Solidarity 082, 20 October 2005

Gate Gourmet: the workers still need our support

By Emma Parsons The Gate Gourmet catering workers at Heathrow Airport, London, remain locked out, months after being sacked and three weeks after they voted for a deal they thought would end the dispute. The latest news, as of 18 October, is that BA may refuse to sign a new contract with Gate Gourmet to provide meals for its flights. This contract was a key part of the deal the TGWU leadership promoted. The leadership was apparently so confident that they had secured a three-way agreement (union/BA/GG) that Tony Woodley himself explained the deal to the workers at the mass meeting on 28...

Looking Left

By Andy Hilton Boycotters are back It looks as if the “boycott Israel" crowd have recovered sufficiently from their defeat in the Association of University Teachers (AUT) to come back for another stab. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine are bringing Dr Nabeel Kassis, president of Birzeit University in the West Bank, to speak in Britain on the case for a boycott of Israeli universities. The tour comprises three meetings, at Sussex, LSE and Birmingham, between the 23 and 25 of October. None of these meetings is sponsored by a branch of...

Writing on the wall

RECORD FINE FOR PFI FIRM Earlier this month PFI engineering firm Balfour Beatty and Network Rail, the successor company to Railtrack, were fined £10 million and £3.5million, respectively, for their part in the Hatfield rail disaster. The judge described the crash as “one of the worst examples of sustained industial negligence”. Despite this, no-one has been convicted in a criminal court of causing the disaster because of the ludicrous inadequacy of the corporate manslaughter laws. What is more, the campaign by the relatives of victims of a number of rail crashes for the government’s reform of...

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