soas occupation challenges immigration raid with mixed results

An article by activists involved in the recent SOAS occupation covering the story of the dispute and the lessons learnt from its results

Even for those well used to the low standards and dirty tricks of private contractor ISS and the UK Border Agency (UKBA), the brutal immigration raid on cleaners at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London last month came as a shock. It sparked a protest movement and occupation which – for 48 hours at least – constituted a significant show of strength against the university management and promised to win real concessions from those directly involved in the shameful intimidation of workers who – the timing was not coincidental – had only recently won union recognition and the London living wage.

That SOAS Director Paul Webley eventually managed to get his office, the Directorate and two conference rooms back without having made any real concessions proved a disappointment for many involved in the action. As activists continue to assess ‘what went wrong’, and rue an opportunity missed, it remains to be seen whether future gains made by the ongoing campaign will vindicate the strategy of those who wanted to end the occupation early.

engineering construction strikes: days of defiance

by Gregor Gall, professor of industrial relations, University of Hertfordshire

It’s the dispute that just won’t go away. For the third time this year, thousands of engineering construction workers have gone on unofficial strike, fighting for the right to work. This time round the dispute escalated dramatically unlike before, with the mass sacking of some 647 strike workers by the two of contractors working for Total, the Lindsey refinery operator.

On June 11, some 1200 contractors at Lindsey walked out unofficially after a contractor gave notice of redundancies to 51 workers while another contractor on the same site was looking for 60 workers to fill vacancies. This broke the agreement that settled their earlier strike in February this year which compelled vacant work to be made available to those under threat from redundancy. The contractors and Total stated this was not the case.

building from below: left unity and the case of northampton sos

by Dave Spencer

See here and here for leaflets from the campaign

The SWP’s call for Left Unity for the 2010 General Election should come with a “serious health warning” attached to it.  On February 5^th 2005 the SWP used its majority to close down the Socialist Alliance, which involved a number of different Left groups and individuals.  They closed it down to establish their own, more loyal front organisation, Respect.  And we all know what happened to Respect!

At the same time the SWP helped to organise the demoralising split in the SSP (Scottish Socialist Party).  They had “a platform” inside the SSP and encouraged Tommy Sheridan to break the broad and brave alliance of the SSP.  Why? Because the SWP cannot stand rival organisations.

can the oil refinery strikers beat the industry?

An article by Gregor Gall on The Guardian site.

Click here to read Gregor’s analysis of January’s strike wave, which appeared in issue 3 of The Commune, and here to read his recent debate with Chris Kane on the current state of industrial struggle.

These are days of defiance in the engineering construction industry. The employers won’t give in and neither will the striking workers, even though the ante has been continually upped in the last week.

Total, on behalf of its contractors, refused to engage in any talks to settle the dispute while the unofficial strike at the Lindsey oil refinery continues. Last Friday, it spurned the use of the state conciliation service, Acas. It has also robustly supported its two contractors, IREM and Jacobs, who sacked their strikers (647 in all of them) and has made no play of its other seven on-site contractors who have not sacked their 500-odd strikers. For Total, this is a game of hard hardball.

twenty years after the ‘collapse of communism’: forum this thursday

The Commune’s 25th June London forum: click here for leaflet

Twenty years ago a revolutionary wave on the scale of 1848 and 1919 swept across Eastern Europe and the USSR. It brought down the state-socialist regimes which called themselves “communist”. Western capitalism declared the “collapse of communism” and some spoke of the “end of history” with a new era of liberal democracy. Instead the era of neo-liberal globalisation brought a new phase of war and recessions: in Eastern Europe the optimism of 1989 gave way to economic shock-therapy and widespread impoverishment, while in the former USSR the old elite has been replaced by the rule of exploitative oligarchs.

reinstate the lindsey oil refinery workers!

statement by the Campaign Against Immigration Controls

Following our conference today (Saturday 20th) the Campaign Against Immigration Controls (CAIC) calls for the immediate reinstatement of the workers who were sacked by Total, Jacobs and other subcontractors at the Lindsey Oil refinery in Lincolnshire last Thursday night.

We are calling a solidarity protest at the Total headquarters in Watford on Monday 22nd June, 4-6pm.

yugoslav “self government”

by Dan Jakopovich

The Yugoslav experiment is a gold mine of experiences. As it is useful to learn about the positive aspects of this experience, it is also good to learn from Yugoslav mistakes and limitations.

Professor Stipe Šuvar humorously depicted the Yugoslav experience, in accordance with its underdeveloped material and cultural reality, as a form of “shephards’ self-government”. About 75% of the Yugoslav population were peasants prior to the Second World War. A leading communist and perhaps the single most important architect of the Yugoslav system of “self-government”, Edvard Kardelj, noted that Yugoslav pre-war electricity production was 59 times below the European average.

unite ‘united left’ no-platforms victimised activist alberto durango

by Chris Kane

There was uproar at the UNITE London ‘united left’ on Thursday night when any discussion of the Mitie workers’ dispute at Willis was blocked and the sacked UNITE cleaners rep at Schroeders, Alberto Durango, was denied the opportunity to address the meeting.

Two branch officers from the Clerkenwell and St.Pancras Branch of UNITE who have supported the sacked cleaners attended the meeting – the Secretary Monica Gort and the Organiser Chris Ford, and also some lay reps. They came with Alberto a member of the UNITE Cleaners Branch Committee. They attended expecting to secure solidarity from other UNITE activists in London in widening support for the cleaners and to back calls for Asst. General Secretary Jack Dromey to reverse his withdrawal of support for the dispute. The complete opposite occurred.

SOAS occupation ends with mixed results

by Taimour Lay

The occupation at SOAS ended disappointingly on Wednesday with a victory rally but few real gains. A statement released in the afternoon admitted that the ‘concessions’ made by Director Paul Webley and the senior management were ultimately more ‘symbolic’ than real. For many of those involved throughout what was often an inspiring protest against last Friday’s despicable immigration raid – an attack which SOAS facilitated and still refuses to apologise for – the question remains: Why did the occupiers walk out when still in a position of strength?

Some members of the occupation were shocked to read the ‘victory post’ that went up on the FreeSOAScleaners blog on Wednesday afternoon, and have collectively released a counter-statement today (posted on Indymedia) to temper the triumphalism. It calls not only for the continuation and renewal of the campaign against ISS, union-busting and collaboration with the Border police, but stresses that lessons must be learned from the occupation after so much promise and negotiating strength on Monday evening was allowed to dissipate in the rush for a deal.

the fate of democracy

by Nathan Coombs

What does the declining turnout for the European Union Parliamentary elections tell us? Most superficially: voters are apathetic, ambivalent and disconnected from the European Parliament. But more generally it highlights the paradox at the heart of the political discourse of Western liberal democracies: the ever-greater symbolic – even metaphysical – weight attributed to the word democracy, in the context of declining voter turnout and disillusionment with politics as a whole.

For instance, in the United Kingdom the panic initiated by the election of two British National Party MEPs and the MP expenses scandal have exposed a deep crisis in public trust for the political institutions and a sense of legitimation crisis on the side of the political class. In response to the expenses scandal, the reaction from most people is that politicians are all corrupt, and many people polled recently were not sure that they wanted to vote for any party. At this critical point the liberal media and political class have been united in repeating that we have to ‘defend our democracy.’ The motif of democracy in danger, democracy imperilled, has driven the crisis of legitimacy into the realm of one of an acute sense of constitutional crisis, with all the major parties proposing some sort of constitutional reform and paying lip-service to the motif of ‘power to the people.’

what lies behind the crisis in iran? hopi emergency meeting 20th june

With Yassamine Mather and Moshe Machover. Followed by a fundraising social.

Sat 20th, 2pm, Caxton House,129 St. John’s Way, London (Archway).

Iranian society is convulsed by a political crisis on a scale not seen for 30 years. Masses of Iranian people have taken to the streets since the results of the rigged elections. Their outrage is justified. The levels of blatant vote-rigging on show was crazy even by the standards of Iran’s Islamic Republic regime. The final result underlined that the whole process was compromised from top to bottom:

reply to socialist workers party’s open letter to the left

Comrades,

We write in reply to your Open Letter to the Left of 9 June, on behalf of The Commune (www.thecommune.co.uk), a small, relatively new group, which stands for communism from below and workers’ self-management.  We publish a monthly paper of the same name and are mostly active in London, though we have comrades across England and Wales.

We welcome the spirit of the Open Letter, and would be interested to participate in discussions concerning left unity in general, or a conference in particular.  Of course, you will understand, we have concerns – we are sure you do too.

We want to be sure that the lessons of the Socialist Alliance and Respect have been learnt.  In particular, we want to know what has changed – and it cannot be simply this or that personality – since packing meetings with raw recruits to block vote against independents and other groups was considered an acceptable tactic during the days of the Socialist Alliance.  And we want to know what has changed since the Socialist Alliance was wound down at your behest, in favour of the Respect project.  You cannot, after all, expect those of us who were involved last time to go through such disappointment again; to be shut out, or to have a project we have built tossed aside when the leading faction finds something more interesting to do.  If your perspectives have changed, we can accept that: but we need to be convinced of it.

hands off the people of iran on ahmadinejad’s re-election

Support for the mass protests against Ahmadinejad’s re-election! But we should have no illusions that Moussavi would have been any better

Yassamine Mather, chair of Hands Off the People of Iran, assesses the highly fluid situation in Iran

It is no surprise that the highly contested results of the presidential elections in Iran have sparked unrest in Tehran and other cities across Iran. The level of cheating on display seems crazy even by the standards of Iran’s Islamic Republic regime. Clearly, the results are the final proof that confirms that the whole electoral process is deeply undemocratic and rigged from top to bottom:

report of london call centre workers’ meeting

by Jack Staunton

On Saturday evening two dozen call centre workers from around London attended a meeting to discuss how we can best organise together. Although in the UK there are now some 750,000 people working in various types of call centre (such as sales, service calls and market research), very few are unionised. Employment is often very precarious, and the high turnover of staff in many workplaces means it can be difficult to organise, even though semi-casual work on low pay, along with management behaviour and petty rules, give plenty of reasons for us to do so.

The meeting took place as an extension of the AGM of the CWU branch at the Pell and Bales charity call centre in Old Street. Workers from another Pell and Bales site, as well as CCA International (sales), IFF (market research) and Listen (charity fundraising) attended to share experiences of standing up to zealous managers and recruiting people to the union, as well as to plan ahead to co-ordinate our organising initiatives.