who benefits from cuts?

by Adam Ford

European governments have been announcing public spending cuts almost daily since they agreed a €750 billion ‘rescue package’ for the euro currency a fortnight back. Greece (€30 billion), Spain (€80 billion), Italy (£24 billion) and Portugal (£2 billion), were this week joined by the new UK government, which slashed £6 billion with immediate effect, and promised the financial markets much, much more.

In their statement, Conservative Chancellor George Osbourne and Liberal Democrat Treasury secretary David Laws (who would later be forced to resign following expenses revelations) declared there would be a civil service “recruitment freeze”, along with substantial losses for regional and university budgets. The Transport department will lose £683 million, meaning a drastic scaling back of badly needed road maintenance seems inevitable.

migrant cleaners and organising solidarity

by David Broder

The recession has seen increasing anti-immigration sentiment in British society, but also many in the labour movement advocating ‘keeping our heads down’ until the economy picks up – these two factors, combined with the inefficacy of Justice for Cleaners and the concomitant attacks on migrant cleaners’ conditions, sharply pose the need for better organisation.

After the partial success of the dispute at Swiss bank UBS in the City of London, it is worth considering the way ahead for the migrant cleaners’ campaign, which in its various forms has challenged border controls, casualisation as well as the established unions. For more background see this article on Latin American cleaners in the UNITE union and this report on the UBS campaign.

council communism and anarcho-syndicalism: 30th may bristol reading group

The next Bristol reading group session will be on Sunday 30th May at 6pm in Café Kino on Ninetree Hill, Stokes Croft, Bristol.

The session will discuss views of council communism and anarcho-syndicalism. Suggested background reading below. All welcome: email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com for more info.

updates on 19th june ‘beyond resistance’ summer school

The Commune’s June 19th summer school ‘Beyond Resistance’ is now just three weeks away, and we are finalising details for the day’s workshops. Below appear the blurbs for three of the planned sessions, as well as a timetable for the whole event.

The event takes place from 11am-6pm on Sat 19th June at 96-100 Clifton St, London EC2. All welcome. Download double-sided A5 leaflet or A3 poster. Click here to buy ticket – pay £5 if waged or £3 for concessions, and click here for map of venue. More details shortly.

greece solidarity meeting in london

by Sharon Borthwick

Here’s an attempt to give a brief overview of Wednesday’s event at Conway Hall: Can’t pay, Won’t pay: Solidarity with Greece organised by Counterfire: an SWP offshoot, with Lindsey German, John Rees and Andrew Burgin at the helm.

We can only hope that left unity over the coming cuts, expressed at the meeting will be upheld considering various SWPist cock-ups of the past. But this was actually a very positive meeting and there were some great, rousing speeches.

defend hackney nurseries! fun day 30th may

From Feminist Fightback

Join us and Friends of Hackney Nurseries on Sunday 30th May, 11am-2pm at London Fields for fun, games and organising to save childcare provision!

At the end of April at least 8 community nurseries in Hackney were informed of immediate cuts in their budget of up to 60%, or about £50,000. This will mean the serious threat of nursery closures, and hardship and distress for parents, workers and children. The Learning Trust and Hackney Council are denying that there is a programme of cuts to nursery provision – so we want to know: Where has the money gone? How can nurseries keep running with such drastic cuts? Why are all the politicians and officers passing the buck and not answering our questions?

dutch cleaners win nine week strike

Dutch cleaners campaigned for six months for higher wages and went on strike for another nine weeks. It was the longest strike since 1933 and they won, ‘bread and roses’.

By Willem Dekker, organizer of the cleaners’ union

a six-day sit-in at Utrecht station

The cleaning sector was fully privatized at the end of the nineties. Since then competition has been driving wages down and work pressure up. In the summer of 2009 cleaners, of whom most come from a migrant background, launched a campaign for higher wages, better working conditions and more respect from management. In times of austerity and a government drive for a wage freeze for public workers, this campaign raised the stakes of industrial conflict. If the cleaners could get a raise – why couldn’t other workers? The campaign turned into a model for multicultural resistance against the cut-backs.

huge challenges for PCS: conference report

by Steve Ryan

Delegates from all branches of PCS met in Brighton last week for the Annual Delegate Conference.

Buoyed by the court decision that the changes to the Civil Service Compensation Scheme were unlawful, the spirit was positive.

the global commune, edinburgh, saturday 22nd may

Following the success of January’s Global Commune day school (see here) we are holding a further day of discussions in Edinburgh on 22nd May.

There will be workshops on ‘After the election – what next?’; ‘Internationalism from below – a communist perspective’; and ‘How do communists organise?’

building alliances against cuts and privatisation of public services

by Gregor Gall

There is an old anarchist saying: ‘No matter who you vote for, the government still gets in’. The result of the 2010 general election puts a new complexion on this old saying for no matter which of the mainstream parties was elected to government, the result would lead to the same outcome in regard of cuts in public services and further privatisation of these.

In the election, three parties only differed on when, where and how much on these two central issues. The elephant in the room of the 2010 election was neo-liberalism. It was never discussed, being the unspoken and unacknowledged baseline upon which all the three parties operated.

solidarity with juan carlos piedra!

People who support migrant cleaners’ struggles in London may well know of Juan Carlos Piedra, an Ecuadorian worker victimised at University College London because of his trade union activism. He has also been active in the solidarity efforts behind UBS bank cleaners in the City of London.

Juan Carlos has been called to an interim hearing for his Employment Tribunal with LCC Services on Tuesday 25th May from 10 am. It is to be held in East London Tribunal Service, 2nd Floor Anchorage House, 2 Clove Crescent, East India Dock, London, E14 2BE. Nearest station is East India Quay DLR. He  is asking as many people as can come to be there from 9.30 in a show of support and solidarity. A strong presence can help sway the decision made.

rank and file organising: it could happen here too

by Sheila Cohen

April 2010 saw the biggest conference ever for Labor Notes, the US-based rank and file trade union newsletter and network which celebrated its 30th birthday last year. Over 1200 activists gathered in the (unionised) hotel just outside Detroit where corporate blandness was set off by the T-shirted exuberance of American workers not shy of yelling a slogan or two – especially when workers on strike against a non-unionised branch of the same hotel chain came forward to tell a familiar story of rank injustice and betrayal.

It’s impossible to take in everything at a Labor Notes conference (especially if you’re jet-lagged) but I followed my main interests in attending a chain of workshops addressed to union organising and membership participation (or lack of it). The first of these – “Innovative Organising Strategies” – was if anything the most inspiring, featuring the crucial dynamics of organising a union “before the union came along”, as some US activists have put it.

communists must organise as communists

by Chris Ford

The coalition government has been heralded as the start of a ‘new politics’ and a ‘new era of pluralism’. But for many the buzzwords offer little consolation, there is dread at the return of the Conservatives and resentment amongst those who voted Liberal-Democrat to stop them, some thinking they were ‘to the left of Labour’.

Far from marking a new beginning the election and the coalition has been a demonstration of deception, a deception that there is a ‘national interest’, a deception of political-pluralism and the reality of Parliamentary democracy.

gains from UBS cleaners’ dispute

by Chris Kane

The cleaners’ struggle at Swiss bank UBS has extracted some significant concessions from the bosses, thanks to a determined campaign.

As reported in previous issues of The Commune, in February UBS switched to cut-price contractor Lancaster, effectively meaning a 10.75% pay cut for cleaning staff in its City of London offices. When the immigrant workforce protested this injustice, their elected shop steward Alberto Durango was fired by Lancaster in a blatant act of victimisation.