Call-out from the Cleaners’ Defence Committee
On Thursday 21st October the Cleaners Defence Committee will hold a mass meeting covering cleaners struggles in UK and Berns, at UCL. After the demonstration on Friday 22nd October there will be a social in aid of the Berns workers at LARC, and there will be 3 meetings that will include coverage of these struggles at the Anarchist Bookfair on Saturday 23rd October.
THURSDAY 21ST OCTOBER
CLEANERS DEFENCE COMMITTEE MASS MEETING
5-30 – 7PM DARWIN LECTURE THEATRE, UCL
Access to the Darwin Lecture Theatre is down Malet Place London WC1E 7JG
There will be speakers from SAC, LAWAS, RMT, the UCL London Living Wage Campaign and other cleaners’ struggles, with plenty of time for questions, discussion and action planning.
FRIDAY 22ND OCTOBER
MASS DEMONSTRATION
4pm – 6pm London& Regional HQ, 55 Baker Street London W1U 8EW, nearest tube Baker Street
London & Regional Properties owns the Berns Salonger company. Berns have a notorious record of mistreating cleaning staff. Cleaning staff work inhumane hours, sometimes up to 22 hours a day 7 days a week, sleeping on cardboard boxes in the workplace. Berns avoid responsibility for this mistreatment through the use of sub- contractors. The cleaners unions, the SAC in Sweden has been in fierce dispute with Berns since February of this year.
8pm – late SOCIAL in support of Berns Workers, LARC, 62 Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel E1 1ES, nearest tube Whitechapel
SATURDAY 23RD OCTOBER
LONDON ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR
Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, nearest tube Mile End
11am to 11.50am , 3rd Floor Engineering Building, Room 324
Solidarity support for Berns Salonger dispute
Mattias Pettersson, spokesman for SAC, will talk about the conflict and update on the situation.
Organised by: Cleaners Defence Committee, Solidarity Federation, IWW
3pm to 3.50pm , 3rd Floor Engineering Building, Room 325
Workplace struggles & solidarity with precarious workers
A number of organisations involved in these campaigns and disputes have been invited to speak and explain their approach to these struggles. Organised by: IWW
4pm to 4.50pm , 3rd Floor Engineering Building, Room 324
100 years of Swedish Syndicalism
The story of SAC (The Central Organization of Swedish Workers) & perspectives on syndicalism from the IWW (UK) & Workers Initiative (Poland). Organised by SAC, speakers: SAC Jan Abrahamsson; IWW Adam Lincoln; Workers Initiative Andrzej Kilis
Interesting. SAC represents very very few people. It is not the mainstream trade union organisation in Sweden, it originates from a splinter group from many decades ago from the main social democratic trade union organisation, LO (Landsorganisationen i Sverige) – the equivalent of TUC in the UK. It would be much more powerful if an LO-affiliated union was fighting this case or if you had invited someone from LO to your event. SAC will give you a very skewed and highly unrepresentative view, they have less than six thousand (6 000) members compared to the millions in LO. That is not to say that they should not be praised when they do good things, but we would be stronger if everyone worked within LO especially in these days of a reelected bourgeois government (for the first ever time in Sweden’s modern history).
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