Solidarity 599, 30 June 2021

Deliveroo couriers in the Independent Workers’ union of Great Britain (IWGB) have been knocked back for the fourth time in their legal challenge aimed at forcing Deliveroo to recognise couriers as “Limb B workers” — a legal category distinct from both salaried workers (“employees”) and self-employed contractors, which Deliveroo insists its couriers are. Limb B workers are self-employed and work flexibly, but do not set their own rates of pay in the way a self-employed tradesperson might. Had the IWGB’s case been successful, Deliveroo would have been forced to increase courier wages and...

The Recycling and Energy Recovery Facility in Leeds is much taller than the plant in Sheffield, slicker and modern-looking. The whole power station is housed under a giant wooden archway and walled with thin panes of glass (identical, for those familiar with it, to the archway of Sheffield’s Winter Gardens, but ten times the size). One side of the 12-storey building is a beautiful vertical garden with its own irrigation system. R: “This garden costs the council £1,400 a month to maintain. But it’s part of the contract, it’s a public building.” The bin wagon parking area is an underground...

The Solidarity 598 article by Eric Lee on the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union reminded me of one of the most intelligent and moving Soviet films about the war. The director Andrei Tarkovsky is probably too ethereal for some, but check out his first feature film, Ivan’s Childhood (1962). Ivan (Nikolai Burlyaev) is a child scout for the Red Army. Irascible, self-confident but recklessly brave, he risks his life behind enemy lines. The avuncular Captain Kholin takes Ivan under his wing and sends him to a military college but Ivan runs away. The film ends with Soviet troops searching through the...

Workers on the Caledonian Sleeper service concluded an 11-day strike for better pay on 26 June. Their bosses have imposed a pay freeze, in line with demands from the Tories for an industry-wide freeze on railway workers’ pay. The strike was extremely effective, with all Sleeper services cancelled. However, subsidies from the Scottish government have protected Serco, which operates the service, from the strike’s economic impact. Labour movement activists must plan action targeting the government, and ask why the Scottish National Party, which claims to be pro-trade union, is helping a...

The union has now made a formal complaint to the Cabinet Office about the treatment of our reps in the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) Swansea. It’s increasingly clear that the strikebreaking campaign is, if not originating with management, certainly endorsed by them. The anti-strike, back-to-work petition was even tweeted by the DVLA’s official Twitter account. I’m pushing for the union to coordinate three outsourced workers’ disputes which are developing concurrently. On 29 June, we’ll get the result from a ballot of outsourced workers in the Department for Business, Energy, and...

July 1 is a day of two anniversaries in Hong Kong. It is the 24th anniversary of the day when Britain "handed over" Hong Kong to China – from one colonial power to another. It is also the second anniversary of the 300,000 strong demo in Hong Kong against the Extradition Bill. That bill, which was later dropped, would have allowed the Chinese regime to extradite people from Hong Kong to China to face charges made by the Chinese regime against them. At the end of the 2019 demonstration, young protestors besieged and managed to break into Hong Kong’s parliament, its Legislative Council (LegCo). A...

On 3 July health workers and supporters across the country will be marking the 73rd anniversary of the creation of the NHS by protesting for patient safety, for pay justice and against privatisation: see here The official NHS Pay Review Body has still not made its recommendation for pay from April 2021. It was due in May. It was delayed until “mid-June”, then “some time in June”, and then... The absolute deadline seems to be 22 July. The Tories want to limit pay rises to 1%. NHS Workers Say No! and Nurses United demand a 15% rise with a minimum of £3,000. Across the NHS one-in-eleven posts are...

Clive Lewis, Labour MP for Norwich South, spoke to Sacha Ismail in late March 2021. For an interview Clive did with us in March 2020, see here . There could still be another 30,000 deaths as we approach the end of lockdown, and maybe much more. Even with the vaccine program at full tilt, in the absence of a proper test and trace system, an isolation system and social support for people, it’s still potentially a dire situation and could still overwhelm the NHS. [This was even before the "Indian variant" of Covid was widely discussed.] NHS workers have launched their demand for a 15% pay rise...

In response to my posing the question is there a Marxist analysis of the brain, and the answer to my own question, "probably not", my old friend Matt Cooper argues that we need to be "much clearer".