International unions

Trade union struggles outside the UK

Defend worker activists in Iran!

from the worker-communist party of iran BORHAN Divangar, Mohsen Hakimi and Mohamad Abdipoor have been sentenced! The Revolutionary Court of the Islamic Republic of Iran has announced the prison sentences passed on these three remaining workers who were arrested after the 2004 May Day demonstrations in the city of Saqez. On 9 November, Mahmood Salehi and Jalal Hosseini were also sentenced to imprisonment. The court in Saqez passed these sentences for the “crime” of organising independent May Day commemorations in 2004. Borhan Divangar, chair of the National Organisation of the Unemployed still...

Belgians battling for their pensions

On Friday 28 October the Belgian trade unions staged a second 24-hour national strike opposing government plans to increase the retirement age from 58 to 60. Unlike on 7 October, when only the ABVV/FGTB federation, with links to the Socialist Party, went on strike, all the trade union federations participated. A hundred thousand joined a march in the capital Brussels, many of them brought there by trains which ran throughout the strike just for the purpose of transporting protestors. The marchers wore green, red and blue, the colours of the three main union federations. Their banners read...

Unite the fragments

By Joan Trevor The workers of the SNCM ferry company have voted a return to work after 24 days’ strike. They had been protesting against government plans to privatise the company. They voted to stop their protest only after the government threatened to put the company into liquidation. The vote was 519 for a return to work and 73 against. It is disappointing, if not surprising, that the dispute ended in defeat. Especially since throughout Marseille there were a number of disputes ongoing, against, effectively, the same government policies. The union federations, however, are not uniting the...

British bosses bolster Saudi tyranny

Yahya al Alfaifi worked as a communication engineering technician (command post technician) at the British Aerospace plant at Dharan in Saudi Arabia for four years. He was sacked in 2002 for organising a meeting of BAe workers, considered a “a trade union action” in Saudi Arabia. Yahya will be speaking at the No Sweat conference in London on 26 November. He spoke to Cathy Nugent. BAe Systems does military aviation work for the Saudi Ministry of Defence. There are different gradations or demarcations among workers there. The British and American workers were considered “first class”. There were...

China: crackdown on steel workers

A police crackdown against workers from the Chongqing steel plant earlier this month resulted in the death of two women protestors, 24 workers injured and the detention of three of the workers’ leaders, according to the China Labour Bulletin. The crackdown ended a two-month-long series of demonstrations by several thousand workers at the steel factory. Workers were laid off by the company without compensation in August, after the company went bankrupt. The clash on 7 October occurred while the workers were staging a sit-in protest outside the municipal government headquarters. The protests...

The British left failed the internationalist test

Many British labour movement activists and leaders were hostile to Solidarnosc — most prominently miners’ leader Arthur Scargill. Scargill was — and still is — a Stalinist who believed that police-state Poland was a genuine socialist country. Like many militants, Scargill’s views were reinforced because the Cold War leaders of the Eastern Bloc were in a head-to-head stand off with his own immediate enemies — Margaret Thatcher and the hated US president Ronald Reagan. Large sections of the left and some on the right of the labour movement made the elementary mistake of assuming that their enemy...

The birth of Solidarnosc

A quarter of a century ago, Poland’s Stalinist police-state system was rocked by a massive wave of working-class action. In just six weeks the Polish workers built Solidarnosc (Solidarity), a trade union movement of 10 million workers that had the potential to be much more. The period from August 1980 to December 1981, when the workers’ movement was driven underground by a military coup, is one of the high points of working class history. Amina Saddiq tells the story. “Lodz is a city of women who are exhausted, jaded, ill and prematurely aged, a city of people crippled socially and...

Release Chinese worker activists!

By harry glass China’s forced-march industrialisation continues apace. The OECD, the rich nations’ think tank, says that by 2010 it will become the fourth largest economy in world — overtaking Britain, France and Italy. China already accounts for 6% of world exports and is expected to reach 10% in the next five years, overtaking Germany and the US to become the world’s biggest exporter. But the real story is the class struggles this industrialisation has generated and the dislocation it has caused. There are many stories now of big riots and clashes with police in both rural and urban areas...

Change to win?

Earlier this year four of the United States’ biggest unions — SEIU service employees, UFCW food and commercial workers, UNITE HERE textile, hospitality and retail workers and the Teamsters — split from the AFL-CIO, the country’s trade union federation. Together with other smaller unions, they have formed a new coalition called “Change to Win”, with a founding conference at the end of September. LabourStart director Eric Lee attended the conference and produced a blog. You can find it here at www.ericlee.me.uk/archive /cat-ctw.html.

Unquiet waters for French government

By Joan Trevor On 4 October all the main national trade union federations in France called a joint day of strikes and demonstrations. The first reports suggest that this has been well supported by workers — including many non-union members. The unions are demanding an increase in pay — the spending-power of French workers has been falling behind price increases; defence of public services; and against unemployment, which currently stands at almost 10%. The unions estimated that more than a million workers went on demonstrations; 350,000 in Paris. The actions have been well supported by the...

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