Solidarity 254, 22 August 2012

“If I’m being held by terrorists who are threatening to kill me, for f**k’s sake don’t send in any ASLEF negotiators.” - Anonymous messroom wit Sabotage by three ASLEF full timers killed off the pension dispute on East Midlands Trains. Hours before the Olympics were due to start, they suspended strikes set to take place during the games so that the Executive could consider another deal they had negotiated. The clincher, according to District Organiser Richard Fisher (one of the negotiating team), in a document entitled Informal Summary Of EMT Pensions Dispute (ISOEPD), was a new agreement on...

More 34 striking miners were killed when police opened fire at a Lonmin PLC platinum mine, Marikana, South Africa on Thursday 16 August. Nearly 80 have been reported injured. Over 250 people were arrested on the same day. This is a shocking event, reminiscent of how the apartheid police “shot to kill” at protests. It has rightly been condemned by the labour movements around the world. Workers at the platinum mine had been on strike for a decent wage and a week earlier 10 people had been killed (including two police). The strike was initiated by rock drillers, under the leadership of the...

Many within British football claim the problem of racism has gone. Within European football virulent racism is still displayed in stadiums. Before the European football championships in Poland and Ukraine, the BBC aired “Stadiums of Hate” a Panorama documentary, featuring Polish fans giving Nazi salutes and a group of Asian fans getting attacked at a match in the Ukraine. “We are not like that” is the strong message the programme gave out. In the 70s and 80s racist abuse from supporters was common place and the far right had a strong foothold on the terraces in the UK. Paul Elliot (the first...

A strike campaign by cleaning workers at John Lewis' flagship store in London's Oxford Street has forced bosses to back off from a cuts plan, as well as winning wage increases for workers. Cleaning contractor ICM (part of the Compass Group) had been planning to make compulsory cuts to cleaning workers' hours, meaning a loss of pay, as well as making compulsory redundancies. The workers' strikes have succeeded in halting the cuts plan. Not a single worker will now face redundancy. Although the key demand of the strike, to win a pay increase to the London Living Wage of £8.30 per hour, has not...

I'm employed by ISS [one of the main cleaning contractors operating on the Underground] on the Northern Line. The strikes have been good so far; we need to keep building and raising awareness of the dispute, including getting more publicity and press coverage. The strike hasn't been strong everywhere. Managers have been phoning individual workers telling them not to strike, telling them that the strike won't win. They've been intimidating workers and it has an impact on the number of people prepared to strike. The cleaning companies have been flooding the stations with extra agency staff to...

It is now a year since riots swept through London and other British cities. To mark the anniversary, many newspapers, politicians and TV pundits are making retrospective statements on what took place. Now, as at the time, much of the political establishment has chosen to portray the events in moralistic terms, shrill denunciations with very little in the way of objective analysis. Blame is placed on an underclass of moral degenerates, frenzied with nihilistic materialism and to blame for their own poverty. In contrast, the journal Race and Class has recently published an article by Warwick...