AROUND 700 RMT Tube cleaners working
for four private contractors are to stage a series of strikes after voting by a
landslide 125-to-one margin for action to win the London living wage and decent
working conditions. Cleaners working for ISS, ITS, ICS
and GBM will not book on for shifts that commence during the 24 hours between
18:50 next Thursday, June 26 and 18:49 on Friday June 27.
Tarragona, one of the industrial hearts of Spain, is one of the areas where unemployment is going to hit hard as the current crisis deepens. The region’s high percentage of industrial workers in the petrochemical industries and the big tourism sector is going to make September a difficult time, as hotels close and tourists return home.
British capitalism is in big
trouble. The official annual inflation
rate has hit 3.3%, its highest level for 16 years. The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn
King, has been forced to send a letter to the Chancellor of Exchequer, Alastair
Darling, to explain why the Bank has been unable to keep inflation from rising
at more than 2%, which is the target set by the government for the Bank.
Ireland, after a long period of economic boom, is
now feeling the effects of the worldwide slowdown. Some have made big money,
but at the other end of the social spectrum there are many who have lost out.
Now is the time to raise the banner of genuine socialism within the Republican
movement and the working class as a whole.
The British bourgeoisie and its apologists
have always tried to bury their revolutionary past. They continually promote
the false idea that “gradualism” has always been the true British tradition.
Revolutions were always affairs of the continent, but have no relevance here. Next
year, on the 450th anniversary of the death of the great
revolutionary Oliver Cromwell, will be no exception.
The Communications Workers Union (CWU) invited Hands Off Venezuela
along with other Latin American solidarity campaigns and guest speakers to
speak at a Latin America fringe meeting held on the opening day of the Union’s
Annual Conference in Liverpool last Sunday. The CWU
renewed their affiliation to Hands Off Venezuela, reaffirming the importance of
the Venezuelan revolution to workers here in the UK.
A MAJOR conference of European railway trade unionists
aimed at developing strategies to resist and reverse the tide of EU-driven rail
privatisation and ‘liberalisation’ is to be hosted in London on Tuesday by
Britain ‘s biggest rail union. RMT general
secretary Bob Crow, European Transport Workers’ Federation general secretary
Eduardo Chagas, Kelvin Hopkins MP and John Hendy QC will be among the keynote
speakers at the event, which will be attended by trade unionists from 15
European countries.
UNISON members in Scotland will soon be balloted for industrial
action over their 2008 pay claim. Ballot papers will be sent out at the
beginning of July with votes due back by 31st July. This is an extremely tight time scale and will present a
challenge to activists. The decision to call a vote on industrial action was taken
at a delegate conference in Glasgow on 29th May following a period of informal
consultation.Some 20% of members took part in the consultation by
attending meetings or by voting through e-mail or ballot. Those that took part
were overwhelmingly for strike action.
BRITAIN’S BIGGEST rail union got rock-solid support from
12,000 Network Rail maintenance members from midday Saturday June 14th
as a two-day strike over harmonisation of terms and conditions got under way. After voting by a margin of nearly three to one for action,
RMT member did not book on for shifts that commenced between midday tomorrow
(Saturday June 14) and 17:59 on Sunday. Members also did not undertake any
overtime or ‘on-call’ work between 06:00 on Saturday June 14 and 06:00 on
Monday June 16.
In spite of all the main parties, big business, the media
and even most of the trade union leaders campaigning for a "yes" vote in
yesterday’s referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, the "No" won the day. This was a
slap in the face for the Irish government and the European Union bosses.
The political landscape in Britain is changing before our
very eyes. This morning’s prominent TV news is of the tanker drivers’ strike,
showing scenes of pickets with Red Flags turning away lorries at Shell
refineries. The next item is the deepening government crisis, followed by a
warning from Gazprom that oil prices could reach $250 a barrel. It was like a
typical news bulletin of the 1970s.
2008 was the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Fourth
International. The International was established by Leon Trotsky and
his supporters in September 1938. As part of the commemoration of this
event Rob Sewell
draws out some of the key lessons and methods on which the Trotskyist
movement was built during
the 1930s. He also explains that while the Fourth International no
longer exists in an
organisational form, it continues for Marxists today in our theory,
programme, method and approach.