Solidarity 255, 5 September 2012

650 workers at the Queensland Children's Hospital construction site have been on a community protest, stopping work at the site, since 6 August. The workers' main spokesperson is Bob Carnegie [below], a former Builders Labourers Federation [BLF] organiser invited in by the workers after courts handed down injunctions banning all union officials from the site. Click here to hear Bob explain the dispute . New interview with Bob (24 September) here New interview with Bob (11 September) here . Please send messages of support to ishmael1819@gmail.com . In Brisbane: If your organisation or yourself...

Last Friday (24 August) a teacher from south east London, a member of Workers' Liberty, woke up feeling very miserable indeed. She’d been slaving her guts out over a year and a half to make sure that her English class achieved C grades in their GCSE. This is a longer version of this article than in the printed paper. Due to Education Secretary Michael Gove that didn’t happen, most of them ostensibly failed (a D no longer guarantees you a place in further education). So, after an obligatory mope, she contacted local union executive member and suggested a demonstration outside the DFE. He...

A descendant of East African slaves and an inmate with Nelson Mandela on Robben island, Neville Alexander should best be remembered as perhaps the greatest mind thrown up by the revolutionary left in the South African struggle. Born in Cradock in what is now the Eastern Cape he became a Marxist early in life through contacts at school and university. He was influenced by Maoism in his early political life and by ideas of importing guerrilla warfare into the South Africa struggle. By the early 1960s Alexander, at the beginning of a decade of imprisonment on Robben Island, had become...

Workers' Liberty recently began compiling a series of recollections and reflections from activists who had been involved with the “third camp” left in the USA — those “unorthodox” Trotskyists who broke from the SWP USA in 1939/40 to form the Workers Party, and the tradition they built (the Independent Socialist League, and later the Independent Socialists and International Socialists). Here, we include a specially-written contribution from Dan Gallin, discussing his involvement with the third camp left and the way in which it informed his later work in the international labour movement. Dan...

Cleaners employed by the Resource Group at the prestigious London School of Economics have stopped a bosses' cuts plan that would have seen them lose up to £1,000 a year. Managers wanted to impose a unilateral reduction in hours for all cleaners with no compensation, leading to a 20% pay cut. A union campaign, supported by LSE students, through July has finally succeeded in forcing Resource bosses to back down, and the cuts threat has been withdrawn. Workers employed by Initial at the Societe Generale bank (the second largest bank in France and the eighth largest in the Eurozone) faced even...