Members of the RMT rail union working in the control
room of Docklands Light Railway will strike for 24 hours from 13:05 on Monday,
February 2, in a dispute over the imposition of new weekend rosters.
The union suspended an earlier threat of a
work-to-rule held after the company withdrew the disputed roster, but talks
held since have failed to break the deadlock.
In January the Royal Bank of Scotland recorded the biggest loss in British corporate
history – £28bn. Just three months ago New Labour bunged £20bn of our money at RBS
to help prop it up. We have since made a £12.5bn loss on our holding as share
prices headed south. Where did our money go? It seems to have disappeared in a
puff of smoke. So the government has
decided to give them another £5bn of our money. The bank’s worth is
disappearing by the day as its share price evaporates. At the time of writing
the total share price of the 300 year old bank was just £4bn. In 2007 it was
£78bn.
I’m writing this inside the Cambridge University Law Faculty at 1am on Wednesday
28th January, after approximately 100 hours of occupation. At the time
of entering the building (last Friday evening) I believe we were the 16th
student university to have been occupied in protest of the Gaza situation.
I have been active in the occupation over the last four days,intervening
in every meeting and trying to ensure that we follow a genuinely Marxist
method in our attempt to have our demands met.
On
the 21st of January 10 school students from all around Edinburgh
attended the first meeting of the ESSU (Edinburgh School Students’ Union). The
meeting was billed under the title “Why we need a Union” and was attended by
students from three different high schools.
The
European Union set up an Emissions Trading Scheme as a market solution to deal
with pollution. Pollution is of course, overwhelmingly generated by big
business (‘market’) activities. Now the scheme has turned around to bite them.As a result
of the crisis, polluting companies have found themselves strapped for cash. So
they’ve cashed in their carbon credits for short term readies.
As a young militant in the 1980s I met Peter Snape MP (now Lord Snape) at an annual conference of my union, the Transport Salaried Staffs Association. He spoke on transport policy and later in the evening I recognised him in the bar and argued with him about Union and Labour Party policies. I remember saying, emboldened by a couple of pints; “The trouble with Labour MPs is that too many of them are in it for the money, and some of them are actually corrupt. Of course, I don’t mean you personally.” He replied; “The trouble with you is that you are obsessed with betrayal.” In the […]
Tube cleaners who led the strike last July for a decent wage are under attack. Mary Oboakye was sacked at a disciplinary earlier in January.
We don’t accept that management can just
push these people around and treat them like dirt. Calls for Mary
Oboakye to be reinstated will be backed up with an action at Metronet
offices at lunchtime on Wednesday January 28th.
‘Shock therapy’, or rapid mass
privatisation, in the former Soviet bloc 1990s was responsible for the early
deaths of 1m people. This is the principal conclusion of a paper published in the
medical journal ‘The Lancet’ (15.01.09). Not
only did privatisation devastate the economy and the means of feeding, clothing
and housing their people; it also shredded the social welfare system and all
the social support mechanisms built up over decades. As a result unemployed, desperate
people with no hope just went to pieces.
UCU (the University and College
Union – the main union for lecturers) and UNISON are battling to save London
Metropolitan University from management plans to cut at least 330 jobs. ‘Times
Higher Education’ puts it higher, estimating it “could mean up to 500
individuals (between one in seven and one in five of the current staff)" losing
their jobs(22.01.09)
A recent report by professor Paul Gregg calls for benefits to be stopped for anyone who “does not co-operate” in looking for a job. Gregg wants those who show insufficient zeal to be held in “work equal activities.” This is similar to “school detention.” The miscreant would have to get on a computer and start searching. Minister Purnell welcomed this “independent” report. In fact he had commissioned it himself to confirm his own reactionary prejudices. “The direction of travel is the right way,” he declared.
South West
Trains has declared its intention to slash 480 jobs on its operations. SWT’s
parent company is Stagecoach, which is owned by the fabulously wealthy Brian Souter.For years winning a franchise to run
one of the train operating companies has been a license to print money. Profit really
comes from the fares paid by passengers and the government subsidies, handouts
from taxpayers. Now that recession is here, passenger numbers are set to fall.
The railway companies are feeling the pinch. They have decided to make their
staff take the burden of the fall in revenues
On December 5, 2008 over 200
recently-fired workers at the Republic Window and Doors factory in Chicago occupied
their plant, demanding that they be paid their vacation and severance checks.
The occupation ended victoriously six days later when the Bank of America and
other lenders to Republic agreed to pay the workers the approximately $2
million owed to them.But the workers didn’t stop there. They are now
seeking ways to restart the factory and potentially operate it as a worker-run
cooperative.