Solidarity 045, 5 February 2004

A report by Dita Sari In the middle of the heat and poverty of the Indian city of Mumbai, the fourth World Social Forum (WSF) was held on 16-21 January. An estimated 100,000 activists from some 130 different countries - the majority from India - gathered together to discuss the urgent social and political issues facing humanity in the 21st century. The main themes centred around issues of neo-liberal globalisation, war, peace (or the lack of it), women, racism, health, education and the environment. These issues were discussed in thousands of workshops, talks and forums. The WSF is an arena...

By Mark Osborn CAFOD (Catholic campaigning organisation) have produced a a useful, detailed, expose of the terrible working conditions, harassment and poverty pay faced by electronics workers, making computer parts, in Mexico, Thailand and China. Thailand is the world's second largest producer of hard disc drives. A Thai worker making these drives, that end up in computers sold by companies like Dell earns around £2.50 per day. They do not receive sick pay or holiday pay (in contravention of Thai law). Sub-contracted workers were reported as looking tired and ill, and if workers become...

By Mick Duncan International Women's Day is Monday 8 March and celebrates a strike among New York women garment workers nearly 100 years ago. No Sweat will be targeting Disney stores on Saturday 6 and Monday 8 March. Every year we celebrate International Women's Day in an appropriate fashion. This year we are targeting Disney for using sweatshop labour to produce their goods. Most of the workers exploited by Disney are young women. Have a look at the No Sweat web site to find model leaflets, leaflet and poster art, masks; a cut-out cartoon sewing machine; instructions and hints, pus a picture...

By Peter Burton, Edinburgh No Sweat In the last year Edinburgh City Council has let the sweatshop manufacturer Adidas use our schools to promote their brand name. Some of us don't appreciate our children being influenced in this way and we don't like sweatshop employers, guilty of routinely paying poverty wages (sometime to children), passing themselves off as people whose first concern is a person's welfare. The Council is having a review of their policy on business sponsorship - we want to make sure they have a policy that plays its part in getting rid of sweatshops and stops these firms...

From the International Alliance in Support of Workers Rights in Iran Iranian security forces and Kerman Province's special guards brutally attacked protesting workers at the Nazkhaton's Copper Smeltery in the City of Babak, Province of Kerman on 23 January killing at least four and injuring dozens more. The attack was a bloody response to a sit-in and protest action held by the company's contract workers and their families, including many elderly women who were there to support their children. The company has decided to lay off all their contract workers, which are almost entirely residents of...

By Alan Clarke So close…- for this Labour government, with its huge majority and addiction to control-freakery, to come within five votes of being defeated on a flagship policy was indeed humiliating. The rousing of the normally comatose Parliamentary Labour Party to destroy Blair's 160-plus majority is a reflection of massive hostility to top-up fees among students, in the general public and throughout the labour movement; but in politics organisation is everything, and Blair's victory is impossible to understand in isolation from the weakness, both organisational and political, of the anti...

By Joan Trevor Elections matter. Since they romped home in the parliamentary elections in 2002 on the coat-tails of Jacques Chirac's freak presidential win, France's UMP government with their massive majority have been punching holes in the French welfare state. They have made massive cuts in pension and unemployment entitlement. They are looking at ways to cut healthcare. They have embarked on a programme of "decentralisation" in education as a way to soften it up for more local pay bargaining, and cuts in the standard of provision. They are creating new job schemes, especially for young...

by Jim Bywater If the discussion at the Chicago Social Forum (30 January) about who the left should vote for in the US presidential elections is anything to go by, there is only one thing certain - it won't be Bush. For some the elections aren't important - we need to concentrate solely on direct action - but for most, they'll vote either Democrat or Green. Soon, hopefully, the media merry-go-round primaries will be over and the Democrats will have their challenger to Bush decided. At the moment, Howard Dean and John Kerry are the most popular candidates. Dean has the backing of the SEIU, and...

In 1938 Leon Trotsky wrote about the effect on labour movement activists of Stalinism's turns in the previous decade: the Third Period of denouncing social democratic workers' organisations as worse than fascism, the Popular Fronts of class collaboration, the great purges and show trials in the USSR. "Even among the workers who had at one time risen to the first ranks", he ruefully recognised, "there are not a few tired and disillusioned ones. They will remain, at least for the next period, as bystanders. When a programme or an organisation wears out, the generation which carried it on its...

Why is the United States, with its British allies, occupying Iraq? Why did they go to war? What are the issues now? In this third of a series of articles, Colin Foster presents a view. Ever since the beginnings of the world oil industry, the Gulf has always been kept under supervision by a big power, first Britain and then the USA. In 1963 the CIA assisted the coup by which the Ba'thist party took power in Iraq. The USA saw the Ba’thists and Saddam Hussein, who became a central figure in power from 1968, as workable semi-allies. They would crush the Communist Party, which had been influential...