconn

A revolt against electronics manufacturer Foxconn, with parts of it captured on video , has seen up to 10,000 of the more than 200,000 workers at the vast complex of factories in Zhengzhou walking out of the plant in protest at repressive conditions. These factories are due to produce maybe over 85% of the world’s supply of the new iPhone 14. Already Covid curbs and workers’ protests are hitting Apple’s sales across the world in a usually highly profitable pre-Xmas period. In order to walk out, thousands of workers had to climb over fences and confront security forces blocking the exits and...

Getting the union onto construction sites

Construction worker activists from Unite were at Labour Party conference to promote their campaign to organise construction sites in Merseyside. They spoke to Solidarity about the campaign. We're activists from the 0541 construction branch of Unite. We're also involved in a rank-and-file network in the construction sector with Unite. Through that, we're running a campaign to organise every building site, initially in our area, Merseyside, but then regionally, in the north west, and ultimately nationally if we can. We're up against some of the biggest construction companies, such as Laing O...

The Headscarf Revolutionaries and the fight for safety at sea

Police hold back Lillian Bilocca on the quayside at Hull as a ship pulls out “I wanted something wrong, put right. People should never put money before people’s lives”: the words of Yvonne Blenkinsop who died this April. She was one of the “Headscarf Revolutionaries”, the working-class Hull women who led the campaign for safety on the Trawlers and to save lives at sea. In the 1960s Hull was one of the biggest and most industrialised fishing ports in the world. The trawlers would be away for weeks fishing in the icy waters of the Arctic and North Atlantic. It was an extremely dangerous industry...

Preparing for Truss' attacks (John Moloney's column)

The first round of strikes by our outsourced worker members at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), planned for 5-6 September, has been suspended. Local reps felt managers for the contractor ISS were making concessions in talks that were sufficient to call the strikes off. Further strikes, planned for 13-14 September, remain on, and that action will take place if those concessions don’t turn into concrete guarantees. Our members at the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) centre in Liverpool, run by Hinduja Global Systems, are on strike between 5 to 10 September...

Kino Eye: Silkwood and work safety

Solidarity 635 carried an article on “unsafe workplaces” demonstrating the high price workers often pay for a lack of safety at work. Those who become whistle-blowers are particularly vulnerable. In Silkwood (1983, directed by Mike Nichols) the eponymous character (played by Meryl Streep) works at a plutonium plant making fuel rods for the nuclear industry. She is a member of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers’ Union and becomes increasingly concerned about safety at the plant, going to Washington to testify before the Atomic Energy Commission. Back at work she activates an alarm and it is...

The right to refuse unsafe workplaces

On the night of 10-11 December 2021 six workers at an Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois and nine workers at a candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky were killed as tornadoes flattened their workplaces (the Amazon warehouse is pictured above). Workers in both workplaces report management threatened to sack them if they tried to leave. As a lawyer for one of the dead workers said, they were worked “up until the point of no return”. Some of the workers at the candle factory were prisoners earning just a few cents an hour as part of the USA’s notorious “works program” scheme. But even the...

Diary of a Tube worker: Measures had already frayed

On Monday, all the remaining distancing measures are removed from the station. The sign giving a capacity limit for the mess room is taken down, and the barriers used to create “staff safe zones” on the gate lines are gone too. Our unions register concern about the removal of the measures, but there’s no big fight over it. Some workmates feel the measures, the enforcement of which had significantly frayed, had become more theatrical than effective. “Do you feel unprotected?”, a workmate asks on our first shift without the “staff safe zone” in place. He’s kidding, but I mull it over. I do feel...

From fear to fightback (John Moloney's column)

We need to learn from the result of our consultative ballot over cost-of-living issues. We will be able to break the data down to workplace and branch levels, and the places with higher rates of return will give us an indication of where we have stronger organisation. Around 70,000 members took part in the ballot, but that includes those who voted electronically and postally, as we have some members for whom we don’t have email addresses. As can be imagined, amongst those who voted electronically we had a higher turnout. It’s clear we didn’t sufficiently energise our activist base in this...

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