Solidarity 162, 5 November 2009

Since 12 October, a new wave of strikes by around 4,000 undocumented migrant workers (sans-papiers, “without papers”) has swept France. At the time of writing, over 40 workplaces have been occupied by the workers, who are demanding “regularisation” (legal status), employment rights, and changes in immigration law to make life easier for France's hyper-exploited immigrant workforce. The French labour movement has learnt its lessons from previous sans-papier strikes in May 2008 (see Solidarity 3/133), and has rallied to support them. The movement is using a variety of imaginative tactics to beat...

Badiaga, Camara, Doukouré, Dramé, Gakou, Kouyaté, Siby, Sylla are delegates from the Seni strikers, industrial cleaners at Kremlin-Bicêtre (Val-de-Marne). They are members of the CGT. How do you explaing this movement? The struggle was started by those who are currently contracted with Seni, but we have among us comrades who were employed in the past for short contracts. On our picket line, there are some comrades who are not presently employed by Seni. Some have been sacked, some as long as five years ago. Some of us are in the process of being regularised. The movement is demanding a general...

The example of the 19th District in Paris. The new wave of strikes and occupations has sparked a very strong mobilisation around the striking workplaces in the 19th district: TFN, a cleaning company, and Suburbaine, which is building tram-lines. Militants from political organisations (NPA, Alternative Libertaire, Parti de gauche), unions (CGT, Solidaires, CNT), associations (MRAP, an anti-racist group and the League for the Rights of Man) and community groups (Quartier solidaire Belleville), engaged in the struggle for the regularisation of all undocumented migrants, have regrouped under a...

Bob Sutton reports on the Hands Off My Workmate conference. On 17 October around 140 activists and trade unionists met in London for the first “Hands Off my Workmate” conference — a launch pad for a wider trade-union based campaign to defend migrant workers against checks and raids in the workplace. The event, held at the School of African and Oriental Studies, had been set up by members of the Socialist Workers’ Party through SOAS Unison and UCU branches. In June this year, nine cleaners working at the university were grabbed in a brutal dawn raid by immigration services armed in full riot...

Redmond O’Neill, a leader of the Socialist Action group, has died aged 55 of cancer. Because O’Neill was an official in Ken Livingstone’s London mayoral administration, his death has received wide attention, for instance in the Guardian. Ken Livingstone’s obituary describes him as a “lifelong revolutionary socialist and leading figure on the left for three decades”. In fact, for many years it has been an abuse of language to call O’Neill and his organisation socialist, or even really part of the left. It was not just their grim support for Stalinist and other “progressive” authoritarian...

Very many people are revolted at the state of the world. Whether it be in reaction to war, racism, exploitation, oppression or the sickening displays of meanness and hypocrisy that effuse from the bowels of government, we have all experienced that visceral urge to tear the head off this system and those who marshal it. We feel this way every day. But unlike those who either sink into despair or comfort themselves with a purely academic understanding of capitalism and its degradations, we — the socialists, revolutionaries, Marxists — aim to change things. We agitate, educate and organise to...

At the end of October the council offered a “deal” with a shallower pay cut — a cut of hundreds of pounds a year instead of thousands of pounds per worker — and a massive workload increase. In a mass meeting called by the Unison and the GMB unions, workers overwhelmingly rejected this offer. The council is continuing to use agency staff and moonlighting workers from other authorities to try to break the workers’ resolve. And the Lib-Dem/Tory administration it has stepped up its offensive against the striking workers by recruiting permanent un-unionised workers on £4,000 less a year than the...

On Saturday 31 October, “Islam4UK” — a hardline Islamist organisation descended from Al-Muhajiroun — was due to hold a demonstration through central London in which it would demand the unilateral imposition of religious Sharia law on the UK. The far-right English Defence League and the bourgeois-liberal British Muslims for Secular Democracy both planned counter-demonstrations. In opposition to the politics of both Islamic fundamentalism and English nationalism, Workers’ Liberty worked with Iraqi and Iranian socialists to organise another mobilisation, to put forward a positive programme of...

Nasrin Parvaz is a member of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran (Hekmatist), one of the organisations involved in the protest against March4Sharia and the EDL. She spoke to Solidarity. Q: Is the growth of Islamism within Britain’s Muslim communities a serious threat? NP: If the Islamists see no resistance, they'll promote themselves. Official government policy is essentially anti-integration; they prefer us to be separated into our own distinct “communities”. That's what's helping minorities like Islam4UK gain power. Government support for the religious establishment — for building mosques or...