Under capitalism there is a steady unremitting pressure on workers’ living standards from the capitalist class, particularly as they compete with one another, and with bosses all around the world, to cut costs – especially labour costs. This need for employers to attack the wages and conditions of European workers has been intensified by the onset of crisis. There are huge discrepancies between national rates of pay within the European Union. Naturally bosses would like to exploit these differences. And the European Court of Justice is trying hard to help them.

In Pennsylvania last month judge Mark Ciavarella, and the judge of the juvenile court  Michael Conahan, pleaded guilty to having accepted $2.6m (£1.8m) from the co-owner and builder of a private prison where children aged from 10 to 17 were locked up.The cases of up to 2,000 children put into custody by Ciavarella and Conahan over the past seven years are now being reviewed in a scandal called "kids for cash".

French students are out of the classroom and back on
the street. On Thursday, 29th January, students and teaching staff
joined in the national strike that had an estimated 2.5 million French workers
marching in the major cities to prove to President Sarkozy that his provocative
remark in the summer of 2007- ‘These days, when there’s a strike in France,
nobody notices,’ was as wrong as it was rash.