Solidarity 052, 27 May 2004

The new Iraqi Workers' Solidarity Group made a number of plans at our meeting on 25 May. We will be organising a fund-raising benefit comedy night for Iraq's new trade unions. We'll be selling a t-shirt with the same aim. At the Glastonbury festival on the weekend of 26-27 June, we hope to secure agreement on further fund-raising. Around 30 June, the date of the supposed "handover" in Iraq, we will - with others, we hope - organise a protest tour of the central London offices of the big corporations involved in the forced privatisation of Iraq's economy and the reconstruction boondoggle. On 9...

Resist the sell-out, reject the deal Firefighters fighting further attacks on their terms and conditions found this week that the FBU leadership was intent on negotiating a deal which would open the door to changes in the four-watch shift system, and even allow fire service management the option of closing some fire stations overnight, even while it encouraged firefighters to risk suspension in pursuit of a union policy it no longer believed in. Having spent weeks insisting that 'stand down time' (the time, in the early hours of the night, when fire crews are only required to attend calls, not...

Nineteen firefighters in Manchester have been sent home without pay in what is increasingly looking like a management lock-out in a bid to break the Fire Brigades' Union before it holds a recall conference next month to consider a strike ballot. Two weeks ago the FBU conference was controversially suspended to allow delegates to return to branches and consult on a possible strike ballot, following management's failure to pay the second stage of a three stage pay deal, and their insistence on adding on new changes in working practices not in the original deal. That deal, which was unpopular...

Rogue bodyguards Blair's bodyguard Multi-cultural? No, anti-semitic BNP idiot of the week By their celebrities shall you know them Not our brothers Rogue bodyguards Over the last weeks we have become more aware of the extent to which the Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority "outsources" its security services. According to the Pacific News Service 1,500 of the security personnel are South Africans and many have used their backgrounds as mercenaries during the years of apartheid to bolster their credentials. This fact emerged after after a bomb blast in January 2004 in which one South African...