Monthly Archives: October 2005
THERE was a large picket of about 120 sacked Gate Gourmet workers yesterday. Daljit said: ‘We are waiting to see if British Airways sign the agreement with Gate Gourmet to renew the contract tomorrow. ‘We have stood on this picket line for over two months waiting for our jobs back.’Parmjit...
Five US Marines were killed by a roadside bomb in Ramadi, western Iraq, on Saturday, the US military said in a statement yesterday. Their armoured vehicle was hit in the insurgent city, 70 miles west of Baghdad. The five soldiers, assigned to the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Marine Division, II...
TEMPORARY workers in Britain are being paid illegally low wages, having unlawful deductions taken from their pay packets, and are being denied holiday pay – says a dossier just published by the Trades Union Congress (TUC). The TUC has handed the dossier over to government ministers. It was published to...
TODAY scores of T&G members will be picketing the Gate Gourmet plant at Heathrow Airport, as they have every day since they were locked out by the US-owned multinational company on August 11. Despite the enormous hardship they are suffering, with no wages coming in and only the meagre ‘hardship’...
THE Labour government is speeding up the break-up, privatisation and destruction of the National Health Service, despite the vote at the Labour Party Conference last month for a motion calling for a halt to further privatisation in the NHS. Since its return to government following the general election in May,...
GATE Gourmet pickets said yesterday they were fed up with waiting. They poured scorn on a Transport and General Workers Union plea to British Airways to sign a new contract with the in-flight meals company which sacked them and locked them out. One of the locked out Gate Gourmet workers, Mrs...
The latest amendments to the Iraqi ‘constitution’ approved by the puppet Iraqi parliament ‘offer nothing’, says the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS). The amendments outline the mechanism by which the constitution can be amended if approved in today’s referendum. Muthanna Harith al-Dari, spokesman for the AMS, in the...
PARLIAMENT is being taken ‘into very dangerous and damaging waters,’ Labour MP Alan Simpson said yesterday. He was speaking after the Blair government presented MPs with a list of 15 groups it wanted banned ahead of the debate on its new terrorism bill. Simpson said parliament was being denied the right...
CHANCELLOR Gordon Brown published a pamphlet Global Europe-Full Employment and penned a special article in the Financial Times yesterday, lecturing the leaders of European Union governments. He told them why they must forge ahead with deregulation, privatisation and attacks on workers’ rights and welfare. Brown could not have chosen a worse...
GATE Gourmet workers were on the picket line at Heathrow Airport yesterday, determined to win their rights, having been told on Wednesday that British Airways is refusing to sign a new contract with the inflight meals supplier. Picket Chanan Rattu commented: ‘BA won’t sign its £6 million deal with Gate...
‘America is one of only a few countries in the world where children face life sentences without parole’, said Amnesty International on Wednesday. ‘There are at least 2,225 child offenders serving life without parole (LWOP) sentences in US prisons for crimes committed before they were age 18’, Human Rights Watch...
THE Blair government’s plans to extend the terrorism laws and allow the police to detain people without charge for 90 days are ‘completely monstrous and should be fought in every single way’. That was the message to a packed meeting convened in the House of Commons on Tuesday night, from...
‘The deal done between the TGWU and Gate Gourmet is worthless, I’m going to apply to an Employment Tribunal for unfair dismissal,’ Mr A Singh told News Line yesterday afternoon. Gurdev Barespal, said: ‘We are all going to claim for unfair dismissal, we were locked out on the tenth of...
THE Labour government’s new Terrorism Bill, published yesterday, will be debated by MPs in the House of Commons today. For the past few days, Prime Minister Tony Blair and Home Secretary Charles Clarke have taken every opportunity to sing the praises of this draconian Bill. At Prime Minister’s Question Time in...
THE British Medical Association yesterday challenged the Blair government to say what will happen to chronically ill or emergency patients, ‘if the local hospital is threatened with closure’ as a result of Payment by Results. Warning of an imminent wave of cuts and closures in the NHS, the BMA said...
ANGELA MERKEL, the leader of Germany’s right-wing Christian Democratic Union (CDU), announced on Monday: ‘We have the basis for coalition talks. The CDU will occupy the chancellery.’ This was a declaration that she plans to become Germany’s Chancellor, heading a ‘Grand Coalition’ with the Social Democratic Party (SPD). It was the...
‘AS Jean’s mother I have felt immense pain,’ Maria Otone de Menezes told a packed public meeting in London on Monday night. The meeting was called to launch the Jean Charles de Menezes Family Campaign for a ‘full judicial public inquiry’ into the police killing of the young Brazilian. De Menezes,...
Yesterday was the beginning of the third month since the more than 700 Gate Gourmet workers were locked out at Heathrow Airport. Speaking on the picket line TGWU member Mojo said: ‘I would like to see Gate Gourmet close down because of the way they are treating workers. ‘They haven’t informed...
PRESIDENT Mahmud Abbas’ summit with the Israeli leader Ariel Sharon, which was due today, has been cancelled after Abbas said he was opposed to a public relations event and wanted a summit that would be serious and meaningful. After his remarks, the Palestinian-Israeli committee seeking to work out a summit...
THE US Department of Justice should immediately investigate allegations that pre-trial detainees evacuated after Hurricane Katrina to Louisiana’s Jena Correctional Facility were ‘treated like animals’, Human Rights Watch has said. The Human Rights Watch and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) said: ‘Detainees told us they felt they...
THERE was one of the biggest turnouts on the picket line at the Gate Gourmet dispute yesterday, with more than 200 locked out workers demonstrating near the factory at Heathrow. They heard from senior shop stewards, Mr Dhillon and Mrs Atwal, that 144 of the 700-plus sacked workers would be...
THE buzz word in the financial media yesterday was ‘Wapping’. The media was referring to the union busting operation carried through by Rupert Murdoch in 1986 supported by the Thatcher government and the riot squads of the Metropolitan Police after he built a new printing works in Wapping, closed down...
School support staff work the most unpaid overtime behind council chief officers, reveals a new survey published last Friday. The MORI survey carried out for public sector union UNISON covering all areas of local government, found that nearly 40 per cent of school support staff were doing up to four...
‘HE broke the law. He engaged in an illegitimate war of aggression that history has condemned,’ former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter said yesterday, indicting British Prime Minister Blair for war crimes for joining the US invasion of Iraq. Ritter likened the 2003 invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq to...
angry Gate Gourmet workers told News Line over the weekend that they want their union, the TGWU, to provide them with information on who is to be reinstated and when, and also who is on the company’s list of ‘compulsory redundancies’. Hermohinder Kabra said: ‘The union leaders are working both...
YESTERDAY the capitalist state was split over the Blair government’s police state attacks on democratic rights. Two Law Lords attacked Home Office plans, to allow the police to hold people for 90 days without charge, and to have an offence of ‘glorifying terrorism’ as ‘unlawful’ in a Panorama...
GATE GOURMET pickets were angry yesterday that they have still not been told who is to be offered their jobs back, or who is on the company’s list for compulsory redundancies. TGWU member Gurdev Baranpal told News Line on the picket line at Heathrow Airport yesterday: ‘They said we would...
Home Secretary Clarke’s plans to give police powers to hold people for 90 days without charge has been condemned as ‘unlawful’ by Law Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick and former Law Lord, Lord Steyn. In an interview for the BBC’s Panorama, being broadcast tomorrow night, Lord Steyn warns: ‘Experience shows...
FOREIGNERS shot on the border, asylum-seekers detained in metal containers, Roma forcibly evicted from their homes in Athens – these are some of the examples of a consistent pattern of human rights violations, Amnesty International reveals in a report today. The report, ‘Out of the spotlight: The rights of foreigners...
PRIME Minister Blair yesterday had a meeting with the long standing CIA agent and Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, who is now posing as the ‘President of Iraq’, the country which US and British forces are currently occupying. The nature of the meeting was more a faction meeting than a meeting...
PRIME Minister Blair yesterday repeated allegations that Iran had a hand in the deaths of British troops in Iraq. Speaking at a joint press conference after talks with puppet Iraqi president Jalal Talabani at Downing Street, Blair said UK troops will remain ‘as long as he wants them’. Blair went on...
‘IF I’m told I’m to be made compulsorily redundant I will not accept. I’m fighting for reinstatement and will not give up my claim for unfair dismissal. ‘My friends feel the same,’ continued locked-out Gate Gourmet worker, Jaswinder Phal, speaking to News Line on the picket line at...
THE political leader the Hamas Palest-inian liberation movement has said that the US and Israel are responsible for last week’s clashes between Hamas activists and Palestinian security forces in the Gaza Strip. Khaled Mashaal warned against internal fighting and called for national unity. He said it was necessary to solve...
On 5 October 1999, 31 people died and 259 were injured in a terrible train crash that took place at Ladbroke Grove, just outside Paddington station, west London. To mark the one-year anniversary of the crash the Paddington Survivors Group launched a rail safety week from last Sunday 2nd...
IN the last few days the Iraqi puppet National Assembly, whose authority does not run outside of the Green Zone US fortress in central Baghdad, has been caught out, trying to rig the outcome of the October 15th Referendum. It was trying to establish conditions for making the rejection...
IN Sri Lanka over 75,000 workers are employed on the rubber plantations and are viciously exploited. There are at least 200 plantations, we visited one, the Sundarland plantation, near Eheliyagoda. This estate is now owned by an Indian company. Until 1972 it was owned by a British firm. All the plantations...
LOCKED out Gate Gourmet workers expressed shock and anger at the treatment of two hundred Xavier Gourmet workers who found the gate to their plant near Heathrow Airport locked when they arrived at work on Monday. Speaking on the picket line at Heathrow yesterday Lakhvinder told News Line: ‘The Xavier...
A force of up to 2,500 US troops, supported by puppet Iraqi troops, moved into Iraq’s western Al Anbar province yesterday in the biggest offensive there this year. A US military statement yesterday claimed that Operation River Gate is intended to stop al-Qaeda operating in the city of Haditha and two...
AT the Labour Party conference, the trade unions and a large minority of Labour constituency parties defeated the Labour government on at least five major issues. The conference voted for the repeal of the anti-union legislation that bans secondary action, for no further privatisation of the NHS, for the restoration...
THE living conditions of workers, the Tamils on the tea plantations and the Sinhalese on the rubber plantations, and their families, has to be seen to be believed. It is difficult to adequately describe the quiet courage and determination of these workers, particularly the women workers who refuse...
THE privatisation of the railways has been a complete disaster and for the families of those killed in rail crashes it is a disaster they will never forget. The situation has caused such alarm amongst commuters that the BBC recently screened a full-length documentary drama about Ladbroke Grove in which...
A GATE Gourmet supplier locked out 200 workers in Heston, one mile from Heathrow Airport, yesterday. Xavier Gourmet, which was trading up until seven months ago as Gourmet International, sent the 7.00am and 2.00pm shifts home, claiming that they would receive information about their jobs and money owed within 72...
THE working class of Sri Lanka is at the sharp end of capitalism at its most brutal and vicious. Workers and youth face a daily struggle to survive from early morning until late at night. This has produced a revolutionary development, with the masses of workers hating capitalism, and openly...
US CASUALTIES are now mounting in both Afghanistan and Iraq, while at home the anti-war and anti-Bush movement is growing by leaps and bounds, after over 300,000 Americans demonstrated in Washington on September 24th against the war. The US has lost over 1,941 troops in Iraq, plus 15,000 troops who...