So much for racism and the BNP at Lindsey
Fantastic news, which I’ve only picked up this morning via the comments section of Phil’s A Very Public Sociologist site. The BNP, whose website is spouting a lot of crap about how their councillors are being called in, in preference to the union of the wildcat strikers, were actually turned away from the picket lines. The video below gives more information.
Now that’s how to institute a no-platform policy: from below.
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The government’s reaction to strikes has been terrible
In September 2005, hundreds of Asian women working for a British Airways supplier, Gate Gourmet, went on strike to protest that their employer was planning to fire them enmasse and bring in cheaper Eastern European labour. Before Gordon Brown had announced his slogan, here was British Jobs for British Workers in practice.
So I have a few quick points to make regarding this whole controversy as I’m trying to pull them together for a broader article.
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How can we build a coalition on progressive issues?
One of the big challenges for progressives is how we connect up campaigning on different issues to build effective coalitions for change. This is central to the mission of Liberal Conspiracy, recognizing that there are too few spaces where progressives from different perspectives come together to forge strategies for change.
The recession now brings this into sharp focus. There may be an opportunity to challenge the dominance of deregulation, to question inequality at the very top, and remake the public case for the role of the state.
Another instinct will be ‘charity begins at home’: the enormous effects on the developing world of rising food and energy prices have been a very minor theme of political and media discussion given a financial crisis and economic recession. This is the crucial year for a post-Kyoto climate change deal – by Copenhagen this December. Will the deal we need be credit crunched?
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Betraying sex workers
In any discussion that takes place these days about prostitution and other forms of sex work it’s virtually guaranteed that at some point in the debate either the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) or the International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW), or indeed both, will be cited by someone as being the authentic voice of those working in the industry.
Whenever those of us who are opposed to legalisation or across the board decriminalisation air our views, we’re invariably shouted down and accused of not listening to what prostitutes themselves want: “Go and talk to the IUSW” we’re told: “they represent prostitutes: they know what they’re talking about.”
The IUSW in particular seems to be working hard just lately to raise its profile, and has managed to garner support from Feminist Fightback among others. But then, as the IUSW is a recognised branch of the GMB, one of Britain’s biggest trade unions, it’s not hard to see why a left-wing, rights-orientated group like Feminist Fightback would be drawn to them.
After all, there’s no doubt that women working in prostitution suffer some of the worst abuses and are some of the most vulnerable women in society, so if there’s a trade union group out there that can offer them support and representation, then what could be wrong with that?
But as this discussion over at the F Word showed recently, the reality is more complicated. continue reading… »
Israel: how to lose friends and alienate people
Israel is not behaving like a civilised nation; that inevitably raises the question of whether it should be treated as one. Even its strongest supporters must be finding it difficult to mount a positive case.
The third day of the bombardment of Gaza has taken the death toll to over 300, including four young sisters killed when a bomb aimed at a nearby mosque missed its target. Some 1,400 have been injured. Even as I write, warships are reportedly bombarding the strip’s rudimentary port facilities. Welcome to Operation Cast Lead.
There have been debates in many British trade unions – including my own, the National Union of Journalists – centred on demands for a labour movement boycott of the state of Israel. I now suspect that I have lacked clarity on this issue. Sadly, prevarication is no longer tenable.
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Why is New Statesman not recognising the NUJ?
Word has reached Liberal Conspiracy that journalists within the venerable left-wing magazine are not happy that it has yet to officially recognise the National Union of Journalists union.
The magazine has been undergoing editorial changes as new editor Jason Cowley took over from Sue Matthias, appointed acting editor when John Kampfner left. In October its US editor, Andrew Stephen, resigned. Cowley has also axed columns by Darcus Howe, Julian Clary and Ziauddin Sardar and hired James Macintyre from the Independent as a political correspondent. Martin Bright remains political editor.
LC has heard from more than one source that many staff considered the snub of the NUJ “outrageous”. Chapel members are considering contacting trade union advertisers with the New Statesman to put pressure on the management for recognition. The left of centre mag produces the TUC supplement every year.
But a magazine spokesperson, when contacted, said they were trying to resolve it. “No official position has been reached and the proprietors are still in discussion on the matter,” I was told.
It’s only right to ask why a left-of-centre magazine is taking so long in recognising the NUJ. An official statement by the union will be sent over to us tomorrow.
(article edited 7pm)
The timeless Tories
Why the Tories will forever be old hat.
Hello, all.
This lengthy piece (tis a bit long – got carried away) is the first in a number that will look at Conservative behaviour on the ground. Yours truly wonders if the Tories are fit for public office, exactly, and/or if social responsibility is really their bag…
This week, staff at Tory council Hammersmith and Fulham will meet to organise a response to the latest attack by the council’s Conservative leadership. What a distasteful attack this one is, too – all council staff have been told they will be dismissed and forced to sign new employment contracts on much-reduced terms and conditions.
So.
I know exactly how the Tory trollies among you will greet this news: you’ll say (sans deliberation, as always) that lazy, fat arsed public sector staff – those you doubtless imagine operate the schools, housing offices, libraries, street cleaning and social services at Hammersmith and Fulham – deserve it (do you class bankers as fat arsed, overindulged public sector workers now, btw?). You’ll say that public sector workers deserve the awful hours, and the lack of union representation and employer sympathy and flexibility that your average working stiff in the private sector gets.
But do they?
I think not.
Unions and fascists – show your support
Aside from that peerage for Peter Mandleson, this is one of the more irritating things to happen in the House of Lords for quite a while. Back in 2002 the rail union ASLEF was taken to court by one of its members after he was expelled for being a member of the BNP. He won, and so several years later ASLEF took the case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights and argued that the decision breached article 11 of the European Convention, which states:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”
The court ruled in ASLEF’s favour by insisting that just as individuals have a right to choose whether or not to join a trade union, so trade unions have the right to choose their members.
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Why can’t we unionise lap dancers?
Personally, I’ve no use for strip joints, lap dancing emporiums, ‘gentleman’s clubs’ or any other euphemism you want to use for young ladies dancing around without much clothing. If I’m going for a drink I want a steady supply of cider, enjoyable conversation and a jukebox that’s as obscure as my music taste. What I don’t want to endure is the awkward, toe-curling, avert-your-eyes embarrassment of having women I’ve never met wriggle around for me (and yes, I realise it’s probably far more awkward for the women themselves than it would be for me).
But it’s obvious that a significant section of the male population doen’t share my squeamishness, and the industry has thrived in recent years. As others have explained better than I could, the government’s 2003 Licensing Act created a pretty huge loophole which left lap dancing barely regulated (excuse the pun), and the number of clubs has consequently doubled.
Why socialists should vote Lib Dem.
Kate Belgrave posed this question on this very site when replying to Jennie Rigg. Kate seems to be slowly warming to the idea but nonetheless I think it is a relevant question. The first thing to note is that there are doctrinal differences between liberals and socialists; they largely arise in different attitudes to capitalism and how to deal with it. Socialists want to replace it and liberals want to promote it while protecting the most vulnerable members of society. Of course, this is a sweeping generalisation which doesn’t do nearly enough justice to the complexities of the issue but it will have to do for now.
However, if we are being entirely honest, socialists don’t really have much of a clue what to replace capitalism with anymore following the failure of social democracy and communism. This is not the place to discuss why those two things failed but it does lead us to make an important discovery; the doctrinal differences are narrower now than at any time in history. Liberals and socialists share a common interest in the preservation and protection of the lower strata of society. continue reading… »
Thatcher – another insult
The Guardian reported on Friday that Thatcher is to return to chequers – she’s been invited by Brown to discuss the global downturn. The only way Thatcher knows how to tackle a global downturn is by attacking the working class and using mass unemployment to achieve reactionary social change.
I can’t think of a greater insult to loyal labour party members than Brown’s invitation to Thatcher.
Derek Simpson et al at TUC didn’t have much of an argument to convince people to stay in the Labour Party and fight or a strategy to make the link work for trade unionists – their sole argument the Tories would be worse and that we should remember the Thatcher years. By doing this Brown trashes what little support there is left for him in the TU movement and demolishes Simpsons arguments by showing once again that New Labour are the conscious heirs of Thatcher and represent a continuation of her politics by other means.
Why it’s OK to dislike Bob Crow
Bob Crow, the leader of the RMT rail workers’ union, is one of the less popular men in London due to his union’s propensity to go on strike at, apparently, the slightest provocation (most recently, a 5% pay rise, and someone being sacked for punching a customer – although I’ve got a theory about the 5% one).
And indeed, as someone who has to go to work, I irrationally hate and despise Mr Crow and the RMT for interfering in this already unpleasant process – in the same way you hate and despise the ‘person taken ill at Temple’ and hope the ‘person under a train at Moorgate’ is thoroughly squashed. But these hatreds are obviously unfair, and they disappear once you’re out of the tunnels and back in the real world…
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Why aren’t unions united over pay rises?
In a few short weeks delegates from all our trade unions will gather once more in Brighton for the Annual TUC Congress.
Last year’s Congress instructed the General Council to:
Give full support to affiliated unions’ efforts to protect their members’ real and relative pay levels, to oppose the Government’s two per cent pay target for public sector workers, and to co-ordinate a joint campaign of opposition at national and local levels to the Government’s unfair public sector pay limit, including co-ordinated joint industrial action.
What have we seen as a result of this decision?
Well, on Thursday 24 April, members of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) at schools in England and Wales took strike action alongside members of the University and Colleges Union (UCU) in the Further Education sector and about a third of the membership of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS).
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Waiters must get the tips we give them
Throughout my teenage years and early twenties I had many jobs as a waitress, in a number of different restaurants. Sometimes fun, with friendly customers, plenty of staff camaraderie and after-work drinks, other times gruelling with hot hours spent in a nasty uniform trying not to look embarrassed as I handed over another overcooked/overpriced/much delayed by a fight between the chefs, pizza.
Part of what drew me to these jobs was the tips – by smiling, being helpful and pandering to odd food requests I could significantly increase the amount I took home at the end of a ten hour shift thanks to the generosity of some of those I waited on. Lucky, since these jobs usually had pretty low hourly rates.
But I was furious when I realised the last restaurant I worked in not only paid a low hourly rate but actually took money from my tips as a top up to the minimum wage.
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Cameron is disowning Thatcher’s economics
David Cameron is moving further away from Thatcherism. This is one interpretation of his call for a US-style chapter 11 bankruptcy law. He says:
Instead of companies going straight into liquidation and having to lay off staff, they get a stay of execution and they can be restructured to try to save the business, to try to save the jobs.
This is a flat contradiction of standard neoliberal economics. This says that the very fact that a company is bankrupt is a sign that it has little value; the market – customers – judges things right. The firm should therefore be broken up, so that workers can be released to find more productive employment. And in removing excess capacity from an industry, the firm’s more efficient rivals will become more profitable, allowing them to expand.
And the notion that bankrupt firms can be restructured is pish; if there were a way for the firm to become more efficient, either the existing managers would have found it, or the firm would have been bought by those who can make a go of it. That this hasn’t happened shows there’s no hope for the firm.
Now, this view was pretty much orthodox Thatcherism. “Lame ducks must go to the wall” was a cliché of the early 80s. And the reason Thatcher called coal mines “uneconomic” – rather than just unprofitable – was because she thought miners would find better work than digging up cheap coal*.
In calling for a chapter 11, Cameron is rejecting this view. Why?
One possibility is that the evidence is on his side. We know now that displaced miners generally did not (pdf) find work, suggesting that workers don’t quickly find valuable work elsewhere. There’s some (but limited) evidence that firms can turn themselves around in chapter 11. And it’s not clear that firms in chapter 11 in industries with excess capacity actually do harm their more efficient rivals. Chapter 11 does, then, have its supporters.
But there’s another possibility. Whether or not chapter 11 is good for the economy generally, it’s certainly good for investment bankers and lawyers, as creditors spend a fortune fighting over the scraps. So perhaps Cameron has just listened to his friends.
* Of course, it’s possible that Thatcher’s pit closure programme was motivated not by economics but by mere class hatred. But no-one believes this, do they?
Are unions at the point of no return?
When John McDonnell, hero of the working class, ran for the Labour leadership, one of the most convincing arguments in his arsenal was the demand to repeal the battery of repressive legislation aimed at the Trade Unions, which the Tories fielded and then Labour compounded.
Recently this has again come to the fore, with speculation that Labour is ‘in hoc to its paymasters’ following union bailouts of Labour’s massive debts.
Gordon Brown, while at the G8 summit in Japan has attempted to put paid to this sort of accusation:
continue reading… »
It shouldn’t be this hard
What stories can we tell about poverty in the UK? As prices rise and wages stagnate, a new era of industrial action may turn up some new ones.
The second Tube Cleaners’ Strike this week is a flashpoint for a city and a country sick to its stomach of scraping by or stumbling over whilst the rich get richer under New Labour.
We are sick of market-licking policy promising us jam tomorrow; for a generation, now, we’ve been waiting for Thatcher’s economic reforms to trickle down and lift the rest of us out of squalor, as we were promised they would.
But now the bubble has burst, and it’s the poor who are taking the fall for the City. The recipients of Income Support in London who rode in with their discounted travel cards to vote Ken Livingstone out of City Hall are now feeling the pinch after Johnson cut that benefit, in one of his first acts as Mayor. And with wages across the board failing to rise in line with inflation, Alastair Darling’s plea that we all ‘tighten our belts’ rings hollowly in the ears of those not earning an MP’s salary of £62,000 plus expenses.
continue reading… »
Update on strikes and David Davis
Firstly, on the cleaner’s strike across London. I got this today:
The second round of strikes are about to come to an end. They have been well-supported across the London Underground network.
Unison conference: the witchhunt
Excellent chance of it all hitting the fan at Unison conference today: The four left-leaning union activists that the union bureaucracy is presently trying to expel are holding a special protest meeting at midday. It’s a meeting which anybody who is anybody in Unison has a substantial stake in.
The union bureaucracy’s witchhunt of these four respected officers is easily the biggest issue at conference this year. There are those who think that the union’s future is written in this battle. Either left or the right in the union must win. continue reading… »
Greetings from Unison conference in Bournemouth
Yours truly is at Unison conference, doing the blogging business. Here’s a little starter post, to give you an idea of the reporting on Unison that yours truly is planning to do:
The great moment has arrived, people: it is time to start publicly discussing Labour-affiliated trade unions and their dreadful betrayal – particularly since New Labour came to power – of the low-paid people and communities who are most desperate for union help.
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» How bad is the feline obesity crisis?
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
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