Solidarity 131, 24 April 2008

Workers in the housing charity Shelter are on strike again on 24-25 April against enforced cuts in pay and conditions. Previous strikes on 5 and 10 March forced Shelter bosses, who at first insisted that they would never negotiate, to put the cuts on hold and talk at ACAS. But their ACAS offer was only a one-off “compensation” payment. Shelter workers rejected the deal by 64% majority, in a 56% turnout, despite pressure from TGWU-Unite full-time officials to accept. Workers have achieved a lot. l A union has been built from a shell into a reasonably well-organised majority of Shelter staff. l...

Civil service by Workers’ Liberty PCS Members A number of Groups (sectors) in PCS are striking on 24 April alongside the teachers and lecturers. Our strike will make the news and will undoubtedly worry the powers that be; how much better if the whole of the PCS union was on strike. Of course it does not stop there. Where are Unison, GMB, Unite etc? Gordon Brown has a united and consistent policy towards public sector pay and employment, yet the union movement does not. At PCS national conference, which will happen shortly, AWL members have put forward motions calling on all the union to fight...

Last week thousands of garment workers in Bangladesh went on strike in protest at rising food prices. Factory workers earn as little as a $1 a day and have seen the price of rice increase by a third since last year. Some 30 million people in Bangladesh – nearly a quarter of the population — may be going without a daily meal. Food riots have taken place this year in Egypt, Haiti and Burkina Faso. The United Nations predicts that 33 countries in Asia and Africa face “political instability” as a result of food price rises. It says the global food bill has rise by 57% in the last year, with basic...

For the third time in 15 years Silvio Berlusconi has won a convincing victory in the Italian elections of 13-14 April. His rightwing People of Liberty party, along with his ally Umberto Bossi’s populist and racist Lega Nord (supported in wide areas of the north), has been guaranteed comfortable majorities in both houses of the Italian parliament. The Democratic Party of Walter Veltroni, heralded as the “revolutionary mould-breaker” of old-style “coalition-obsessed” Italian politics, trail nearly 10 points behind in both houses. Contrary to expectations that there would be massive abstention...

Workers at Mahalla in the Nile Delta have suffered a fresh wave of repression from Hosni Mubarak’s regime after a series of militant strikes, protests and demonstrations beginning on April 6th. The Egyptian police arrested hundreds of workers, demonstrators and even journalists reporting on the revolt, as the regime seeks to silence working class people angry at low wages and massive food price inflation which has seen bread prices go up nearly 50% in the last year. The strikes at the Mahalla textile works are dangerous for the Mubarak regime, since it is the largest factory in Egypt and his...

Numa Andrés Paredes Betancourt, a member of the National Executive Committee of the ACEU (one of Colombia’s main student union federations), visited Britain recently as part of a trip organised by Justice for Colombia, the labour movement campaign in solidarity with workers and students in Colombia. Daniel Randall spoke to him at the National Union of Students conference in Blackpool. DR: Could you tell us something about the campaigns you’re running currently? NAPB: In international terms we want people to focus on campaigning to get the UK government to stop funding the Colombian military...

On 15 April, Behrooz Karimizadeh, one of the founding activists in the Iranian socialist group Freedom and Equality-Seeking Students, paid 300,000 toman (roughly £16,000) to be released. He will need to visit several doctors in order to recover. He is under intense policy control and his telephone is monitored. We must not forget that three other Freedom and Equality-Seeking Students, Ali Kanturi, Farhad Hajmirzaee and Peyman Piran, are still in prison. The first two in particular are in a bad condition. They need solidarity to secure their release! • If you would like to help us campaign or...

Mike Sambo of the Zimbabwe International Socialist Organisation spoke to Sacha Ismail What is the latest with the election results? We have not yet heard results for the presidential poll, but meanwhile ZANU PF requested for a recount of ballots for 23 constituencies and the exercise was done over the weekend. We are still waiting for the outcome of this recount. How is the crisis developing? The political and economic crisis has been deepening at an alarming rate each day ever since the government started its chicanery around the election results. The economic situation has deteriorated so...

Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party and Zimbabwe’s Electoral Commission have withheld the results of the first round presidential elections and instigated a recount in 23 electoral areas. The recount has been further delayed. This “extra time” has been used by Zanu-PF MPs and supporters to intimidate MDC activists and voters into line before the second round. MPs and government ministers are reported to have arrived in towns and villages brandishing firearms together with armed groups of supporters. Known MDC voters have been forced into mass meetings and threatened with retribution if they do not...

May Day, the International Workers’ Day, is known as a commemoration of the Haymarket riots in Chicago on 4 May 1886. But the reason why May Day was first celebrated internationally — the struggle for the eight-hour working day — is often forgotten. The Federation of Organised Trade and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada conference in October 1884 unanimously passed a resolution calling for the eight-hour working day to be enshrined in law starting from 1 May 1886. As this date approached workers in the USA prepared a general strike to win the demand, and almost half a million struck...