video on cleaners’ dispute at npl/amey

In December 2006 the government’s National Physical Laboratory, contracted out its cleaning to Amey, a multimillion pound services provider. When they took over the contract there were 36, unionised Latin American cleaners earning £7 an hour. After an immigration raid and multiple sackings there are now 15, many of whom are on temporary contracts and only earning the minimum wage.

Julio and Pedro were sacked for trying to tell the other staff what was going on.

Contact: contact@caic.org.uk for more information and to get involved with the campaign for reinstatement.

demo in support of victimised cleaners

There is an ‘unofficial’ (so far) cleaners’ demo, tomorrow Thursday 12th February at 13:00 pm outside Willis’s building at 51 Lime Street, London EC3M

This is a result of negotiations breaking down over the reinstatement of six Unite union activists who were made redundant on the spurious grounds that they could not alter their shift hours exactly as Mitie cleaning company demanded. The dispute is detailed here.

Still doesn’t look like Unite will be supporting them. Please bring placards, banners, whistles, megaphones and anything else that makes noise.

The protest is being supported by Schroders bank cleaners.

To confirm you’re coming, text or call Alberto 07803 634 319

race, education and immigration

Saleh Mamon reports on the recent west London public meeting on Race, Education and Immigration 

On Saturday 31st January a number of progressive teachers, trade unionists, community activists and migrant organisations met at the West London Trade Union Club in Acton.

The public meeting, organised by the London Development Education Centre (Contact londec@hotmail.com) covered a wide range of themes- from individual cases, teaching strategies and politics of education. There were many contributions from the participants seeking clarification, bringing their own experience and suggesting further action. It was an excellent meeting both in terms of new ideas, sharing knowledge and campaigning for racial justice. The dialogue that the gathering sparked opened up possibilities of united action for different forms of community resistances to institutional and state racism.

16th february forum: the storm in the world economy

The last winter has seen the biggest breakdown in the world financial system since the Great Depression, and the opening-up of what promises to be a deep and prolonged recession.

Banks have collapsed. Household names from Woolworths to Wedgwood have gone to the wall. The ideological dominance of the free-marketers and neoliberals has been swept away.

And yet few are challenging the real cause of the crisis – capitalism itself. The broadsheets write acres about Karl Marx, but in most Western countries the workers’ movement is not even fit to take a punch at the ruling class.

We will be discussing the composition of the global working class today, its relation
to the economic crisis and the prospects of uprooting this system. Speakers:

Kim Moody (leading figure in the American rank-and-file trade union publication
Labor Notes)

Andrew Fisher (Left Economics Advisory Panel)

7pm, Monday 16th February, Lucas Arms, nr. King’s Cross, London

obituary: jack sprung, 1922-2009

by Dave Spencer

Jack Sprung was one of those militant shop stewards who were a feature in The Commune’s uncaptive minds series of meetings on the 1970s. He was a steward for many years at the Standard Triumph plant in Coventry, part of British Leyland. He was also a political activist, as a member of the Coventry Workers Association, a breakaway from the Communist Party.

Jack always claimed that shop stewards were a step on the way to workers’ control of the workplace. He was a fan of Mike Cooley, the initiator of the “Lucas Workers’ Corporate Plan”. The Lucas workers were threatened with the closure of their factory and worked out a plan where their skills and the machinery at Lucas could be used to build 150 socially useful products like kidney dialysis machines and a road-rail bus. They published their plan in 1976.

Unfortunately the capitalists decided that the shop stewards movement was too strong and decided to destroy it. In 1976 Jack was victimised during a bitter dispute where, according to the local paper, the workers were actually running the factory. He went to College and became a tutor in Industrial Relations throughout the West Midlands.After retiring he became the General Secretary of the British Pensioners and Trade Union Activist Association (BPTUAA). He was a supporter of Coventry Radical Network and attended our meetings right up to his final illness.

the revolution delayed: 10 years of hugo chávez’s rule

This month marks the tenth anniversary of Hugo Chávez’s coming to power in Venezuela, and ten years of the “Bolivarian revolution”. This process has included waves of state intervention in the economy and fervent rhetoric against US imperialism. But while some on the  left see this Chavista movement as the new “socialism for the 21st century”, groups such as ours have argued that it is actually more like an old-fashioned attempt at modernisation by a technocratic élite; that  increased bureaucratic power over capital is not inherently progressive;  and that the “revolution” in Venezuela allows for very little working-class control or initiative from below.

Here we present a translation of a March 2008 interview conducted by the French anarchist ‘Charles Reeve’ with two members of the El Libertario group in Caracas, the nation’s capital, which offers some stark insights into the reality of the situation. Looking at various aspects of the Venezuelan economy and living standards in the country, it argues that Chavismo and the mythology of the “Bolivarian revolution” conceal a raft of neo-liberal reforms and attacks on workers’ rights, and that we must break out of the dynamics of Chávez vs. the opposition in order to build an autonomous working-class alternative.

demonstration at worker-occupied factory in ukraine

by Chris Kane

On 7 February a demonstration was held in Kherson in Ukraine in solidarity with the workers of the engineering plant now under workers occupation. Many workers came from other factories in Kherson and activists from left organisations in Ukraine. The workers occupied the engineering plant in opposition to redundancies and elected a workers council which is now in control of the factory.

Click here for an earlier report outlining the dispute.

Send messages of support for the workers at the factory: solydarity.ksmz@gmail.com

And to the coordinating committee in support of the occupation: rabochiy_komitet@googlegroups.com

More photos below:

protest for decent housing in hackney

On Saturday 7th around sixty people marched down London’s Stoke Newington Road to Hackney Town Hall in protest at the council’s neglect of Hackney residents in temporary accommodation, who are subject to very low levels of maintenance and poor hygiene as well as expensive rent. After speeches by residents outside the Alexandra Court Hostel describing the bad conditions (as detailed below), we marched through the streets. The protest was organised by the London Coalition Against Poverty, whose appeal for the protest is reproduced at the bottom of this piece.

14th february conference: gender, race and class

Discussing and organising our fight for women’s liberation – open to all those who want to learn, think and plan for grassroots feminist activism…

Join us for workshops which identify the interconnections between oppressions and our struggles against them. Work together with other feminists to find ways to actually change the material conditions of women’s lives. Workshops include: learning from feminist history/ sex workers’ rights/ challenging domestic violence/ international solidarity/ a woman’s place is in her union?/ reproductive freedoms/ rape and asylum/ community organising/ queer and trans politics/ prison abolition/ self-defence workshop/ feminists and the capitalist crisis/ films, stalls and campaign planning.

Saturday 14 February 10.30am-6.30 pm, School of African and Oriental Studies, Thornhaugh St, Russell Square, London, WC1. Fully accessible venue. This event is free!

For more info see www.anticapitalistfeminists.co.uk: to register email anticapitalistfeminists@gmail.com

reminder: 9th february reading group meeting

The next meeting in our reading group on ‘communism from below’ takes place on Monday 9th, and the reading material is available online.

While reading the texts, we ask people to think about these questions:

– Is Parliament a neutral arbiter between classes? Does the state bureaucracy have autonomous interests of its own?
– Is state intervention in the economy in Britain today at odds with the interests of private capitalists, and is it of benefit to workers?
– To what extent is it worthwhile for the labour movement to have a parliamentary wing?

The first text is The new forms of appearance of state-capitalism by Andrew Kliman. It argues that the crisis shows that state intervention is not in contradiction to free-market ideology: pro-privatisation dogma means the state squeezes social services and yet uses huge amounts of public cash and regulation to more safely structure capitalist exploitation.

Section 18.4 of Istvan Meszaros’ Beyond Capital argues that because capital’s dominance over the working class extends throughout society, we cannot consider that capital and labour have a “level playing field” in Parliament. Rather, the parliamentary-state apparatus serves to balance the interests of competing capitalists in the interests of capitalism as a whole, and so it follows that we need to look beyond such structures in order to effect real social transformation.

The meeting is taking place from 6:30pm on Monday 9th February. Email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com to request a printed copy of the texts, register your interest and find out more details of the central London venue. Click here to download leaflet.

hundreds of polish workers join wildcat strikes

600 workers, including hundreds of Polish workers, have walked out from Langage Power Station near Plymouth in solidarity with the wildcat actions sweeping across Britain.

When five hundred site staff had failed to arrive by 10am, the small minority of other foreign labourers (themselves also mostly Polish) who had been bussed in were sent home by management, deciding it was unsafe for them to work by themselves.

Jerry Pickford, regional officer for Unite South West,  said workers had walked out in “general sympathy with what’s happening in the construction industry… all the Polish workers have walked out as well, because this is not an issue against foreign workers.

“This is an issue against foreign employers using foreign workers to stop British workers getting jobs. Once they do that they will try and undermine the terms and conditions of employment in this country.”

It would be illegal for the union to support the strike or even hold a ballot, but workers are taking action off their own backs. Today strike action also spread to the Sellafield nuclear plant, while 400 contractors at Scottish Power’s Longannet power station in Fife (along with 80 workers at an ExxonMobil plant there) and 130 at the Cockenzie Power Station extended their action until Friday.

don’t walk away from the oil refinery strikers!

by Steve Ryan

The wildcat strikes now spreading across Britain present a real challenge for the Left.

Firstly the strikes are wildcat, ignoring union bosses and to a degree the unions themselves . They are well organised and have spread very quickly.

They should not have come as a surprise. Tensions have been building for months around recession job cuts and attempts by employers to undercut terms and conditions, often through using foreign labour.

Many on the Left are arguing that we should not support the strikes. At face value this is understandable. The walkouts are being portrayed as nationalist, maybe racist. Certainly the slogans being used, whether ironic or not, are unfortunate. The BNP are undoubtedly  intervening.

‘british jobs for british workers’?

by Gregor Gall

Construction workers’ anger against the employment of foreign labourers has boiled over. The revolt that started on Wednesday this week in Lincolnshire at the Lindsey oil refinery, then spread north to other parts of Humber and Tees, and has now reach Scotland and Wales. Around 3,000 workers have walked out on unofficial strike and they have been joined by several thousand other unemployed construction workers in protests at various construction sites.

This is the first sign of a robust, collective response by workers to the economic downturn, and it is clear that this spreading solidarity and sympathy action has been driven by the membership. In a growing economy, the employment of foreign labour for workers is not necessarily a problem for existing workers, so long as the extra labour is a supplement rather than an alternative and on the same wages and conditions as those of existing workers.

demo stops IDF propaganda meeting in london, 29th january

Report and photos by Jack Staunton

On the evening of Thursday 29th January a 100-strong demonstration took place outside a building hosting a meeting  addressed by Israeli army (IDF) colonel Geva Rapp. The colonel had planned to come and advertise a pro-war book, tell stories of his military career and preach “unity among Israelis”, but anti-war activists stopped the event going ahead.

The turnout – overwhelmingly young people – was quite impressive given that the protests were organised with just a few hours’ advance notice of the meeting taking place. The IDF propaganda rally had not been publicly advertised, but a leaked circular email explained:

“London Jsocs will be hosting Colonel Geva Rapp, the head of the ground operations in Gaza (Operation Cast Lead)! This talk should be extremely interesting and valuable. However, please do not talk about this event on facebook due to security concerns and current high tension surrounding the conflict.”

True, the organisers were exaggerating somewhat the role of Geva Rapp in the war: but nonetheless succeeded in displaying their enthusiasm for the attack on the Palestinians and furthermore no doubt their “editorialising” helped attract more people to the anti-war demonstration. Some (blurry) photos and comments on the action below: