Solidarity 407, 1 June 2016

Workers at US telecommunications giant Verizon have forced significant concessions from their bosses, after a strike that lasted more than six weeks. Around 40,000 Verizon staff are expected to return to work on Wednesday 1 June after the company reached a settlement with their unions, the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which sees the company retreat from its plans to cut staff pensions and increase outsourcing. Workers will now vote on the proposed settlement before it comes into effect. The deal, which would last for four years...

Last November, the Turkish Islamist Justice and Development (AK) party won a victory at the polls. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s thin-skinned Islamist president, and an increasingly intolerant persecutor of his many critics, had refused to accept losing the AK majority in the June general election. He ramped up the war on the Kurds in the Turkish south east and then ran on a platform of defending the security that he himself had undermined. Recently, in May, Can Dündar and Erdem Gül of the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet got five year prison sentences for writing about the Turkish security service...

Aleppo continues to be worn down by Russian airstrikes and Daesh has attempted to take areas near the Turkish border. Instability in Syria increasingly means aid routes being cut off and medical facilities evacuated and understaffed. Daesh hopes to expand their territory near the Turkish borber, where up to 100,000 civilians are trapped. They are targeting these areas after coming under sustained pressure in both the Iraqi city of Fallujah and their de facto capital Raqqa. Whilst seriously weakened in Fallujah, having possibly just 700 fighters, the group is now trying to gain territory from...

Thousands of refugees are now trapped in Greece. Recently the Greek government broke up the makeshift camp of 12,000 people at Idomeni on the Macedonian border, forcibly moving people to warehouses in Thessaloniki. Many families have been split up, people are missing. Solidarity spoke to Dashty Jamal, Secretary of the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees, who recently visited a camp on the island of Samos in search of missing Kurdish refugees. I have been looking for information about 70 missing Kurdish refugees. In May I went to the camp in Samos (an island close to Turkey). I had to...

The sell-off, or potential closure, of Tata Steel will affect not only the 14,000 current UK steel workers but also at least 110,000 former steel workers. All former workers will have their pensions reduced. From the 70s onwards, occupational and private schemes were promoted as a means to take pension out of the hands of the state and away from any argument for democratic political control. There was the added ideological benefit for capitalists — the health of the pension fund, the chase for high profits and all that goes with it, could be presented as being in the future pensioners’...

The BMA junior doctors′ council will meet on Friday 3 June to decide its response to the ″deal″ that the BMA has made with the government. I will be arguing for the council to reject the contract and to campaign for a “no” vote in the contract referendum. The proposed new ″negotiated″ contract for Junior Doctors has caused a great amount of debate and discussion. It has caused a certain amount of division. It highlights a clear demand from some to continue the fight. There are still important issues with the contract, particularly for part-time trainees, those who mainly work high intensity...

Simon Cole is not a left-winger. He is a lifelong cop, and the chief cop working on the Government's much-criticised "Prevent" programme. "Prevent" is supposed to stop young people being drawn to ideologies like Al Qaeda's, but its bureaucratic workings make it ineffective or even counterproductive. Even Cole, though, says that the Government's planned new "anti-extremism" law risks legislating "a kind of thought-police control of what people can and can not say". The planned new law would criminalise speech (rather than action) previously quite legal. Cole and others think it is unenforceable...

Sell tat online in the morning, write software in the afternoon, drive for Uber in the evening? The term "gig economy" was coined only in 2009, but now some are hailing it as the wave of a thrilling, versatile, flexible future. US economists Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger have found that the percentage in "alternative work arrangements" - contractors, on-call workers, agency temps - rose from 10.1% to 15.8% in 2015, in the USA. Their figures may underestimate, since they include only those whose main work is "alternative". There are more "gig" workers in the 55-75 age bracket than in others...

After the grim result of Labour's tagging-along with the Tories in the Scottish referendum campaign, the Labour Party decided - without much open controversy - to campaign independently for a vote for Britain to remain in the EU. Yet on 30 May, the newly-elected Labour mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, flouted that policy to join with David Cameron - who only weeks ago was smearing Khan as "terrorist-linked" - to launch a "pledge card" for the cross-party "Britain Stronger in Europe" campaign. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are doing good work, touring the country, making a distinctively labour...

To give some "left cover" to its basic migrant-bashing message, "Vote Leave" is claiming that quitting the EU would boost the NHS because "£350 million a week" currently paid in EU contributions could go to the NHS instead. But net British contributions to the EU are only about 40% of the figure which "Vote Leave" quotes . That is less than 1% of total British government spending. And the love for the NHS from the Tories and Ukip people who run "Vote Leave" is something we didn't hear from them before the referendum, and probably won't hear again. The top Brexiter Tories are in the Cabinet...