Defending jobs

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Sacked workers occupy Belfast and Enfield car parts factories

Some 200 workers occupied the Visteon car components factory in west Belfast on 31 March, and workers in Enfield occupied on 1 April. Vicki Morris reports on the Visteon occupation in Enfield, north London and on why Thursday 9 April will be a crunch day for the dispute “We done what we had to do, we have a message for big multinational corporations: you can’t get away with it no more. You should treat ordinary people with respect. And it’s not us that should be treated as criminals but people like Mandelson.” Kevin Nolan, Unite convenor from the occupied Visteon factory in Enfield, was...

Prisme factory occupation: make the bosses think twice!

At the time of going to press, the Prisme Packaging factory occupation in Dundee, which began when its owners announced closure of the company, is about to enter its fourth week. Dale Street spoke to David Taylor, one of the Prisme workers involved in the occupation. What progress has been made with the idea of setting up a workers’ co-operative? We have nearly finished this — we have just to meet with the accountant, and the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Clydesdale Bank. We are hoping to stay here when we set up the new business, but nothing is set in stone. All the machinery is here, but it...

Local solidarity way to save jobs

Cambridge University Press recently announced plans to axe 160 jobs at two sites in Cambridge. Thirty redundancies at the company’s education department have already been confirmed, and management wanted a further 130 redundancies at the press itself. However, a concerted effort by the press workers, the local trades council, and local people has forced management to reduce the number of redundancies to 53. Workers at the press recently agreed to a three year wage freeze, a gradual realignment of wages with industry norms, and the loss of their final salary pension scheme, measures which were...

Tubeworker 23/3/09: VOTE YES!

The new issue of Tubeworker urges all RMT members on London Underground and TfL to vote Yes in the current industrial action ballot, and discusses some of the issues that workers are talking about. It also reports on the sacking of a cleaner rep and ISS's reneging on the last instalment of the London Living Wage for cleaners, as well as the usual range of workplace reports. Click on the file name to view, download and print it. Click here to read Tubeworker 's blog.

Further Action at Staythorpe

Engineering construction: Workers demonstrated outside the Staythorpe power station construction site, in Nottinghamshire, again on Wednesday 11 March. But Unite union officials seem to be quietly encouraging a winding-down of the action. Most of the workers currently on the site are Spanish workers, reportedly non-union and walled off from access by trade unionists, employed by two Spanish sub-contractors. The demonstrations are for labour for future phases of the contract to be hired locally under the national union agreement for engineering construction. The numbers on the demonstrations —...

Dispute/Discussion: Nationalist strike - an inconvenient truth

Solidarity’s approach to the recent construction strikes was very poor. While they were a national news issue and a major focus for everyone interested in how the British working class respond to the crisis, we wobbled and ended up downplaying the massive threat of nationalism to our class. We did not heed Trotsky’s advice in the Transitional Programme: “To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be.” The key reason these strikes spread was because they touched a...

Dundee packaging workers occupy over redundancies

Workers at Prisme Packaging in Dundee have occupied their factory, demanding at the very minimum that they get their redundancy pay. Christina Faulkner, one of the workers, spoke to Solidarity about the occupation. At 10am on Wednesday 4 March someone the workers had never met before turned up at the factory and told the twelve workers that the company was shutting down immediately bexcause it had lost a contract. They should take their personal belongings and go. They would get no redundancy pay, because there was "no money" to pay it. The workers refused to accept this, and have been...

No applause for Derek Simpson at Staythorpe

After today’s (Tuesday 24 February) picket the workers marched through Newark, the local town for what turned out to be the shortest rally I’ve ever witnessed. The three platform speeches in the market square couldn’t have been altogether more than 15 minutes long and no questions or comments were taken from the rank and file. John Mann, Labour MP spoke about his experience of the Cottam power station dispute (it is in his constituency of Bassetlaw) and his efforts in parliament through an Early Day Motion to get rid of UK opt outs from the Posted Workers Directive. Tommy Hardacre said that...

Against Viking, Laval, Ruffert, Luxemburg: cross-Europe workers' unity!

Today workers can move freely and easily across most of the European Union. The freedom is a boon, and makes it easier to build the working-class unity across borders which was an urgent necessity even from a trade-union point of view as long ago as the beginning of the First International, in the 1860s. But capital is agile. Capital will seek to turn our freedoms against us. In four judgements in 2007-8 the European Court of Justice (ECJ) made it easier for bosses to undermine union agreements in one country by "shipping in" or "posting" entire temporary workforces from other countries. The...

Isle of Grain: talking strikes

Two other comrades and I went to Hoo on the Isle of Grain on Saturday 7 February to talk to local workers and residents. We have visited the area before as socialist activists at the Climate Camp. We had some long conversations with a group of men who were all locals, but none of whom worked on the plant, although they had family members working at Kingsnorth. They knew very little about the strikes but wanted to talk about them, climate change, banks, protesters, capitalism in general. We then went to a pub in Grain, where it was pretty exciting to see our “Workers Climate Action” leaflet on...

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