Solidarity 130, 10 April 2008

Birmingham to strike 23-24 April

Birmingham City Council workers will strike again on 23 and 24 April over the council’s plans to use “single status” negotiations to cut pay and jobs. Unison, T&G Unite, GMB, Amicus and UCATT made the call on 9 April. They will stage pickets at refuse depots, schools, libraries, offices and care homes on each morning before joining a rally in Victoria Square at noon on Thursday April 24. Many years back, local government employers and unions agreed a Single Status “framework” at national level, to put blue-collar and white-collar workers into a single pay structure. But each local authority...

NUT left abstain on homophobia

For the first time in its history, the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers debated a motion submitted by LGBT teachers from their own conference. The motion, entitled “International Homophobia and Transphobia” condemned the current levels of anti-LGBT bigotry in Britain and the rising tide of militant right-wing attacks on LGBT people and Pride demonstrations around the world. Poland, Russia, Israel and Iran were among the places singled out for mention. Tim Lucas and Claire Jenkins from the NUT LGBT Working Party proposed and seconded the motion and a number of delegates...

UCU Left discuss way forward

On 29 March the University and Colleges Union Left met in London. Around 60 lecturers discussed the way forward for the left in the union. The UCU Left is now heavily dominated by the SWP. Despite its claim to be a rank and file group it is, in reality, much more a caucus of members of the UCU’s national committees. 10 of the 15 members of steering committee elected at the conference are members of the union’s leading bodies. A proposal from AWL supporters that the steering committee should be based on activists in branches was heavily defeated at the conference. The good news is that the UCU...

Reject pathetic health pay offer

Several weeks overdue, the health service Pay Review Body finally made its recommendation to the government on 4 April — three days after the rise should have been implemented. The PRB recommended an increase of 2.75% — considerably below the current inflation rate of 4.1% (based on RPI). As if this were not bad enough, health union officials then spent the weekend in talks with the government and to thrash out a three-year deal starting with the PRB’s recommended 2.75% in this year, followed by 2.4% next year and 2.25% the year after. There is an option to re-open negotiations on the second...

NUT left should be bolder

The 2008 National Union of Teachers (NUT) conference was unlike any other in the recent past. The difference? For almost a year NUT activists have been preparing the ground for the first national strike in over two decades. The attack on teachers pay and the unions' industrial response to it shaped the opening days and determined the mood of the rest of conference. By the time of conference the ballot had already opened, but results were not due for another week (in the end 75% voted for action on a 32% turnout). The Executive put a priority motion on pay outlining a commitment to continue the...

Communist Refoundation: workers left between a rock and a hard place

Comrades outside Italy could have been forgiven for thinking, on hearing in January of the fall of the government of Romano Prodi, that finally the forces of the so-called “Radical Left” in his centre-left coalition had said “enough!” to the eighteen-month or so of sustained attacks on the living standards and quality of life of the popular masses of Italy. Alas, the reality is otherwise or, perhaps, it is nearer the truth to say the “unreality” is otherwise! For the government fell through the resignation of his Minister of Justice Clemente Mastella, ex-Christian Democrat and leader of one of...

Venezuelan steel workers fight repression

On 14 March, Venezuelan police — the “Bolivarian National Guard” — attacked a demonstration of striking steel workers from Latin America’s biggest steel works, the SIDOR factory in Ciudad Guayana, arresting more than fifty workers and injuring dozens. SIDOR’s 13,000 workers have been on strike repeatedly over the last year and a half, demanding a new collective contract including wage increases and better working conditions. SIDOR was privatised in 1998 and belongs 60% to the Argentinian consortium Techint; since privatisation conditions have deteriorated severely, with many workers dying on...

Marxists on the capitalist crisis: 2. Costas Lapavitsas - A new sort of financial crisis.

Costas Lapavitsas is a Marxist economist specialising in the study of financial systems. His writings include the chapter on money in Anti-Capitalism: A Marxist Guide (edited by Alfredo Saad Filho), and he is a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Interview by Martin Thomas It has gradually become clear that one of the key features of the last thirty years is increasing autonomy of finance. Many things have happened in the world economy since 1973-4, which is basically the end of the long boom, but one thing that is clear is that the financial system has become...

National Union of Students Democracy saved... for the time being. Build the fight!

Come to the Reclaim the Campus conference on 17 May to discuss the way forward for the student movement! On 1 April, the National Union of Students conference in Blackpool narrowly voted to reject the NUS leadership’s “Governance Review”, which would have abolished what little democracy remains in our union and institutionalised its conversion into a pro-government lobbying organisation. Unwilling to accept their defeat, the leadership immediately began promising to reintroduce their “reforms”, and astonishingly rumours are now circulating of plans to call another Extraordinary NUS Conference...

Focus support on Palestinian workers

In her reply to David Kirk’s criticism of the Solidarity 3/128 editorial on Israel/Palestine, Cathy Nugent comments on the idea that we should not put demands on bourgeois governments: “… socialists have always made such ‘calls’ and made demands on bourgeois governments, and in many dreadful circumstances — in order to organise movements of opposition, to cohere groups of people who share our basic politics, because these demands/calls have the potential to create mass movements, or because under pressure bourgeois governments do act.” This is correct when it refers to the necessity of making...

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