Solidarity 092, 27 April 2006

Trust the BBC to come up with a particularly absurd example of the privatisation craze . Many jobs in the corporation’s human resources department are being “outsourced” to notoriously incompetent and anti-worker contractor Capita. But staff who are worried about this can contact a special helpline set up by BBC bosses, for the good of their mental health (isn’t that kind?) A couple of problems with this, apart from the obvious. Firstly, workers worried about Capita will have to be referred to the help line by their (Capita) managers. Secondly, the helpline has itself been “outsourced” and...

Cathy Nugent reviews “Deportation is Freedom, the Orwellian World of Immigration Controls” by Steve Cohen (Jessica Kingsley) This is an extended, angry, rational and forceful polemic against current, past and future immigration control. It is a radical argument against all immigration control. A point worth reiterating as many who are on the left admit to supporting some border restrictions. (George Galloway has in the recent past endorsed a “points system” for immigration. Respect opposes the worse excesses of current policy, yet does not say it opposes all immigration control.). Those on the...

Darren Bedford reviews The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, the latest album from Mike Skinner aka The Streets. “Honesty” is fast becoming something of a buzz-word when it comes to describing British music. No-one can get over Hard-Fi’s “honesty” about working-class life in suburban London. Everyone’s head-over-heels with Arctic Monkey’s “honest” descriptions of rowdy Friday nights out in Sheffield. Skinnyman’s “honesty” about the realities of council-estate living has been the toast of the British hip-hop scene for much of the past few years. But of the current generation of innovative...

As Leon Trotsky once wrote, the revolutionary party is the memory of the working class. It is, it must be, also the memory of the Marxist movement itself. Documents, newspapers, reminiscences, carbon copies are the repositories of this memory. The AWL has over the years accumulated a considerable amount of such material, and not only of our own tendency, over the last four decades. We have decided to organise and augment this material, and to make it available to scholars of the movement and others. We are setting up a Phoenix Marxist and Labour Movement Archive. We appeal to comrades and...

From the proposals about trade-union activity to be discussed at the AWL conference this weekend, 29-30 April: AWLers in the trade unions have to be able to demonstrate that they have the answers to the basic industrial issues confronting union members. But it is vital that those who we are working with do not see us as the best trade unionists but as the best socialists who in consequence are the best trade unionists. There is no other way of persuading someone to make the move from working with us as a good trade unionist to joining us as a socialist. This requires having a consistent, clear...

On 1 May hundreds of thousands (and probably more) US immigrant workers will take to the streets to protest against the immigration reform. The US government was to crack down on migrant labour — despite the capitalist reliance on such labour. One argument used by bourgeois politicians is that migrant labour drives down the wages of US born workers. A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows a slightly different picture. There is generalised low pay in the US but also a growing gap in wages between immigrant and US-born workers. This may also be a factor behind the...