News

Boric and Kast

In the days after the first round of Chile’s presidential election, the mood amongst left activists in Santiago is bleak. José Antonio Kast, candidate for the far-right Christian Social Front received the largest share of the vote on Sunday, with almost 28%, while Gabriel Boric, candidate for the left coalition Apruebro Dignidad, received almost 26%. They will face each other in a second round run-off on 19 December. Polls predict a knife-edge result.

It’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years

Franziska Elmer is a marine biologist working on a project to boost the growth of algae in the oceans as a carbon draw-down technique. She spoke to Stuart Jordan from Solidarity.

We are working on a research and development project that investigates how the macroalgae Sargassum fluitans and natans can be grown in parts of the ocean that have very little nutrients in the surface water. A few hundred metres below the surface there is very nutrient-rich water that is currently not used by any organisms as there is no light for photosynthesis.

On 19 November, India’s farmers triumphed after a year-long struggle, as Narendra Modi’s government announced it would repeal its neo-liberal agricultural reforms.

While the US administration labours to squeeze a now-much-reduced social-spending plan through Congress, on 17 November the Senate voted by a big bipartisan majority to expedite procedure on a huge military budget. That budget has already gone through the House of Representatives by a big majority, with Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others from the “squad” voting against. In the Senate, Bernie Sanders spoke out against the budget and for at least a reduction.

Sometimes workers and unions have to strike at times we would not have chosen. The bosses pick a time when they feel secure and can afford a risk of idling their business to victimise union reps or impose worse conditions.

Sometimes we win strikes even when the bosses have done the best of calculations.

This is a time when the chances of winning strikes are better than usual.

Crowds of several hundred torched cars, set off fireworks, and threw rocks during protests against Covid curbs on 19 November in Rotterdam. Police opened live fire, injuring three.

At least thirteen people trapped on the Belarus-Poland border have died, the most recent a one-year-old child. Given the magnitude of the barbarism inflicted on these people, it could easily have been many more.

Belarus’ noxious regime, which funnelled refugees to the border in order to exert pressure on the European Union over economic sanctions, is undoubtedly in large part responsible for this crisis. But so, equally, are the EU governments (and the UK’s, which has backed them up, including with troops!)

Thousands of midwives, a significant proportion of the 50,000 in the UK, joined demonstrations across the country on 21 November, along with other birth workers and supporters.

They want more resources to improve overstretched maternity services, the working conditions of midwives, and the care they provide to mothers and babies. It is all part of the wider NHS squeeze.

Rail union RMT has again announced strikes over Night Tube “grade consolidation”. Management are intent on destroying work-life balance and bumping up dangerous fatigue-inducing shift patterns in order to save themselves some cash.

Three weeks of strike action began at Goldsmiths University of London on Tuesday 23 November with picketing, a strike rally and the start of an extensive teach-out programme. The first day of action was the culmination of weeks of preparation, and the product of a determination to beat redundancies and damaging restructuring at the college.

Over the last ten years Workers’ Liberty school workers have been at the forefront of pushing the debate about testing in schools in the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and in its successor the National Education Union (NEU).

In 2019 we wrote a motion passed at the NEU’s national conference which committed the union to an indicative ballot of members to boycott the statutory tests in primary schools. The ballot result was strong, but sadly not built upon. Last year, we wrote a motion, passed with amendments, that committed the union to call for the abolition of GCSEs.

In “COP and the credibility gap” (Solidarity 614) I covered the COP26 outcomes on energy generation. This week I cover other aspects.

The Sudanese military leadership has released political prisoners and reinstated deposed Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok to office.

In a sense the junta is retreating. But in another sense they have simply put some window dressing on their coup.

Hamdok has declared there will be elections by July 2023 — exactly what the coup-leaders was already saying. He has agreed a technocratic cabinet likely to be highly compliant with the military. And the military still has the control of the country’s governing “sovereignty council” it took after the coup.

“Mr Modi, you apologised when you withdrew the farm laws – when will you apologise for killing 700 farmers?

“… The farm law is a glimpse, now for the CAA and labour code”

(From a graphic circulating among Indian activists. The CAA is the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act)

A year-long mass movement of India’s farmers, with strong working-class support, has defeated Narendra Modi’s far-right government.

On the morning of 19 November Modi announced that the three farm laws passed in September 2020 would be repealed soon.

Speaking about the thousands of refugees stranded without shelter on the Poland-Belarus border, a Polish comrade told us:

“There was a pregnant refugee, I think from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Polish border guards took this woman by her hands a legs and threw her back over the border like a sack of potatoes. She lost the pregnancy. The border guards have been made like gods, with power of life and death over people.

Édouard Taubé, who was known as Mody and who wrote under the pen name Gil Lannou, left us on 13 November last, after suffering two strokes in a single week.

On 4-5 November, the University and College Union (UCU) announced the results of two national ballots. Higher Education (HE) sector members were balloted on two disputes: the long-running “USS” pensions issue, and the “Four Fights”: pay, workload, casualisation, and inequality. Most of the workers involved are are insecure jobs, with long hours and modest pay.

Corruption. Conservatives. And the other big c-word here, really, is contracting-out.

Contracting-out of public functions has expanded hugely over decades, since the 1980s. It generates lush and repeated profit-chances for those who can make the introductions, drop words in the right ears, or just give inside knowledge on the right notes to strike in applications.

UK-based Sudanese socialist and student activist Mohammed Elnaiem, who was active in Sudan during the revolt of 2019, spoke to Solidarity.

Five hundred trade unionists and community members marched through the very small town of Street, in Somerset, on 13 November, to support Clarks warehouse workers’ ongoing, all-out strike against being “fired and rehired”. Workers’ Liberty members and supporters from London and Bristol joined the march.

Durham University has come under fire for organising safety training for students also working as sex workers. The university brought in the external “Students Involved in the Adult Sex Industry” in response to calls to ensure students who may be at risk “are protected and have access to the support to which they are entitled”.

Martin Thomas, author of Corbynism: What Went Wrong?, responds to the reviews of the booklet by Mike Davis and Urte March in this issue of Solidarity and earlier ones by Richard Price and Andrew Coates online.

On 2 November, Minneapolis residents voted 56.2-43.8% to reject a relatively moderate version of the idea of "ending the Minneapolis Police Department and creating a new transformative model for cultivating safety in our city”, as the city council put it.

“System change, not climate change”, and similar slogans, were prominent on the 6 November demonstrations for the COP26 summit. Yes, we need to change the whole economic, social and political set-up, not just reduce emissions personally. What new system should we seek? And how?

“One solution, revolution”, chanted the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Appeal on the London demonstration. That doesn’t help: who are they asking to do that? How?

“So feeble that it couldn’t run a whelk stall - or would hesitate to try, in case whelks were upset”, commented a Johnson-sceptic Tory columnist on Labour’s current leadership.

Clive Bradley reviews The Dawn of Everything: a new history of humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow (Allen and Lane).

Yorkshire County Cricket Club (YCCC) has stumbled into a self-made crisis which has been decades in the making.

Almost five months after the left, under the banner Time for Real Change, won a clear majority on the National Executive (NEC) of the public services union Unison, on 2 November the left won a one-seat majority on the Labour Link National Committee.

Unlike other affiliated unions, Unison has a parallel (though very opaque) structure for its political activity related to the Labour Party, with its own national committee and conference. Perhaps a quarter of Unison’s members pay into the affiliated political fund and can take part in that structure.

Mike Davis reviews Corbynism: what went wrong?

On 4-5 November the University and College Union (UCU) announced that two national ballots have shown a strong mandate for resuming strikes by our members over issues that have long plagued Higher Education.

The NHS is already packed to capacity. The Tories' stonewall on NHS pay (3% offer, when inflation is nearing 5%), and accumulated stress, keep the NHS staff shortage acute.

Flu rates are still low, but then flu usually takes off only from December. A flu spike, on top of the Covid stress and the backlog from lockdowns, could overflow NHS capacity.

Since 21 October, soon after some five weeks of rising counts pushed NHS bosses and scientists to call for restoration of mild Covid restrictions, Covid case counts have been falling in Britain.

On 7 November a new wave of protests and a mass strike began in Sudan to overturn the military coup of 25 October. We hope to carry more next week. Sudanese civil society activist Hamid Khalafallah spoke to us on 2 November.

What happened after the struggles of 2019?

The big contingent in the small-scale strike wave sweeping the United States (“Striketober”) is 10,000 workers at agricultural equipment company John Deere, out since 14 October over wages, pensions, healthcare and a multi-tier workforce.

Synagogue in Hanover, Germany, set ablaze during the Kristallnacht pogrom

On 9-10 November 1938, Germany and Austria were swept by vicious pogroms against Jews and Jewish property.

The day was called “Kristallnacht” (crystal night) for the way it covered the streets with broken glass. It signalled a shift in Nazi anti-semitism beyond legal and administrative discrimination, and towards mass, violent assaults on the Jewish population.

The COP26 talks (Glasgow, 31 October to 12 November) are an embarrassment for the capitalist class. On the one hand they cannot simply ignore the reality of climate change. On the other hand, they are aware of years of failure, the fossil fuel industries’ current plans for a multi-trillion dollar expansion, and the complete absence of a carbon drawdown infrastructure.

Alexandra is a member of the Student Solidarity Group in Sheffield. She talked with Solidarity about the Girls Night In protests in Sheffield and when one was attacked by angry men.

Freshers’ week started, and a lot of reports of spiking started to trickle in. People were talking about it online. Then you started to see stories about injections too. I started to hear about things happening in Sheffield. The next thing I know, Sheffield Night In is set up and I see them on Instagram. I discover that this is a nationwide thing, planning a boycott of nightclubs.

In 2019 China’s greenhouse gas emissions passed the total of the richer countries (OECD and EU) to reach 27% of the world total (USA 11%, India 7%, EU 6%).

Proportional to population, China’s emissions are still much lower than the USA’s (though now higher than the UK’s). And its historical total emissions are much lower.

To get from here to a world with average temperature rise limited even to 2C, China will have to cut emissions.

The Alliance for Workers' Liberty has issued Corbynism: What Went Wrong?, a 60-page assessment of the collapse of the Corbyn project.

Military coups are, sadly, a fairly regular occurrence in Africa. In the last couple of years, we’ve seen the military seizing or attempting to seize power in Mali, Guinea, Ethiopia, Gabon and Sudan. What makes the recent military coup in Sudan of particular interest to us is the extraordinary role played by the country’s trade unions in the fight to defend democracy.

The world’s biggest 60 banks have provided in the order of $4 trillion of finance for fossil fuel companies and projects since the 2015 Paris Climate Deal.

The UK’s Barclays is the worst European culprit. In 2020 it provided $27 billion (£19.4 billion) of fossil fuel funding.

Four other UK banks are in the list of 60, including Natwest, still majority government-owned.

The government’s “levelling up” bluster is vacuous – but also dangerous.

It is dangerous because it functions to hide the reality of levelling down for swathes of the working class, in all areas of the country, and of reinforced regional inequality intertwined with that.

On 27 October at 6am, a striking John Deere agricultural equipment worker, Richard Rich, 56, employed at the company for 15 years, was hit by a vehicle at a poorly lit intersection at the main parts distribution centre in Milan, Illinois, and died of traumatic chest injuries.

Over 400 new coal mines underway or announced as of June 2021. 118,500 new oil and gas wells projected to start up in 2021-2, 468 new oil and gas pipelines or pipeline expansions in active development as of February 2021.

The recent flurry of strikes taking place in the US, dubbed “Striketober” is perhaps not yet a wave, but definitely a noticeable stream.

Of about 190 strikes up to 22 October, 40 took place in October.

So far the number of strikers is smaller than the almost half a million in 2018 (and almost as many in 2019), which were the highest figures since 1986. In 2020 there were many small strikes and workplace actions, often over safety in the pandemic, but striker-numbers were way down.

In Sheffield, with the help of Workers’ Liberty activists and supporters, food couriers working for JustEat delivery partner Stuart have been organising in the IWGB union in two fights: over job security and pay. On Friday 22 October, the threat of strike action forced Stuart into a U-turn over a planned pay cut.

Calls to boycott nightclubs in towns and cities across the UK are being made between 25 October and 4 November following a recent increase in drink and injected spiking in clubs, under the banner of “Girls Night In”.

Girls Night In groups have formed in over 30 locations so far, with each specifying boycott dates, and are predominantly being coordinated via Instagram.

They are making a range of demands, for more thorough searches on entry, improved training for nightclub staff, anti-spiking devices to be made available, and increased CCTV in bars.

On 24 October, the Israeli Land Authority posted tenders for 1,300 new Jewish-settlement houses to be built in the Palestinian West Bank. This is the first big new settlement plan under the current coalition government. The housing minister declared that he also planned to double the settler population in the Jordan Valley, on the side of the West Bank furthest from Israel. Other building projects are being mooted which would cut off the Palestinian village of Beit Safafa and block Palestinian traffic between north and south of the West Bank.

Members of GMB and Unite have voted to reject the local government pay offer, with similar percentages to Unison members, who voted by 79% to reject a 1.75% pay increase (2.75% for those on pay point 1).

Ballot papers are scheduled to go out to Unison members in early December, asking whether they want to strike to secure an improved pay offer.

The union will be asking members to vote yes. Meanwhile, the Joint Trade Union Side have written to the Employers’ Side, asking them to return to the negotiations and make an improved pay offer.

Workers at the Sage care home in north London struck from 20-22 October, as part of their ongoing fight for higher wages and improved conditions. The workers are demanding a pay increase to £12 per hour, as well as parity with NHS staff terms on sick pay and annual leave. They also want paid breaks on night shifts, and unsocial hours pay for weekend and night working.

The strike saw a lively picket at the workplace, as well as a demonstration outside the head offices of Freshwater, the property conglomerate whose owner, Benzion Freshwater, is on Sage’s board of trustees.