students and staff fight to save esol teaching in tower hamlets

By Alice Robson

Friday 12 June saw hundreds of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) students, staff and supporters march in East London in protest at major cuts to ESOL announced at Tower Hamlets College.

mitie cleaners petition unite to support their struggle

Update on the Mitie cleaners’ fight (next demo: 1pm, Friday 12th, HBOS, 33 Old Broad Street, London EC3)

Four cleaners sacked by cleaning contractor Mitie at City insurance giant The Willis Group handed in a cross-union and community petition to the Unite union last Friday lunchtime, asking deputy General Secretary Jack Dromey to give full support to their four month old campaign for reinstatement.

The petition has attracted the support of Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, who met with shop steward Edwin Pazmino earlier in the week. Union notables such as Jane Loftus (CWU vice-president) and Jerry Hicks (recent Left challenger to Unite co-president Derek Simpson) also featured, along with Unite’s London construction branch and Ford Visteon Enfield workers. Meanwhile the involvement of Latin American workers has attracted the support of a host of Latin American community organisations.

willis cleaners lobby transport house – friday 29th

The next action by the cleaners working at Willis Group in the City who were unfairly dismissed by cleaning contractor Mitie will take place from 1pm on Friday 29th May at the Unite union’s London HQ. The Transport House building is located on Theobalds Road near Holborn station.

During the lobby the Mitie workers handing in a petition to Unite/T&G number two Jack Dromey, demanding that the as yet unsupportive union throws its weight behind their struggle. The Mitie cleaners have been fighting for more than three months after they were sacked for protesting a move by management to force them to work full-time night shifts – yet Unite and its “Justice for Cleaners” campaign have not lifted a finger to help them.

report on ‘strangers into citizens’ demonstration

by David Broder

Today several thousand people marched from Elephant & Castle and Westminster to London’s Trafalgar Square in a demonstration calling for the regularisation of undocumented immigrants.

The organisers of the march, London Citizens, have an extremely conservative stance similar to that of Mayor Boris Johnson, commenting on their website that they have been “calling for the Government to implement a one-off regularisation measure that would allow refused asylum seekers and visa overstayers who have put down roots in Britain to become legal. Campaigners argue that strict conditions – residence of at least four years followed by a two-year “pathway” period, a clean criminal record, good English, character references, etc. – should be applied.”

However, others on the march argued that immigrants should not only be let stay because of “good behaviour” or because they are hard-working (i.e. making a business case for exploiting migrants) but rather because everyone has a right to settle where they please.

willis cleaners’ demo this friday

The next of the protests organised by the sacked Mitie cleaners who had been working at Willis Group takes place this Friday, 1st May.

These migrant workers were unfairly dismissed after protesting when they were forced to work their shifts at night rather than during the day. Their campaign has been ongoing for over three months: for more details of the case and past demos see the page here, or Jake Lagnado’s article on the dispute which appeared in issue 4 of The Commune.

The workers have put up brave and sustained resistance in an inspiring struggle made all the more difficult by the Unite union bureaucrats’ refusal to help their fight.

This week’s demo is at 11:30am at the Willis building at 51 Lime Street, London EC3M (Bank/Liverpool Street). Note the change to the usual time, which is to avoid clashing with the May Day rally beginning at 1pm at Farringdon.

man dies as police clamp down on london g20 protest: photo-report

by David Broder

Today the capital saw a mass march on the City of London, with contingents from four stations around the Square Mile – representing the four horsemen of the apocalypse threatening the system (war; climate change; job losses and the capitalist crisis; lack of housing) – converging at the Bank of England. The numbers at this demonstration, held to coincide with this week’s G20 summit hosted by Gordon Brown, were far greater than those at the SWP-organised “March on the City” and Chris Knight’s “Dancing on the grave of capitalism” event held last October at the peak of the financial meltdown.

Even the Tory Evening Standard reported that there were 4,000 people at the Bank of England, and certainly the protest’s numbers were large for a weekday. However, the demo, as well as the Climate Camp, were tightly contained by the police via a system of ‘kettles’ with 5,000 police, horses and police vehicles on hand to encircle groups of protestors. All in all there were 63 arrests: and late in the evening we heard that a man had died as the police besieged the demonstrators from all sides.

Much unlike Saturday’s turgid march organised by the otherwise lethargic Trades Union Congress and some liberal NGOs, the protests in the City of London were of an anti-capitalist character, mostly animated by anarchists. However, in the recent furore about today’s “G20 Meltdown” the media has greatly puffed up the importance of Chris Knight, the radical anthropologist suspended from his University of East London post for saying that people were so angry that bankers might be hanged from lamp-posts

Photos and a few comments on the events appear below. Besides the events described and depicted in this article, the day also saw a Stop the War rally from the US embassy to the Excel Centre.

demo for mitie cleaners, friday 3rd april

The next demo in support of the sacked Mitie cleaners will take place in the City of London on the afternoon of Friday 3rd April. It is the latest in a series of actions organised by the migrant workers, who have been kicked out of their jobs working as Mitie cleaners for the Willis insurance group after protesting at being forced to work at night-time rather than during the day.

The struggle is an excelent example of self-organisation, coming up against the resistance of the Unite union bureaucracy and their “Justice for Cleaners” campaign, which seems more a means of recruiting members and taking dues for the union coffers than it does a way of organising successful struggles. As Alberto Einstein Durango – a cleaner activist working at Schroders bank who has been central to the Mitie/Willis campaign – explained at The Commune’s forum on Monday night, the workers will fight based on their own strength and own collective-decision making, with or without the Unite “organisers”.

The demo starts at 1pm outside the Willis building at 51 Lime Street, London EC3M (Bank/Liverpool Street). For more info on the dispute and reports on recent actions, see the page here.

text of leaflet for 28th march ‘put people first’ demo

The New Labour minister Ed Balls has described the current downturn as the greatest crisis of capitalism “for over a hundred years”, and wage-freezes and mass-lay-offs are biting hard. Unemployment has now surpassed two million, February seeing a further 138,000 people forced onto the dole as a result of the biggest jobs cull since 1971.

The supposedly all-powerful market, whose authority ‘could not’ be challenged, is laid bare, as a fraud: the emperor has no clothes. The corporate press now openly mocks the free-marketeer ideology which was so central to the ruling class’s discourse only a couple of years ago. Presidents and prime ministers, too, say they are breaking with the ‘old ways’ of neo-liberalism: Gordon Brown even told the European Parliament on Tuesday 24th March:

“The problem of unbridled free markets in an unsupervised market place is that they can reduce all relationships to transactions, all motivations to self-interest, all sense of value to consumer choice and all sense of worth to a price tag.”

solidarity, power, direction: lessons of france’s 19th march strike

Pete Jones reports from Paris on the 19th March strike day

Three hundred and fifty thousand people (according to organisers) marched on Paris on Thursday March 19th to vent their frustration at Nicolas Sarkozy’s mismanagement of and complicity in the current economic malaise. Paris factory workers also used the day to picket their workplaces, hoping to put further pressure on the government following a month of factory closures thanks to industrial action.

The march from République to Nation in the unseasonably warm sunshine was very pleasant but its final relevance is up for debate. In contrast, the day’s demonstrations finished with limited but significant rioting at Place de la Nation. Following a series of seemingly arbitrary arrests around five or six hundred youths confronted police chanting ‘Release our comrades!’ and throwing bottles and metal grills. The police responded by firing tear gas to clear the packed Place, eventually arresting around 300 people of whom just 49 will be charged.

report of demo for mitie/willis cleaners in city of london

Defiant City cleaners stepped up their protest against victimisation yesterday with another noisy demonstration outside the plush offices of a multi-national insurance firm.

The four union activists were recently sacked from their jobs by cleaning privateer Mitie after organising a union and winning the London Living Wage at the Willis building in the heart of London’s financial district as part of Unite union’s Justice for Cleaners campaign.

The protest is the latest in a series of demonstrations against the treatment by the cleaning contractor and was joined by workers who clean other financial towers in the Square Mile.

mitie cleaners’ demo in city of london, friday 20th march

This Friday 20th March at 13.00 hours, Latino and African cleaners employed by Mitie at global insurance brokers the Willis Group will be demonstrating outside the Willis Building, 51 Lime Street EC3 (tube: Liverpool Street or Bank).

They were made redundant because they could not change their hours as the company had demanded. Their colleagues were forced to switch from a part-time evening to full-time nocturnal shift, or resigned. Cleaning companies have been trying to enforce this change in a number of key locations in London. Typically it seems to happen just as they win the Living Wage, and key activists seem to suffer.

In this case it is the shop steward Edwin Pazmiro and three colleagues. The company’s latest tactic was a legal scare letter demanding they stop the protests. It hasn’t worked. Please bring anything visible (banners etc) and anything noisy!

students occupy for gaza: activism goes back to university

Taimour Lay looks at the recent wave of university occupations across Britain in protest at the Israeli attack on Gaza

When students at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London shut down an on-campus MoD exhibition on January 13, the one-day occupation was seen as both a qualified success and a missed opportunity. But with the atrocities committed in Gaza creating a sense of outrage and urgency among thousands of people, what SOAS activists failed to carry through, other students resolved to achieve.

Two days later the LSE’s Old Theatre was under occupation and a day later Essex University followed. The major ground and air offensive, Operation Cast Lead, ‘ended’ on January 18 but from January 20-22, the second wave of occupations in solidarity with Gaza had begun in earnest: Kings College London, Birmingham, Sussex, Warwick, the London College of Communication, Manchester Met, Oxford, Leeds and Cambridge were all under occupation, communicating formally and informally, sharing tactics, drawing up broadly similar demands and settling in for the long haul. The immediate context of Israeli military aggression had broadened into a critique of the education system’s financial links with Israel and the increasing commercialisation of all aspects of university life. Success in one place emboldened the rest; clampdowns by the authorities generated a discontent that may keep growing.

photo-report of protest against welfare reform bill

Today a group of protesters staged a demonstration inside a Government building as part of a Week of Action in opposition to controversial welfare reforms.

Dozens of activists stormed into a Department for Work and Pensions building in Westminster, shouting slogans and saying they were going to occupy the offices.

The protesters, from groups including Feminist Fightback and anti-poverty organisations, were dressed as bankers. They described the Government’s planned legislation as the “welfare abolition Bill” and claimed the measures would virtually abolish welfare for single parents and disabled people.

One of the protesters, Anne-Marie O’Reilly, from Feminist Fightback and London Coalition Against Poverty, said: “Everyone knows that the Government’s welfare Bill was designed by ex-banker David Freud.

“Even if it weren’t for the banks’ track records, the fact that he has recently defected to the Tories should make it clear this Bill needs to be thrown out.  They will throw us out of the building today, but we think it’s time they really throw the bankers and their interests out of Whitehall and stop penalising poor people, disabled people and single mothers.”

Another activist, Alice Robson, said: “The Government is bailing out the banks and giving them bonuses whilst cutting welfare benefits for the poor.  This Bill does not make sense – the Government should be targeting the rich not the poor to pay for their crisis.”

On this website recently we have published three articles looking at changes in the welfare system: Joe Thorne’s overview of the Welfare Reform Bill and this week’s Week of Action, Christine Hulme on Jobcentre privatisation and Chris Grover on unemployment under Brown and the recession.

See below for photos of today’s action.

demo for reinstatement of mitie cleaners

On Thursday 5th was the latest in a series of protests in support of cleaners unfairly dismissed by Mitie. The sackings came when the workers objected to being forced to work their full-time shifts at night.

Despite management threats and the weak stance taken by the Unite union, the demo, outside the City of London offices of the insurance broker Willis, attracted over thirty people. This was an improvement on the previous actions on Tuesdays and Thursdays over the last couple of weeks. The noisy protest used chants such as “Mitie, shame on you!” and “The workers, united, will never be defeated” (in English and Spanish).

Some photos are posted below. For pictures, reports and a video of previous actions, see here.