Solidarity 062, 18 November 2004

Lynx workers to strike again

Workers at the parcel delivery company Lynx have taken two days of strike action for an improved pay offer. The company bussed in dozens of agency workers to their main depot in Nuneaton, and then claimed the strike had “had no effect”. Union officials persuaded the agencies to withdraw their staff and by lunchtime on the first strike day the agency staff had left. On the second strike day, agency workers were again bussed across the picket lines, but in much smaller numbers. Despite the TGWU having no recognition agreement at Lynx, the strike has pushed management into requesting arbitration...

The end of the “superpit”

The last pit in the “superpit” coalfield of Selby, North Yorkshire, closed last month and with it went 1,700 mining jobs. The coalfield — which consisted of five pits and one drift mine — covered 110 square miles, an area the size of the Isle of Wight. It was started October 1976, at a time when British capitalism thought coal was a good alternative to oil. When it opened, the Selby coalfield was praised by then Labour government as a “striking symbol of the re-birth of coal as a major energy source”. The closure means the number of UK mines has shrunk to just 11, employing 3,000 miners. Only...

EWS

RMT members at rail-freight company EWS are to be asked about stepping up their industrial action over jobs, working hours and conditions, after talks with the company at Acas broke down. 1,300 engineering and groundstaff have already held one 48-hour strike over jobs, working hours and conditions. EWS wants to introduce a new driver restructuring initiative that will involve drivers taking on rolling stock technicians' duties and other work. This will encrouch on the work of groundstaff.

Privatised pay deal

Privatised ex-NHS staff at Birmingham’s Heartlands hospital have accepted a deal which will see them reach parity with NHS pay and conditions by 2007. The deal was offered to them by Initial Hospital Services and Birmingham Heartlands management after the workers planned strikes in protest against the “two-tier workforce”. NHS-employed staff were going to be up to £1 an hour better off than privatised staff doing the same work. The deal is by no means ideal — this year's pay rise will be only 3.22% and the levelling up to Agenda for Change pay rates will take two and a half years. But it does...

PCS debates action after 5 November

The national strike called by PCS on the 5 November was solid, with about 200,000 staff were on strike. Encouraging report backs show a high level of picketing across the country and that all the rallies were well attended. Confirming the old adage that unions who take action pick up members, the PCS has added several thousand new members over the last few weeks. Following the strike the union is turning to political campaigning on the issues and for industrial action in bargaining units where they think they can deliver it. It is a strategy that rests on the confidence and industrial muscle...

Agenda for Change: more battles ahead

UNISON and Amicus have both accepted the NHS pay package, “Agenda for Change” (AfC). UNISON members voted 3 to 1 to accept the deal, on a low (25%) turnout, while 57% of Amicus members accepted the deal and 43% rejected it on a 40% turnout. This is a clear victory for the union leaderships, and leaves the Society of Radiographers (SoR) as the only union to reject AfC. AfC will mean many thousands of health workers facing a pay freeze. 200,000 will face an increased working week. Promises that the deal would be “fully funded” to allow low-paid workers in the NHS to catch up look less likely...

Activists debate the Iraqi unions

About 50 people — many more than usual — were at the most recent monthly meeting of Iraq Occupation Focus to hear Sami Ramadani and Ewa Jasiewicz on “Trade unionism in occupied Iraq” (London, 9 November). The first speech, Ewa’s, was informative and sober, but entirely detached from the debate which dominated the rest of the meeting. Ewa described the activity of the Southern Oil Company Union in Basra, an IFTU affiliate with which she worked for some months; expressed doubts about Communist Party control in most of the IFTU and the IFTU’s “ambiguous” stance on privatisation; and mentioned the...

Defeat Brown’s poverty plans: Decent pensions for all!

Britain’s basic state pension is only 15% (and falling) of average earnings. It is the meanest, in proportion to earnings, of all the richer capitalist countries. Last week Gordon Brown, speaking to the bosses’ association, the CBI, endorsed the Thatcher government decisions which started the withering of the state pension, and assured them that he would stick to that policy whatever the pressures from the labour movement. The Guardian reported (10 November): “The chancellor said that Germany and France both faced spending 15% of their national output on pensions by 2050, but that the decision...

Baghdad: the two occupations

A report by Cécile Hennion and Rémy Ourdan , translated from Le Monde of 3 November 2004. Baghdad is an occupied city. It’s difficult to describe, but there’s always something in the air to remind you of this. The American occupation is Abu Ghraib, it is torture, and it is the prisons and the systemic humiliations. It is a green zone, a huge Americo-Iraqi camp planted in the heart of the city, supposed to symbolise “the new Iraq.” It is an Iraq so removed from the real Iraq that its inhabitants often laugh at it, and sometimes cry. It is a ballet of planes and helicopters. It’s a frightened...

Debate & discussion: fantasy socialism

I find Solidarity’s obsessive anti-Stalinism extremely tiresome. Dishonest too. You can’t be blaming everything bad that has happened to socialism on “Stalinism”. Who says that Stalinism was not a form of socialism? Of course it was! State socialism. Dictatorial socialism. Totalitarian socialism. Or, as those who struggled against it in Eastern Europe in the 70s and 80s put it — “actually existing socialism”. Solidarity’s idea of socialism as some immaculate conception outside of the real world is simply a fantasy. A day dream. It is in fact what anti-socialists like Herbert Spencer said...

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