Solidarity 584, 3 March 2021

Stitch-up in Liverpool

Liverpool mayoral candidate Anna Rothery If you don’t like the contestants in the race, replace them with other runners. That seems to be the approach of Labour’s North West Regional Office on choosing the party’s candidate for Liverpool City Mayor. As members waited for ballot papers to arrive, they got an email from party bosses saying that “the right candidate” needed to be chosen. The three women already shortlisted did not fit that particular bill, so a new shortlist would be drawn up, and they wouldn’t be on it! The post of City Mayor has been a controversial one since its inception in...

Rank-and-file links key

Thanks to Dave Chapple for his article (in Solidarity 583 ), which is an important contribution to the history of trade unionism in the UK Post Office. As a CWU [Communication Workers’ Union] activist of 25 years standing I would like to add some additional comments. I joined Royal Mail in the 1980s. Like Dave, I found that my older colleagues sometimes talked about 1971. Indeed, the key branch officials had all taken part in the strike. As I became more active in the union, one interesting theory I heard was that Tom Jackson was actually playing a game of internal politics within the UPW...

Shortfall on autism training

The government is developing new plans to provide mandatory autism training to all health and social care staff. But it looks like the reality of implementation will fall below the ambitions of the original consultation. Then, it was said that “people with lived experience (of autism) should be involved in the delivery of training”. Even that was a watered down version of demands from autistic people that the training be “autistic-led”. The end result looks like a training package delivered by a litany of third sector organisations, combined with NHS trusts. Very few of those could honestly...

Organising couriers in Israel

Uri Metuki spoke to Michael Elms of Solidarity about couriers in Israel fighting for rights of union organisation. Uri leads the “youth and students” section of the Histadrut organising effort. JustEat/10bis employs 1,700 couriers. The other company is called Wolt, which is a spurious self-employment company. We have some couriers who approached us from Wolt, we started talking with them and finding out about the situation, but the organising drive took off with JustEat/10bis. We have more than half the workforce, but they did not recognise the union. They used all kind of union-busting...

The left should oppose nuclear weapons and NATO

When the New Statesman published Paul Mason’s provocatively titled article, “How the left could save Nato”, in late November 2019, it attracted a deserved torrent of criticism. But in the Labour leadership election that followed, neither the eventual left candidate, Rebecca Long-Bailey, nor the other tentative left contender, Clive Lewis, opposed participation in NATO. Indeed, Lewis had previously defended it. And from early on, Corbyn’s leadership had reconciled itself to maintaining the UK’s nuclear weapons and commitment to NATO. Now the Starmer leadership has upped the volume by describing...

"Modern slavery": grandstanding vs helping workers organise

Emily Kenway is a former adviser to the UK’s first Anti-Slavery Commissioner and the author of The Truth About Modern Slavery (Pluto Press, 2021). She spoke to George Wheeler for Solidarity . (The book is reviewed here .) Can you explain a little of what the book is about, and why you wrote it? The book is about how modern slavery is a particular narrative about exploitation, constructed largely by philanthrocapitalists, anti-sex work activists and anti-migrant politicians. It shows how calling exploitation “modern slavery”, and all that this entails, suggests a moral crusade but undermines...

The US left and Trump: replying to debate

Thomas Carolan did make a British analogy for what socialists can do now in the USA in relation to the Democrats. But it was not with the Labour Party! It was with the Liberal Party in the late 19th century.

Uphold free speech, fight antisemitism

David Miller The government’s new attempt to police freedom of speech and academic freedom on University campuses — e.g. to withhold registration if a University is deemed not be complying — should be opposed. Universities already have a statutory duty to uphold free speech (in the 1986 Education Act). The new push is a demagogic attempt to push back against “wokeness”, linked to reactionary attempts to promote historical pride in such things as colonialism and slavery. However, there are real pressures against free speech and the right to organise on campuses. There have been many free-speech...

Free Indian trade unionist Shiv Kumar!

Nodeep Kaur (pictured above), the jailed Indian trade unionist and farmer solidarity activist whose case we have covered in recent issues of Solidarity , has finally been released on bail. So has climate activist Disha Ravi. But Kaur’s comrade Shiv Kumar, one of the founders of her union Mazdoor Adhikar Sangathan (Association for the Empowerment of Labourers), is still in jail and has been tortured. A medical examination conducted after the regional high court ordered it found “right foot swelling and tenderness of left foot nail, beds of right second and third toe are broken and underlying...

Black workers take on Amazon

A union organising drive at Amazon’s new fulfillment centre (BMH1) in Bessemer, Alabama, a majority Black and working-class city adjacent to Birmingham, began in the late summer of 2020, when a handful of workers, fed up with stressful working conditions, intrusive monitoring and lack of safety during the pandemic, contacted the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union. The union has a high profile in the region, where it has organised poultry workers, many of whom are African American, as are around 85% of the BMH1 workers. From the beginning, Amazon mounted a massive anti-union propaganda...

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