Monthly Archives: November 2005
THIS Sunday December 4th the Gate Gourmet sacked workers will be marching through Southall to demand that every one of the 700 locked out workers is reinstated to their job at their established wage rates and conditions of service. This march is vitally important for every worker, and must be...
The General President of Irish trade union SIPTU yesterday welcomed the decision by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) Executive to back his call for a national day of protest over Irish Ferries attempts to replace its workforce with cheap labour scabs. SIPTU represents maritime officers...
US autoworkers union (UAW) President Ron Gettelfinger and Vice President Richard Shoemaker, who directs the union’s General Motors and Delphi departments, yesterday issued a statement on Delphi’s decision to postpone its motion to petition for rejection of its collective bargaining agreements and modification of retiree health care benefits. ‘We...
Locked out Gate Gourmet workers were out all day yesterday campaigning for Sunday’s march and rally in Southall to demand that all the locked out workers are returned to their jobs. While the picket continued, a campaign team visited the huge Greenford Royal Mail sorting office and spoke to Geoff...
‘Let me start by thanking you – directors, executives, managers representing companies from all over the UK – for the contribution you are making to Britain.’ Brown never greets the trade unions in this fashion, but nothing was too gushing or too saccharine sickening for the CBI...
‘This will be the start, they are going to pay for all their lies, all the shootings,’ Alex Pereira, the cousin of Jean Charles de Menezes told News Line yesterday. He said: ‘I am very happy Commissioner Blair is being investigated, he should resign’. Pereira was responding to the Independent Police...
LOCKED out Gate Gourmet workers are furious that the TGWU’s head of civil aviation, Brendan Gold, has gone back on his promise to provide the picketing workers with a winter shelter. They told News Line yesterday that they would not accept this and want action from the trade union movement...
EX-CBI bosses leader Lord Turner’s report into the future of pensions – commissioned by the Blair government – is due to be published on Wednesday. It has already been rubbished by Gordon Brown who has said that it is unaffordable, and in particular opposed the idea put forward by...
LOCKED-OUT Gate Gourmet workers are campaigning all this week for their march and rally in Southall on Sunday December 4. Speaking on the picket line at Heathrow Airport yesterday, Chanan Rattu told News Line: ‘We went to support the RMT railway workers at King’s Cross station on Saturday. ‘We gave out...
Yesterday General President of the SIPTU trade union, Jack O’Connor wrote to every member of the union concerning the struggle to stop the replacement of trade union labour with slave labour on Irish Ferries. Earlier, SIPTU said it would not rule out the possibility of blockading ports. This followed the...
‘THEY can’t be allowed to do this,’ locked out Gate Gourmet worker Parminder Brar said yesterday after hearing that the TGWU leadership plans to cease hardship fund payments on 6 December. Teams of the locked out workers were campaigning for their march through Southall on Sunday 4 December yesterday. Parminder told...
THE British and Irish trade unions are under serious and heavy attack at Gate Gourmet at Heathrow airport, and at Irish Ferries. At Gate Gourmet, in a pre-planned operation over 700 workers were locked out on August 10, because they would not accept the company’s ‘survival plan’, involving huge...
‘WE would fight any attempts to impose a wage freeze,’ UNISON warned in the wake of Gordon Brown’s call for public-sector pay rises to be pegged at two per cent – slightly below the current figure for the rate of inflation issued by the government, but well below the...
‘Torture by the authorities, including with electric shocks and cigarette burns, continues in Georgia’, said Amnesty International today in a new report released on the second anniversary of the ‘Rose Revolution’. ‘Many cases still do not come to light because police cover up their crimes and detainees are often afraid...
‘We would fight any attempts to impose a wage freeze,’ UNISON warned yesterday in the wake of Chancellor Gordon Brown’s call for public-sector pay rises to be pegged at two per cent. Paul Kenny, GMB Acting General Secretary warned: ‘The last government that tried to suffocate low paid public...
LOCKED out Gate Gourmet workers are calling on the whole trade union movement to join them on their march through Southall on Sunday December 4th. ‘We want a big rally’ said Parminder. ‘We are really looking forward to our demonstration and rally in Southall. ‘We are going to tell all our...
THE Palestinian National Authority (PNA) immediately reacted to the latest Israeli political upheaval on Monday, describing it sceptically but hopefully as a ‘volcano’ that might open an ‘opportunity for the peace process’ and lead in the post-elections period to a re-emergence of a peace camp in Israel. Some 80 Israeli...
THE Council of Europe has announced it is investigating 31 reports of unmarked executive aircraft being used by the CIA to transport ‘suspected terrorists’ via European airports to places where they were tortured in eastern Europe and in Azerbaijan. Jack Straw the British Foreign Secretary has been involved in writing...
Britain’s biggest public sector union, UNISON yesterday condemned the decision of three Suffolk Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) to deny operations to overweight patients. ‘It’s against the NHS principle of free healthcare for everyone at point of need. ‘Free healthcare should be available for all,’ a UNISON spokesman told News Line yesterday. The...
LOCKED OUT Gate Gourmet workers are to march through Southall on Sunday December 4th to demand that the TGWU makes their dispute official and mobilises the trade unions to take action to return every locked out worker to their job. Chamnan Rattu told News Line: ‘We want everyone to join...
THIRTY FIVE locked out Gate Gourmet workers yesterday went to see Brendan Gold, the TGWU’s Head of Civil Aviation. He is one of the trade union signatories (the other is the TUC general secretary Brendan Barber) to the notorious ‘Compromise Agreement’, which sells workers’ employment rights and jobs to the...
THERE have been quite a large number of journalists killed by US forces in Iraq, among them employees of Reuters and other European news agencies. The US forces sought from the start of the Iraq war to press journalists into being embedded into their ground forces, all the better to...
AROUND 100,000 workers employed by the SNCF (French national railway) are taking strike action this week, following Saturday’s mass demonstration of more than 40,000 people through the centre of Paris to stop the privatisation of France’s public sector. A strike by the CGT trade union federation on the RATP rail...
Survivors of torture and other ill-treatment in Guantanamo Bay spoke Saturday at the beginning of a three-day conference hosted by Amnesty International and Reprieve. For several, this was the first time they had seen each other since their release. For two of them, it was the first time they had met,...
A CRISIS, with the most revolutionary implications for the working class, is erupting in the US, with GM, the world’s biggest motorcar producer announcing 30,000 job cuts, and that nine assembly, stamping and Powertrain engine-making plants, plus three Service and Parts Operations facilities are to close, to save $7...
General Motors yesterday announced plans to close nine plants, cut shifts and axe 30,000 jobs across North America by 2008. GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner said a ‘wide-ranging restructuring of manufacturing operations in the United States and Canada’ is part if the plan to return the company to profitability. A...
A DELEGATION of Gate Gourmet locked out workers is due to meet the TGWU head of civil aviation, Brendan Gold, at the union’s head office this morning in Holborn. Speaking on the picket line yesterday morning, locked out Gate Gourmet workers told News Line that they have clear demands. Parmit Bains...
GATE GOURMET, the firm that locked out over 700 of its workers in a pre-planned onslaught on August 10, admitted yesterday that the locked out workers had defeated its attempt to force through a three stage ‘Compromise Agreement’. The locked out workers had dubbed the deal a ‘rotten compromise’. Under it...
THE Gate Gourmet catering company was forced to admit on Saturday that the ‘sweetheart’ deal, which the leaders of the TGWU and the leader of the TUC Brendan Barber had drawn up for it, was dead. This deal, was tailored to fit all of Gate Gourmet’s requirements. It included...
BBC unions on Friday went into dispute with the corporation over proposed compulsory redundancies. The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) said in a statement: ‘The NUJ has lodged a Failure to Agree with the BBC after the Corporation announced yesterday (17 November) that they want to make 45 compulsory redundancies...
YESTERDAY saw the Prime Minister seeking to reinvent himself as the champion of the people and a supporter of ‘social justice’. Speaking in his working class constituency of Sedgefield he tried to convince a national audience that he was privatising the education system and creating an ‘education market’...
EXACTLY 18 years after the King’s Cross fire, Britain’s rail and firefighting unions on Friday launched a joint campaign to keep in place essential fire-safety regulations for sub-surface stations that were introduced after the 1987 disaster that claimed 31 lives. RMT, ASLEF and the Fire Brigades Union have called a...
The Jean Charles de Menezes Family Campaign issued a statement yesterday claiming a victory in their fight for the full truth about the police murder of the innocent young Brazilian. The statement said: ‘The Jean Charles de Menezes Family Campaign expressed their delight this morning at news reported in the...
Locked out Gate Gourmet workers are angry that TGWU officers are putting pressure on those who have been selected by the company for compulsory redundancy to accept. Union solicitors have sent letters to all those selected urging them to come into the local union office for interviews. Mr S Sukhi told...
THE fact that armed police used internationally banned dum dum bullets, seven of which splintered, expanded and exploded inside the head of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube on July 22, underlines the illegal nature of the operation and the authority that sanctioned it. In fact, the shoot to...
Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt is planning to shut down ‘failing’ NHS hospitals this winter in the face of a predicted £700m NHS deficit in England. A Department of Health spokesman said that NHS trusts will have to ‘experience pain locally’. Hewitt warned earlier this year that trusts with deficits will no...
LOCKED out Gate Gourmet workers spoke out angrily yesterday over TGWU officers who are putting pressure on those the company has selected for compulsory redundancy to sign the Compromise Agreement and drop their tribunal proceedings for unfair dismissal. Speaking on the picket line shop steward Gurdip Heer, said: ‘People...
YESTERDAY was the deadline for locked out Gate Gourmet workers facing compulsory redundancy to sign the ‘Compromise Agreement’, surrendering their claim for unfair dismissal or any other claim against the company. The ‘Compromise Agreement’, signed by leaders of the TGWU and the TUC, would also stop them getting employment with...
Babar Ahmad has called ‘for this injustice to be avenged’ after Home Secretary Charles Clarke ordered his extradition to America to face trumped up terror charges that carry a death sentence. This is despite the fact that European law bars extradition to countries that carry out death sentences. The young computer...
THE Senate of the United States Congress, which has a Republican majority, fired a shot across the bows of President George Bush’s administration over its policy in Iraq on Tuesday. A motion was passed by 79 to 19 demanding quarterly reports from the White House on the progress of training...
Huge support is building up for US Delphi workers confronting a massive attack on their wages, healthcare and pensions. The former General Motors subsidiary, still its main supplier, wants to slash Delphi workers’ wages and benefits by 62 per cent. Marcello Malentacchi, General Secretary of the International Metalworkers’ Federation, has...
‘Close Down Campsfield – 12 years Too Long!’, declared campaigners yesterday. They were announcing a national demonstration outside the Immigration Removal Centre’s main gates on Saturday 26th November 2005. Close Campsfield Campaign demonstrators will be assembling at 12 noon, in Langford Lane, Kidlington near Oxford. Speakers will include former detainees Patricia Mukandara,...