Monthly Archives: May 2013
THE Unite trade union has condemned RBS for ‘brutal and irresponsible’ behaviour by announcing 1,400 job cuts just one day after figures were released that showed UK unemployment rose by 15,000. The cuts are part of a two-year programme within the UK retail business, with the details of 700 of...
THOUSANDS of mine workers have downed tools at South Africa’s Marikana Lonmin mine after an AMCU union leader, Mawethu Steven, was shot dead at the weekend, along with a number of other workers who took part in the recent strike movement. This movement was met by the South African...
DOCTORS yesterday hit back at Tory Health Secretary Hunt, who had tried to claim that changes to GP contracts were to blame for A&E departments being ‘overloaded’. Leading BMA member Anna Athow told News Line: ‘The “A&E crisis” is no mystery. Successive governments have been re-organising the NHS to...
FOXCONN'S promise of facilitating a democratic trade union is only for their marketing image, says a research team based in several universities in the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong. It is a faked response to their customers’ concerns say Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM). A series of...
EVEN the Human Rights Watch group – veterans of the struggle to remove and liquidate the Gadaffi regime in Libya, and now immersed in the follow-up taking place in Syria – have had to separate themselves from the spectacle of a ‘rebel’ leader cutting out a Syrian soldier’s heart...
WORKERS from electricity companies from around the country went on strike in Egypt on Sunday. Workers Media Coordinator at the Egyptian Centre for Economic and Social Rights (ECESR) Dalia Moussa said that the workers have been treated unequally and have complained of increasing corruption in the Ministry of Electricity and...
Over 15,000 teachers and their supporters responded to the call issued by the Executive of the State Secondary Teachers’ Trade Union OLME and staged a rally on Monday evening outside the union’s offices, and a short march to the Vouli (Greek parliament). The action was in protest against the government’s...
THERE is a huge crisis in A&E departments in English and Welsh hospitals. Emergency patients brought to A&E departments by ambulance frequently have to wait outside for hours, waiting for A&E to accept them. When they do get in, many have to wait more than four hours before a decision...
For the first time since the process of closing accident and emergency units in hospitals up and down the country was started by the last Labour government, and driven forward by the coalition, statistics about the effect closures have on patient mortality have been produced. Until now every closure has...
‘The UK is responsible for one in five of the world’s tax havens – that’s more than any other country,’ stated Tax Justice Policy Adviser Mike Lewis of the charity ActionAid yesterday. New ActionAid research tracking the offshore structures of the FTSE100 found that the presence of the UK’s largest companies...
FIRE Brigades Union reps met yesterday to prepare for a national strike ballot over changes to the firefighters’ pension scheme. The FBU National Conference begins in Blackpool tomorrow, where delegates are expected to vote overwhelmingly for an immediate ballot for industrial action against the government’s proposals to increase the normal...
SENIOR nurses have issued a warning about unsafe staffing levels on hospital wards in England. The Safe Staffing Alliance, which includes the Royal College of Nursing, Unison and the Patients Association, says safe nursing levels have been ignored for too long. The Alliance, which also includes a number of directors of...
A GRANDMOTHER, who because of the Bedroom Tax, had to pay an extra £20 a week, has thrown herself in front of a motorway lorry after leaving a note blaming the Cameron-led coalition government and its Bedroom Tax policy for her decision to end her life. Stephanie Bottrill...
THE death toll from the collapse of the Dhaka building housing garment factories that workers were ordered back into, despite warnings, reached over 1,121 on Friday. Rescuers pulled out 28 more bodies, which saw the total death toll reach 1,121 with the new finds made 16 days into the rescue...
THE upcoming International Nurse’s Day in South Africa, on Sunday May 12, will see the life-saving profession hailed as quiet heroines and heroes who save lives while working long hours for low pay. The NEHAWU nurses union commented: ‘We salute these courageous and compassionate workers who do a sterling job...
TUBE drivers, cleaners and TFL electricians and engineers have voted overwhelmingly for strike action in a series of disputes over attacks on agreements and working conditions, pay and threatened redundancies. The RMT yesterday confirmed a massive nine to one vote in favour of strike action by Train Operators and Instructor...
THE Greek Statistics Authority (ELSTAT) has announced that unemployment reached 27% last February, while youth unemployment (15-24 years old) reached 64.2%, from 54.1% in the same month last year. ELSTAT said that 1,320,189 workers were unemployed last February in Greece, 245,021 more from February 2012 and 11,663 more from...
HEZBOLLAH Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah, said yesterday that Israel had raided the Syrian capital’s suburbs because it had a number of targets; one of them was getting Syria out of the conflict with it and besieging the resistance. Nasrallah added: ‘The Syrian first response was telling Israel that it will...
DAVID Prior, the new head of the NHS regulatory body the Care Quality Commission, nailed his colours firmly to the Tory mast of privatising the health service and a mass closure of hospitals, in his first main speech delivered to the private health ‘think tank’, the King’s Fund,...
PRESIDENT Bashar al Assad has outlined to Lebanese visitors that he is seeking a ‘strategic response’ to the recent Israeli air strike on the outskirts of Damascus which killed and injured up to 500 people. He told them ‘Syria could “easily” respond to Israeli air strikes by firing...
PRESIDENT Nicos Anastasiades on Sunday described his three-day working visit to Israel as the ‘start of a new era in bilateral relations’ saying he is ‘absolutely satisfied’ with the talks he has had with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Anastasiades said, according to an official press release, that he was ...
IN its hour of need – with Syria resisting massively the attempt at ‘regime change’ organised by the US-UK-Turkey axis, and carried out by their Islamist and Al-Qaeda foot soldiers – the imperialist powers have turned to the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow to see if it can rescue...
DESPITE the urging of the Cosatu trade union federation to end their bus strike, thousands of striking bus drivers marched through the streets of Johannesburg on Tuesday morning to demand a wage increase. ‘Our members came in droves to make employers aware that we mean business. ‘We...
VICIOUS attacks on workers, especially immigrant workers, were at the centre of the Tory-LibDem Coalition’s Queen’s Speech delivered at the State Opening of Parliament yesterday. The Queen outlining the extremist agenda said: ‘My government’ will introduce an immigration bill which will ‘ensure that this country attracts people...
THE world capitalist crisis is turning the UK into a country composed of a relative handful of the very, very rich, a middle and working class that are struggling desperately to try to keep their heads above the waterline, and millions of the poor who have already sunk deep...
A bitter labour dispute on Northwest docks escalated on Saturday as Columbia Grain Inc. locked out Portland longshore workers, accusing them of obstructing exports by ‘gaming the system’. The lockout, which began at 6am at Columbia’s Port of Portland grain elevator, compounds a similar action at United Grain Corp. in...
The crisis of European capitalism is so severe that it has driven the bourgeoisie to tear at each other’s throats in a frenzy of blame over who is responsible for the collapse of the eurozone. Ten days ago, a document from the French government was leaked to the press which...
LAND swaps should be a result of negotiations with Israel rather than an ‘advance payment’ given by Arab states on behalf of the Palestinians, a member of Fatah’s Central Committee said on Thursday. ‘Our stance (as Palestinians) is very clear. We want a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with...
SYRIA’S neighbours condemned Sunday’s Israeli air strikes on Damascus yesterday. The United Nations confirmed that, far from the Syrian government forces using Sarin and other chemical weapons, it is the imperialist-backed ‘rebels’ who have been found to have done so. Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi asserted that this...
IN LINE with Obama’s policy of ‘leading from the rear’ (a tactic learnt after receiving some very, very harsh lessons in Iraq and Afghanistan), the US ruling class has unleashed its Israeli ‘mad dog’ to launch its second rocket attack on Syria in a week, risking the outbreak of...
ONE in five UK households borrowed money or used savings to cover food costs in April, the latest Which? monthly insight tracker survey has found. The survey of 2,000 people, which focused on spending and behaviour, suggests the equivalent of five million households used credit cards, overdrafts or savings to...
ON Workers Day May 1 the ‘Marikana’ Evictions took place. These residents of Philippi East, a growing township sandwiched between Nyanga, Mitchell’s Plain, Khayelitsha and Philippi, were evicted. Desperate as they were, they contacted Abahlali baseMjondolo activist Cindy Ketani, in the hope that this movement that supports those...
EX-PATIENTS and their families were angry yesterday to hear that the local clinical commissioning group (CCG) has only suspended referring NHS patients to the private BMI Mount Alvernia Hospital in Guildford, Surrey. The hospital has suspended children’s surgery after a damning report that cited ‘life-threatening’ failings. The last inspection took place...
THE Inquiry into the police massacre of 34 Marikana miners at the Lonmin pit and the wounding of hundreds more is continuing. On Monday, the inquiry heard that at least one very senior police officer could see no way of proceeding with the 16 August 2012 police operation without the...
SENIOR academics confirmed yesterday that they are set to shut down the University of London Union, recommending that ‘ULU in its current form ceases’ from the summer of 2014. The university’s collegiate council, composed of the academic heads of the ‘self-governing’ colleges that make up the University of London, met...
HOMELESS charity Crisis yesterday condemned letters telling tenants in Haringey that ‘social landlord’ Genesis is starting eviction proceedings because it does not think they will be able to afford its rents due to the government’s cap on benefits. The letter from Genesis was in response to welfare cuts in the...
A DAMNING report from the Care Quality Commission into the running of a private hospital has finally emerged in public some four months after the inspection took place. Last January the CQC, following complaints, investigated Mount Alvernia hospital in Surrey, a private hospital run by one of the country’s biggest...
UP TO 10,000 workers trade unionists, students and youth were on the London May Day march from Clerkenwell Green to Trafalgar Square on Wednesday. There were banners from trade unions, trades councils and political parties including Newham NUT, the Shrewsbury Pickets, Greater London Unison, Wandsworth POA, Waltham Forest Unison, London...
ISRAEL’S lead ‘peace negotiator,’ Tzipi Livni, has praised as ‘important’ a concession by the Arab League that Israel and the Palestinians could trade land in a bid to move the peace process forward. Speaking on Israel Army radio last Tuesday, Livni said: ‘This is very good news, it’s definitely an...
OVER 10,000 workers, trades unionists and youth marched from Clerkenwell Green to Trafalgar Square yesterday on May Day. There were banners from trades unions, trades councils and political parties including Newham NUT, the Shrewsbury Pickets, Greater London Unison, Wandsworth POA, Waltham Forest Unison, London BECTU, and Hackney Unison. There were huge...
A ‘blitzkrieg strategy’ was how the bourgeois press dubbed last Monday’s announcement by business minister, Michael Fallon, that he was starting the process of choosing which bank would earn a fortune advising the government on privatising Royal Mail. This refers to the speed in which the coalition is moving to...
A lockout or strike is set to occur June 15 at ExxonMobil’s Baytown, Texas, refinery, chemical plant and laboratory if company management continues to reject contract language that would improve health and safety at the largest petroleum and petrochemical complex in the US, said the United Steelworkers (USW)...
THE News Line Editorial Board sends its revolutionary greetings on this 2013 May Day to the workers and the oppressed nations fighting imperialism throughout the world. We hail the struggle of the Syrian people against intervention by imperialism, the struggle of the Palestinian masses for their state, the struggle of...