Three years ago Peter Doyle the Regional Officer
for UNISON in Carlisle pulled off a huge victory in terms of Equal Pay for Work
of Equal Value worth potentially £340 million. The amount was so big partly
because the case had dragged on for years and also because the extent to which
the 1,500 women had been underpaid. Trade union struggles are often complex and
difficult. They are made even more difficult by the union bureaucracy cuddling
up to the labour leadership, instead of representing the members.

It is almost impossible to believe the rank stupidity and/or duplicity
of the people masquerading as Labour Ministers. This is a press release
from UNISON in response to the latest claptrap from Kim Howells, in
which he makes allegations that put at risk the lives of trade unionists
in Columbia. Please use this information in your own unions and demand
the retraction of Howells’ allegations.

In the past
month Ken Loach has been outstanding in his support for Shelter workers in an
industrial dispute with management. They are trying to impose an extra two and
a half hours a week work for no extra pay so that Shelter, a company with a £49.1m turnover is competitive with
private companies in winning work contracted out by a Labour government to the cheapest bidder. Over 70% of
the 468 Unite members voted for strike action.

{youtube}SJ_qK4g6ntM{/youtube}

Last Thursday it was Carlyle Capital’s turn to
go belly-up, a corporation that has George Bush and John Major on its board and
has done very well out of the Iraq war. It is a private equity company – firms
that borrow other people’s money in order to take over other firms and loot
their assets. Under capitalism firms do eat each other. Now it can be argued
that, without jackals, the veld would be full of wildebeests that had died.
Jackals keep the place tidy. But you wouldn’t really praise jackals as wealth
creators.

Five years ago the USA, Britain and various wretched bribed
‘allies’ invaded Saddam’s Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a monster – but imperialism
knew that when it backed him in his aggressive war against Iran and supplied
the chemicals for him to gas Iraqi Kurds. The invasion was justified by the lie
that Saddam had ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ He didn’t.