Solidarity 092, 27 April 2006

NUS leaders attack lecturers’ campaign

By Daniel Randall, NATIONAL UNION OF STUDENTS (NUS) executive (personal capacity) In a recent press release, NUS has “condemned” the decision by the lecturers’ union AUT to refuse to set exams (as part of their pay dispute). The student organisation has vowed to “up the pressure” to “demand” that AUT back down. Leading NUS officers such as National President Kat Fletcher have said that they believe the “immediate priority” is to demand that the AUT sets exams. A letter signed by sabbatical officers from 20 of NUS’s member unions recently appeared in the Independent. Admirably, pro-strike...

Sign this petition!

ENS is calling for signatories to the following statement. You can add your name by emailing volsunga@gmail.com Whilst it is unfortunate if students’ degrees are disrupted, we cannot allow university bosses to divide us by playing the interests of students off against the interests of workers on campus. A quality Higher Education sector staffed by well-motivated and well-paid workers is in all our interests. That means we have to support every struggle towards it, even if that means facing some disruption. NUS’s demands on the AUT to call off aspects of their assessment boycott will have the...

Italy’s economic disaster

Italy has the lowest employment rate of the big western European countries: 58% of the working-age population is in work, compared to 72% in Britain. According to the Economist Italy would need another five million jobs just to match Britain’s employment rate, but Italian industry is being undercut in the global market by manufacturers in lower-wage economies such as China. The proportion of workers in the black economy has risen from 12.9% in 2004 to 14.2% in 2005. In the five years of Berlusconi’s government, the rich in Italy got richer and the poor poorer. While the income of the self...

The election in numbers

The turn-out was very high – 83.6%, up from 81.4% last time round. L’Unione’s votes break down as follows: Senate: Left Democrats (DS) 17.5% Margherita 10.7% Rifondazione 7.4% Rosa nel Pugno 2.5% Comunisti Italiani & Greens 4.2% Italy of Values 2.9% Others in L’Unione 3.5% Camera: Olive Tree (Left Democrats plus Margherita) 31.3% Rifondazione Comunista 5.8% Rosa nel pugno 2.6% Comunisti Italiani 2.3% Greens 2.1% Others in L’Unione 2.9% Left Democrats: These used to be part of the CP but are now social democrats. Some of the former Socialist Party have ended up here. Margherita: Used to be...

Prodi says: don’t march

This peace demonstration was held on Saturday 18 March, just three weeks before the election. The majority of L’Unione — despite its policy to withdraw troops from Iraq — refused to support it. They also succeeded in convincing Italy’s biggest trade union federation, the CGIL, not to give its official backing. Prodi and his supporters said they feared the demonstration would end in violence: an anti-fascist mobilisation in Milan a week earlier had ended in street-fighting between anarchists and the police. In the event there was no such trouble, nor was there ever likely to have been. The...

Italy’s left and the Blairites

By Cath Fletcher The centre-left has scraped into power in Italy. Romano Prodi’s coalition, L’Unione, won April’s election by the barest of margins, beating Silvio Berlusconi’s governing coalition by 25,000 votes to win a majority in the Camera dei Deputati (lower house). Its Senate majority of one came only thanks to a quirk of the electoral system: there it got a smaller share of the popular vote than the centre-right. This was no 1997 in Britain, with a wave of public enthusiasm for kicking out the right wing. At times on election night, as the projections swung against the left, it felt...

France’s Muslims are no monolith

By Colin Foster According to a recent research report from an international think-tank, what’s happening in France’s Muslim minority is a decline of political Islam, in fact a general depoliticisation, and a withering of communalism in favour of individualism. On closer reading, the report’s contradiction of all first impressions and established wisdom is not quite so flat. Nonetheless, the report does present a powerful argument that things are not as they appear at first sight. There has been a “re-Islamisation” of France’s Muslims in the sense of increased mosque-going and so on, but it is...

Execution League

Amnesty International has recently published its “league table” of rates of execution in countries around the world. 80% of executions worldwide were carried out by just one country. There are no prizes for guessing which... Yes, it’s China. 1700 people were murdered by the Chinese state last year. The other big offenders were Iran, Saudi Arabia and the US; those countries were responsible for 14% of executions. Gay and human rights activist Brett Lock (brettlock.blogspot.com) has done a useful analysis of the figures. He worked out at the rate of executions in each country relative to the...

The power in the union?

The most obvious and entrenched pay gap under capitalism is that between men and women. “Women’s work” is everywhere less well paid, for a variety of reasons. Unionising and fighting for women’s rights as workers is a big part of the solution to that problem. That is why it is heartening to see in the UK more and more women joining their union. (Although it is less good to see that while women’s rate of unionisation is increasing, male unionisation is declining.) In autumn 2005 the rate of union membership (union density) among all workers was 26.2 per cent. This is a slight increase from 26.0...

Unhappy Meals

>“McDonald’s is in some ways a toy company, not a food company,” says one retired fast food executive. In fact, in its desperation to sell its unhealthy products to small children, McDonald’s sells (or “gives away” with food) more than 1,500 million toys a year, worldwide. McDonald’s “Happy Meal” toys are manufactured in sweatshops in China and other developing countries. Here, the children don’t eat “Happy Meals”, they work long hours for less than the price of a “Happy Meal” per day. In 2000, a reporter for the South China Morning Post visited a factory near Hong Kong which made Snoopy...

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