International unions

Trade union struggles outside the UK

Textile workers strike in Egypt

The 3,700 female workers in the Mahalla textile factories were furious. The Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, had earlier in the month raised the minimum wage to 6,000 Egyptian pounds — the equivalent of just £100. That’s £100 per month . But workers in the state-owned companies, including Mahalla, were exempted from the pay increase. The decision by the El-Sisi government to raise wages was due to the increasingly severe cost-of-living crisis in the country. In January 2024, the government raised prices of electricity, metro tickets and telecommunications services in an attempt to get...

Unrest rises in Iran

“ The one that knocks on the door at night, has come to kill the light” — Alireza Ghorbani, Strange Times. Kazem Nik-Kaah, from the Iranian workers’ rights campaign, Free Them Now, believes that there are at least ten worker-protests and strikes each day in Iran, particularly in steel, petrochemicals, oil and gas production. On 9 March nurses and medics from all the hospitals in the large city of Shiraz demonstrated against low pay and unpaid wages. The next day nurses protested in Bushehr complaining that their salaries are too low and that they were being forced to work extra overtime. The...

The fight for free unions in Belarus

On 16 February Dzmitry Shcharbina, an employee of the OJSC Belarusian Steelworks, was charged under Article 130 of the Belarusian Criminal Code: “Incitement of racial, national, religious or other social enmity or discord”. The basis of the charge is his alleged participation in protests in his workplace after the rigged presidential elections of 2020. Dzmitry faces up to five years in prison. A few days earlier three employees of Gazprom Transgaz Belarus were taken into detention. According to the Belarusian trade-union-rights organisation Salidarnast, they were then forced to sign statements...

Iran: steel workers fight back

On Tuesday 20 February the 3,000 militant, resilient steel workers at the National Steel Group in Ahvaz, south west Iran, struck again. The workers are demanding suspended worker activists be readmitted to the plant, and that a job reclassification plan is fully implemented. The steel workers are furious that past agreements with management which ended previous strikes have not been fully implemented. The steel workers struck in November 2023, and again in December and January. Relying on mass meetings to take decisions, at one point the workers sealed the entrances and exits to the site and...

Solidarity with Ukraine!

Ukraine is the victim of Putin’s murderous, Russian-imperialist aggression. Ukraine is right to fight to defend its democracy and its right to self-determination. The international left and labour movement has an obligation to make solidarity with Ukraine. The full-scale war which began two years ago, on 24 February 2022, has led to 22,000 civilian deaths. 5.1mn people are internally displaced. 6.2mn have fled Ukraine. The US suggested that by summer 2023 the total number of deaths, on both sides, amounted to around 500,000. A staggering waste of life. 18% of Ukraine is still occupied by...

Free the HK 47! Free Jimmy Lai!

The Hong Kong-based tycoon Jimmy Lai has pleaded not guilty to two charges of colluding with foreign forces to endanger national security, and publishing seditious material in Apple Daily, the tabloid newspaper he founded, in his trial which began on 18 December. This is an extraordinary delay, well over three years (1084 days) after he was first arrested for collusion on 10 August 2020 under the National Security Law. Lai is currently serving a five year sentence for fraud (accommodating a consultancy firm inside Apple/Next Media HQ without informing the landlord), and had already served an...

Myanmar: a challenge for unions

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) exists to certify that products coming from the world’s forests are produced responsibly. You may never had heard about the FSC, but if you look around your home, you’ll see its logo everywhere — on your toilet paper, inside your books, maybe even on your furniture. The Bonn-based global organisation is a network of over 1,200 members in 89 countries. Some of those are corporations, some are non-governmental organisations (e.g., Greenpeace), some are individuals. And some are even trade unions — large, well-known unions. These include UNIFOR in Canada, IG...

Meeting trade unionists in Kyiv

Between 11 and 17 November, I was in Ukraine as part of a PCS union delegation. During our stay in Kyiv it was quiet with only three air alerts, which everyone ignored (they have a fine sense of what is dangerous). Unfortunately that quiet period has ended with multiple sustained air attacks in the past week. These have been drone attacks but the attacks that people most fear are ballistic missiles, where you get little or no warning (as you can imagine having discussions about ballistic missiles is slightly surreal). Everybody I met in Kyiv described living there as being in a bubble, and...

Will Sweden’s workers humble Musk?

Mechanics servicing Tesla’s electric cars in Sweden, members of the IF Metall union, have struck for over a month to demand a collective bargaining agreement — the first strike, or sustained and widely reported one at least, in the company’s history. But Elon Musk and his hierarchy are facing off not just with the mechanics, but large numbers of other Swedish workers. Starting with metal workers at a supplier, solidarity action has spread to dockworkers, post and delivery workers, cleaners and car painters among others. There are also reports of potential spillover to Germany, where Tesla...

India Labour Solidarity ups activity

The India Labour Solidarity campaign (ILS), established late 2022, has been active on several fronts. On 15 November ILS held an event at Parliament, organised with socialist MP Nadia Whittome and NGO Trade Justice Movement, to discuss a potential UK-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA). The event briefed MPs, parliamentary staff, trade unionists and others on the issues and made the case for negotiations to be suspended, a position supported by the TUC but not campaigned for in the labour movement. Another organisation participating in the 15 November event was Unau Welfare, representing members...

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