There were spectres haunting Dublin on Saturday, the fear of
unemployment and of job cuts but more importantly the spirit of James Connolly
and Jim Larkin the founding fathers of the Irish labour movement. It took two
hours to get from Parnell Square to the final rally. 200,000 people, workers,
their families and their kids, young and old, from all over the country, Cork,
Kerry, Sligo, Donegal, the midlands and all over.
As I write, the New York stock exchange index fell to its lowest level in six years as the big financial institutions and investors in company stocks slipped into the depth of despond about the state of the world capitalist economy. And these investors have every reason to feel depressed. The world economy, by most estimates from the major international institutions, will contract this year for the first time since the 1940s. And by the world, they mean everywhere, not just in the advanced capitalist economies.
Support the Statutory Redundancy (Amendment) Bill. On 13th March Labour MP Lindsay Hoyle will put forward the Statutory Redundancy (Amendment) Bill for its Second Reading. This far from revolutionary proposal seeks to up-rate redundancy pay and to link it to average earnings. It is however a measure of this government that this is a private member’s bill.
As the capitalist crisis continues to ravage the once mighty ‘celtic tiger’ the
Irish government has stumbled across a sure fire method to stimulate economic
growth and raise living standards; cut the wages of the lowest paid workers! The
Labour Courts are currently debating whether to drop the minimum wage a euro to
€8.65, and Labour Affairs Minister, Billy
Kelleher, has argued that the review needs to take account of the current economic
climate. He expanded his support for the counter reform by suggesting that the
minimum wage should not be a barrier to employment. Such talk is all very well from a government
junior minister who currently earns a salary of over €139,000 per year and no
doubt enjoys all the perks and benefits offered by the parliamentary gravy
train.
Jerry
Hicks is standing as general secretary of Unite-Amicus. He has been storming up
and down the country, taking on the establishment within the union in his
campaign to become general secretary. He travels everywhere by coach (because
it’s cheap), stays overnight in supporters’ back rooms, and is currently
nursing a fractured leg kindly donated by the police while he was picketing on
behalf of the workers outside Staythorpe Power Station. His campaign is financed
by voluntary donations of Unite-Amicus activists. He deserves our support.
The welfare ‘reform’ measures currently wending their way through Parliament are so right wing you might have thought they were drafted by the Tories. Funny you should mention it…David Freud, who drafted the White Paper on which the bill is based, has just defected to the Conservatives. This shows two things:
He’s a rat leaving what he sees as a sinking ship
New Labour sucking up to the Tories with anti-working class policies just paves the way for the real thing to take over and put the boot in further.
Poor old Alex Salmond. Things
haven’t been going too well for him lately. Maybe it was one too many whiskeys
with their Burns Suppers, but the Scottish National Party Government seems to
be stumbling from one embarrassment to another. First they couldn’t get their
“recession beating” budget passed on the first go. Then they were forced to
back down on their flagship policy to scrap council tax, apparently due to a
lack of “parliamentary consensus”. And then, just to add insult to injury Iain
Gray, the Scottish Labour Party leader, slammed the SNPs plans for an
independence referendum.
Coupled to the Bologna Process, though not explicitly included in
it, has been the privatisation of education and all that this entails. So now
not only are students faced with the fact that they will have to work harder
and longer hours for a shorter period of time, that the costs of their
education will also increase (so working on top of the hours required for
studying becomes more of a strain) but also that their courses may end up being
influenced by some company who’s only real interest in to create profit out of
the process…
Today, almost 25 years since the miners’ strike
began, the industry has been decimated, with only a few thousand jobs left. The
proud traditions remain as the Durham Miner’s Gala demonstrates each year, and
many miners have taken their fighting traditions into the wider labour
movement. But many of the pit villages are crumbling and the social effects may
never be completely overcome, on the basis of capitalism.
But this destruction wasn’t an ‘act of god’ or some huge work of nature
like the tsunami. This was a deliberately worked out plan. It was an attempt to
take on and smash the most militant determined and class conscious section of
the organised labour movement. And this was seen as a critically important task
by the ruling class ad their chosen instrument, the Tory Party. It even had a
name, the Ridley Report.
Over the course of a cold February week two
Glasgow campuses emerged at the forefront of the wave of occupations that is
currently engulfing universities across Britain and, in the process, transforming
their political atmospheres. Strathclyde and Glasgow University were both
occupied, with the occupiers protesting about the Israeli onslaught on Gaza and
their universities’ links with arms companies that were complicit in the
offensive.
The picture shown was published in the Daily Star on Thursday 12th
February. Derek Simpson, currently joint general secretary of UNITE, is
shown with posters that completely misrepresent the cause for which his
members are fighting.
The media in Britain and internationally
have systematically portrayed the recent Lindsey dispute as being a struggle
between “British workers and foreign workers”, when in actual fact it has
nothing to do with this. The struggle was about defending wages and conditions
as established in hard fought for trade union agreements. Here Rob Sewell
points out some of the dirty tricks of the press.
The Private
Finance Initiative was always bonkers. The idea was that, instead of the
government borrowing to build infrastructural projects, they would hand the job
over to a private consortium to raise the money.This was
always daft. The government was always the safest borrower in town. When did
you last hear of a government going bust? Because its loans are completely
safe, the government can borrow at a cheaper rate than anyone else.