Solidarity 057, 2 September 2004

Puma profits from the Olympics From a new report by the US National Labor Committee and China Labour Watch Puma sponsors Olympic teams and star athletes around the world. But it is unlikely that even these finely conditioned athletes could keep pace with Puma’s workers in China, forced to work up to 16.5 hours a day, from 7:30 a.m. to midnight, six or seven days a week, for wages of just 31 cents an hour. How many athletes could endure the constant production line speed-ups, the relentless numbing repetitive motions, being yelled and screamed at, humiliated, only to return home exhausted to a...

Unions at Wal-Mart! After years of dogged attempts to organise unions in Wal-Mart, workers in Canada are starting to make some gains at this, the world’s largest retailer. In August, the Quebec Labour Relations Board certified a union at the Wal-Mart store in Jonquière, Quebec after more than half of its 145 workers signed cards to become members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW). A mandatory contract will soon have to be agreed — and that would create the first union branch at Wal-Mart anywhere in North America. Workers at a Wal-Mart store in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, are...

Help us raise £30,000! What a dull summer it’s been. And there’s been nothing coming into the kitty. Were it not for the money raised by comrades working at Reading Festival, it would have been a complete washout. We are looking forward to an autumn of renewed political activity and a drive on increasing public sales of Solidarity. Why not ask for a “solidarity price” for this paper — £1 — even that little extra will help us! Help us by… • Giving a donation. Can you afford to give us a day’s wages? • Taking out a standing order. A regular contribution of £5 or £20 or more a month will ensure...

Jim Byagua joined the 300,000 marching through New York against Bush on the weekend before the Republican Party National Convention New York City this week hosted the Republican National Convention — the pre-election party gathering where right-wing celebrities such as Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of the city and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the terminator, issue media sound bites amidst ecstatic placard-waving delegates and thousands of balloons. In response, approximately 300,000 people took part in the United for Peace and Justice march on Sunday 29 August whose main slogan was “No to the...

The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) have scoured the Labour Party rule book and found a way to force a leadership contest in the Labour Party. A way, that is, potentially, to get rid of Tony Blair as leader of the Labour Party! In CLPD’s bulletin No.67, July 2004, they set out the rules to use. In summary: “Conference has the power to initiate a leadership election by invoking Section 4B.2d (ii) of the National Rules of the Labour Party… “A CLP or an affiliated organisation can use a contemporary or an emergency motion to ask Conference to activate the above provision. …[relevant...

By Maria Exall At this year’s TUC Conference, Brighton, from 13 September, there are several motions from a variety of unions on the issue of employment rights. As in previous years these include many good positive demands, as well as the call for the abolition of anti union laws. This year, however, the unbiased observer may well be confused as to the intentions of those voting for these motions. The trade union movement, led by the Big Four unions, will be supporting policies in September that they failed to support in July. At the Labour Party National Policy Forum at the end of July the...

By Paul Hampton Hugo Chávez comfortably won the referendum on his presidency in Venezuela last month, strengthening his hold on power until the next presidential election in 2006. Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) announced that nearly five million (59%) voted “no” to a recall presidential election and to keep Chávez in power in the referendum on 15 August. The “yes” option obtained three and a half million votes, just under 41%. More than 400 international observers went to Venezuela to monitor the elections. Both the Carter Center and the Organization of American States (OAS)...

The union movement has a marathon to run, but is performing at the level of an egg and spoon race. At least the unions, for so long stuck fast in a swamp of partnership, have now started to move. In the last year or so, changes at the top of the unions and pressure from below have resulted in the TGWU, Amicus, GMB and Unison moving to get concessions from Blair. The TGWU has announced a new campaign to build up membership. In Solidarity 3/56, we argued that the tiny concessions from Blair to the big four unions can not justify the “concordat” which they signed in July, for the period up to the...

The Palestinians and Israel face an Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who has been grimly successful in his brutal policy over the last year. The Palestinians have been forced back onto a prisoners' hunger strike, with its demands limited to better prison conditions. The Israeli left is on the defensive. The left internationally must break with futile revenge fantasies about sweeping away Israeli power "from the river to the sea", and re-focus on the only way forward that can allow for working-class unity across the divides: Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, and the right...

Unite the socialists for the general election! Some union leaders are claiming that they have won significant concessions from Blair and reshaped New Labour's manifesto for 2005. But even they cannot seriously deny that John Cridland of the bosses' federation, the CBI, was basically right when he said that New Labour's deal with the unions at its 23-25 July Policy Forum "left things roughly where they were". Tony Woodley of the TGWU concedes that "the argument between new Labour, with its pro-business and warlike tendencies, and the left will continue" and that "the argument about the nature...