Between 3 and 11 December the anti-sweatshop campaign, No Sweat, will be touring with members of the National Garment Workers Federation of Bangladesh. This grassroots union federation has been at the frontline of a recent wave of strikes and riots.
The Roosevelt myth — that he was a great progressive or some sort of friend of labour — remains one of the most pernicious in history. Yet it hardly stands up to a cursory examination of the evidence.
The politics of the Green New Deal are little more than a mild, reformed green capitalism on the model of... Norway. The only other model is a wacky reference to “the Cuban experiment”
The press outcry against Haringey social services department should not be allowed to determine what is done now. Yet the minister responsible, Ed Balls, publicly acknowledges that his response has been influenced by the agitation of the Sun newspaper.
On 2 December, 20 protestors entered the offices of Amey plc in High Holborn to protest at the sacking of five Colombian cleaners and the rejection of their appeal. The protestors attempted to present a petition to an Amey representative, but were prevented
When in 1938 Trotsky wrote the document which became known as “The Transitional Programme”, the founding statement of the international group he helped set up, what was he trying to do? What did that group, the Fourth International, stand for?
The closest thing many of us will have seen to “militant anti-fascism” in recent times is an entirely or partly staged scuffle with the police at the front of a demonstration.
The Wall Street Journal of 1 December reported that the government of Latvia, beset by economic crisis, sent its Security Police to arrest university economics lecturer Dmitrijs Smirnovs... for being too pessimistic.
Ken Livingstone has launched an organisation called “Progressive London” (www.progressivelondon.org.uk), backed by a “broad alliance of individuals, campaigns, communities, artists, trade unions, environmentalists, political parties and groups”.
We should not allow ourselves to be paralysed by the strength of the BNP, or imagine that the far right is an unstoppable juggernaut. But the danger seems to be rather that the left will lull itself to sleep, convinced that the news is not so bad after all.
The central idea behind the motion carried by the NUT executive -development of demands to be debated in each trades union and then decided on at a recalled TUC Conference and this to form a labour movement response to the economic crisis- is a positive one; an immediate problem is TUC and its affiliated unions.
The rail union RMT has called a workers' representation conference for 10 January 2009 at Friends House on Euston Road, London (11:00-15:00). There rumours that the PCS civil service union may also sponsor the conference
Alistair Darling is seeking £5 billion spending cuts in the public sector, and he seems to have the National Health Service in sight to provide the majority of these cuts.
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