Monthly Archives: June 2007
ALMOST two years after over 700 Gate Gourmet, Heathrow workers were sacked and locked out by the Texas Pacific equity capitalist group, the Gate Gourmet Sacked Workers are organising a lobby of the Biennial Conference of the TGWU from 8am on Monday July 2, outside the Brighton Conference...
‘THIS has been the best-supported strike I’ve ever seen,’ CWU General Secretary, Billy Hayes told striking postal workers in Peckham yesterday. This was after the membership of the CWU showed by their almost 100 per cent support for the strike action that they understood the gravity of the attack on...
YESTERDAY’s 24 hour strike of CWU postal workers was 100 per cent, and massively powerful. Everywhere pickets told News Line that what they wanted to see was action by the whole public sector to defeat the privatisation plans of the bosses and the government to save hundreds of thousands...
‘THIS has been the best-supported strike I’ve ever seen,’ CWU General Secretary Billy Hayes told striking postal workers on the picket line at Mandela Way in south-east London yesterday morning. He added: ‘It’s been a fantastic day for the union and I think we’re going to win this.’ Hayes continued: ‘There...
A delegation of six Chagos Islanders yesterday handed in to 10, Downing Street, two petition letters addressed to new prime minister Brown. Delegation leader, Hengride Permal, chair of the Chagos Islands Community Association, told News Line afterwards: ‘We are hoping Mr Brown will agree to meet us now that Blair...
‘OUR members are eager to make their feelings felt and ready to strike Friday,’ a Communication Workers Union (CWU) spokeswoman told News Line yesterday on the eve of today’s 24-hour action by 160,000 postal workers. The CWU spokeswoman added: ‘Members will be out from 3am tomorrow. ‘They are disappointed that...
COMPLEX and fragmented arrangements for running the privatised ‘London Rail’ franchise will make it ‘more difficult to manage operationally and safely’, with potentially disastrous consequences, according to leading rail-safety expert, Peter Rayner. At least eight components will be involved in running ‘London Rail’ – two responsible for signalling, two...
GORDON Brown launched his government of national unity yesterday by giving ex-Tory Sean Woodward a job in the cabinet (he defected from the Tories in 1999), and by having discussions with Shirley Williams. This is far from being a government of national unity. After the Lib Dem...
ELEVEN school dinner ladies and men from Haggerston school in Hackney, east London, went on strike yesterday against poverty pay. They were joined by over a hundred school students who flooded the gates in support. School teachers refused to cross the picket lines despite warnings from their own union,...
WORKERS who headed to New Orleans in 2005 to help rebuild the Hurricane Katrina-devastated city were abused and exploited, according to a report by Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) and testimony from worker groups at a House hearing today. Ted Smukler, the IWJ public policy director who testified at the hearing by the House...
A CALL for ‘appropriate industrial action to stop the redundancy of its members’ was made to BMA representatives at the BMA’s Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) yesterday. Proposing Motion 393, from Enfield and Haringey and the London Regional Forum, Mrs A Athow, Enfield and Haringey, applauded the fight put up by...
A DELEGATION of Chagos Islanders from Crawley will be delivering a letter to the new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street this Friday at 3pm. Last May 23 the Court of Appeal found against the Blair government’s attempt to use the Royal prerogative to dump an earlier High...
THOUSANDS of Palestinian professional workers have demonstrated their unequivocal support for the legitimate PNA government under Premier Ismail Haniya, and denounced PNA chief Mahmud Abbas's ‘hasty’ and ‘unconstitutional’ decrees. The professional workers support was evident by the massive rally they held in Gaza city where thousands of teachers,...
MASSIVE NATO firepower is killing hundreds of Afghan civilians, as British forces in Helmand province battle with Taleban fighters seeking to bring back to power the former government of Mullah Omar. The slaughter of innocent civilians has reached the point where the puppet president of Afghanistan, Karzai, has had to...
AT a stormy morning session of the BMA Annual Representative Meeting yesterday, Birmingham BMA demanded the resignation of the chairman and deputy chairman of the Junior Doctors Committee (JDC). Motion 595 from Birmingham division stated: ‘In the light of their failure to honour the commitment given to the JDC,...
MYRIAM Luz Triana is the National Finance Secretary and head of women’s affairs at the Colombian General Workers’ Confederation, the CGT. She tells the ITUC international trade union federation how, in spite of the anti-union violence, including many murders, the CGT manages to assist the least advantaged workers, such...
The BMA leadership was defeated yesterday when the association’s Annual Representative Meeting overwhelmingly carried Motion 65 against the purchaser-provider split in the NHS. This split is central to the BMA’s Green Paper report ‘A rational way forward for the NHS in England’, and vital for the establishment of a health...
TRUE to form the private equity capitalist groups Permira and CVC having acquired the prestigious AA motoring group with the help of huge borrowings from the banks, have through savage attacks on AA workers paid back the bankers, and have now sold the AA to Saga, with the capitalists...
THE British Medical Association’s (BMA) Annual Representative Meeting (ARM), which opens in Torquay today, gathers at a time of unprecedented challenges for the medical profession. As a result of government policies, the key architects of which are Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown, the historic independence of the...
IN a call that will be enthusiastically taken up by the BNP, which champions Christian civilisation, the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, Carey has urged the new Labour Party Premier, Gordon Brown, to introduce much harsher immigration controls in order to protect Britain’s Christian identity. The BNP will understand at once what...
DELEGATES at the UNISON National Delegate Conference in Brighton on Thursday forced a debate on Friday on coordinated action over soon-to-be prime minister Brown’s public sector two per cent pay freeze. They spoke to News Line about the leadership’s attempt to gag conference and other issues they are concerned about. Surrey...
‘I send this message to Gordon Brown. We are prepared to fight. We are prepared to strike. And we are going to win,’ General Secretary Dave Prentis told delegates on the final day of the UNISON Annual Conference in Brighton yesterday. He said this after delegates had, on Thursday morning,...
‘I SEND this message to Gordon Brown. We are prepared to fight. We are prepared to strike. And we are going to win,’ General Secretary Dave Prentis told delegates on the final day of the UNISON Annual Conference in Brighton yesterday. Prentis made this declaration after the delegates had referred...
The Bush/Blair ‘war on terror’ has made conditions for asylum-seekers tougher in many countries, the UN refugee agency has warned. Speaking on World Refugee Day on Wednesday, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) head Antonio Guterres said some nations had curbed immigration to the point where refugees were being...
UNISON’s national delegate conference yesterday opened with a row over the refusal of the Standing Orders Committee to allow a debate on emergency motions calling for coordinated industrial action against Gordon Brown’s two per cent pay freeze on the public sector. Standing Orders Committee ruled that the motions from Darlington,...
THE Communication Workers Union (CWU) is to take national strike action on June 29. It will be followed by more strike action if management does not meet the demands of the CWU and its members. Dave Ward, CWU Deputy General Secretary announcing the strike action in Royal Mail yesterday, said: ‘First...
THE CWU postal workers trade union has been forced to take strike action, very much against the wishes of the CWU leadership, by a Royal Mail management and a government that is determined to privatise the Royal Mail and the Post Office, casualise the workforce and destroy the CWU...
SIR SHERARD Cowper-Coles, the high-flying diplomat who is Ambassador in Afghanistan, told BBC Radio 4 yesterday that British forces would have to stay in the country ‘for a very long time’. He said the government ‘should be thinking in terms of decades’. Cowper-Coles claimed that Afghans wanted the imperialists, including...
THE GMB general workers union yesterday called on parliament to halt ‘tax privileges’ to venture capitalists and establish the amount of unfunded pension liabilities ‘dumped by private equity’. The union’s general secretary, Paul Kenny, gave oral evidence to the House of Commons Treasury Committee on ‘the private equity industry’. The...
‘WE’RE sticking up for members who are the victims at the sharp end of what is a growing scandal,’ TGWU deputy-leader Jack Dromey said yesterday, in evidence to MPs on the House of Commons Treasury Committee, scrutinising the behaviour of private equity firms. Dromey told the committee: ‘One practical example...
Yesterday’s House of Lords judgement fails vulnerable older people, says Help the Aged. The charity was responding to the decision by the House of Lords in YL v Birmingham City Council and Others. This was a legal challenge, brought on behalf of an 83-year-old Alzheimer’s sufferer, who was asked to leave her care home because...
‘We demand fairness and justice for our members – and we are prepared to fight and, if necessary strike, to get it,’ UNISON general secretary Dave Prentis pledged in his keynote speech to the union’s national delegate conference in Brighton yesterday. However, he said that ‘we will work with Gordon...
Hamas yesterday accused the West of playing politics with Palestinian aid after the US and EU resumed assistance to the Abbas appointed emergency government in the West Bank while Gaza remains under Israeli blockade. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said: ‘By announcing their political and financial support for the...
CHANCELLOR Gordon Brown told police chiefs yesterday that he will do ‘everything to give you the resources’ and ‘we will not shirk from giving you the powers you need’. Addressing the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), in Manchester, the next Labour leader and future Prime Minister paid tribute to...
Labour deputy leader contender Jon Cruddas is leading a private members debate in Westminster Hall at the House of Commons, on, ‘Regularisation of Migrant Workers’ today. The debate is part of the ‘Strangers into Citizens’ campaign. Campaigners are holding a vigil this morning outside the House of Commons from 7:45am-9:00am,...
The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) this morning accused the government of giving management consultants a licence to print money at the taxpayer’s expense. The civil servants’ union was responding to today’s report by MPs on the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee into the use of consultants in...
THE landslide vote for Sarkozy that was to get him off on a flying start as the ‘Saviour of France’ for his war against the working class and the trade unions was a vote that never materialised. French voters stayed at home with only 60 per cent turning out to...
YAHYA Musa, a deputy from the Hamas movement, has said that the decree issued by President Abbas that stipulates the suspension of articles in the basic law comes within the framework of violating the law and is tantamount to a crime against the Palestinian political order and legal...
YESTERDAY President Abbas decreed the ending of parliamentary rule in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as he appointed an illegal government headed by Salam Fayyad, a former employee of the World Bank and the IMF, and a favourite of the US government, and declared the Hamas military...
PRESIDENT ABBAS, now ruling by decree is set to establish a national salvation front government, without any Hamas members, and without any reference to the Palestinian parliament. The United States and Israel have already decided that they will recognise such a government. The Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says prospects for...
Hamas yesterday condemned as an illegal ‘coup’ the formation by decree of an ‘emergency government’ by Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas. Hamas said Abbas had suspended a number of articles in the Palestinian basic law that ‘disallow him of pursuing his wrong steps in forming an emergency government without approval...