Solidarity 235, 22 February 2012

Boot camp school

A proposed free school in Oldham has become the latest of Gove’s flagship school model to hit the headlines, and this one raises serious concerns over what our society thinks education is for. The proposal for the Phoenix free school in Oldham involves the school being run entirely by current or ex-services personnel. This includes the headteacher (the proposed candidate is a captain who has been on tour in Afghanistan), all the teachers and any other staff. There is currently no requirement for free schools to employ qualified teachers. The rationale for this school is, according to the...

School victory, Chicago-style

Parents and students occupied a school in Chicago which had been slated for “turnaround” by the Public School administrators. That is a process which involves the entire staff of a school being sacked and a new one brought in. The school would have been turned into an Academy. Activists from the local Occupy group then formed a human chain around Piccolo School to stop police from evicting the protest, which ended in a victory. Campaigners accused the authorities of failing to consult with the parents, students and local community and systematically underfunding the school. • More here .

Wages not workfare

Between January and November 2011 58,000 people in the UK worked for free for high-street shops, charities and government departments as part of the government’s “Mandatory Work Activity” or “Work Experience” programmes. Both “workfare” schemes involve unemployed people working 30 hours a week whilst receiving at most £53.45 a week (under 25s) or £67.50 (over 25s). On the MWA project people who are deemed not to be trying hard enough are forced to work for four weeks. If they refuse to work their benefits are cut for 16 weeks for the first time, six months for the second time and, under the...

Birmingham students challenge ban

Edd Bauer, Birmingham Guild of Students Vice President Education and a supporter of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, spoke to Solidarity . On 15 February, we had a mass “Take back your campus” protest at Birmingham University against a High Court injunction to stop demonstrations, which management got last November and which remains in force until November 2012. Hundreds of students from Birmingham and around a dozen other universities took part. It ended in an occupation of the university’s corporate conference centre. Student activists showed we would respond to aggressive moves...

Rank-and-file action forces Balfour Beatty u-turn

A day after the High Court refused to grant Balfour Beatty Engineering Services an injunction to stop a planned strike by Unite members, BBES have performed a spectacular and embarrassing u-turn and backed down from their plans to impose new contracts for electrical and mechanical construction workers which would have involved pay cuts of up to 35%. Balfour Beatty was one of a group of eight construction industry giants, representing over half of the work in the UK, who in summer 2011 announced plans to unilaterally leave the Joint Industry Board (the union-negotiated collective agreement...

Class-struggle dispatches from Iraq

1,200 workers in a cement factory in Karbala held a strike calling for increased benefits. The factory is operated by the French company Lafarge, and bosses want to massively increase production to about 60,000 tonnes per month. This is a huge amount for an old factory and the capability is not really there to meet these targets. According to the contract between Lafarge and the Iraqi government, the furnace must be upgraded before the increase in production can take place, but the upgrade hasn’t been made The furnace has receive routine repairs only. It’s meant a massive increase in workload...

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