Solidarity 217, 21 September 2011

The four workers killed at Gleison Colliery in the Swansea Valley worked at a small “drift” mine, one of very few left in Wales. It appears that blasting at the mine caused catastrophic flooding and a roof fall, trapping those working nearest the coal face. Most of us thought this kind of story was in the Britain of the past. It is not, and it is one of our jobs as socialists and trade unionists to remind people of the toll of injuries and death in workplaces today. 171 workers died in workplace accidents in the period from May 2010 to April 2011. The figure was up on the previous year . On...

Unions have set 30 November as the date for another one-day strike against pension cuts. The teaching unions NUT, ATL, and UCU, and the civil service union PCS, have still-valid mandates for action from ballots earlier this year. Unions such as Unison, GMB, the Fire Brigades Union, and teachers’ union NASUWT are now balloting. It is important that the ballots be for discontinuous action (rather than for a single day’s strike); and activists should demand that unions name a date for a further strike now rather than waiting until after the November action. Workers must also start putting in...

Katy Clark, Labour MP for North Ayrshire and Arran, spoke to Solidarity in the run-up to Labour Party conference which opens in Liverpool on 25 September. The Labour Party has had 70,000 new members join since May 2010, but it normally takes individuals quite a long time to get through the structures and gain influence, especially in today’s Labour Party. I know a number of people who joined the Labour Party last year in a surge of enthusiasm, but it’s quite difficult for new members to become delegates to conference. In fact, I suspect most new members haven’t really got that involved. The...

Many people in the Israeli protest movement, including many key organisers, are left-wing on the Palestinian issue. But the movement as a movement took a decision very early on not to touch the question of the occupation, the settlements and so on, despite the vast money spend on the army, the settlements, the Wall. A lot of left-wingers think they will inevitably move in that direction. I’m not so sure. It’s not that people don’t know there’s a link, it’s that they don’t want to make it, because they’re afraid of losing a big part of their support. And they would lose a lot of support —...

American dock workers have taken militant unofficial action in a battle with port operator EGT Development over union busting. The company recently opened a $200 million grain terminal in Longview, Washington, which it sought to run with non-union labour despite a contractual requirement to do so. Following initial protests by the International Longshore Workers’ Union (ILWU), EGT signed a recognition agreement with a different union. Every other West Coast grain terminal is staffed by ILWU members, making EGT’s actions a direct attack on the union which ILWU activists say is merely a...

By Vicki Morris Barnet Unison local government branch held a successful strike on Tuesday 13 September. They had balloted 313 members in the services first up for privatisation as part of the “One Barnet Programme” (OBP), which will see the bulk of council services delivered by private sector companies. If the plan goes ahead, most of the current council employees will be transferred to private sector employment. Unison’s strike over “the identity of the employer” was due to last half a day from 1pm, but Tory-run Barnet council locked out the striking workers from the morning, making it a day...

By Pat Yarker On Sunday 18 September BBC Radio 4 begins a week-long dramatisation of Soviet writer Vasily Grossman’s epic novel ‘Life and Fate’, set during the battle of Stalingrad. Grossman wrote his panoramic text in the 1950s and presented it for publication during Khrushchev’s cultural thaw in 1960. He was told by the Politburo his novel was so dangerous it could not be published for at least two centuries. All copies, drafts, notes and materials were taken from him. Grossman was born in the Ukraine in 1905 to a family of well-off assimilated Jews. He studied chemistry at Moscow State...