Monthly Archives: December 2018
THE South African Federation of Trade Unions – and unions affiliated with the federation – has applied pressure to companies employing their members, with unified demonstrations highlighting workers struggles. The federation has put its weight behind members of the Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU) and the National Union of...
NEW YEAR STATEMENT BY THE NEWS LINE EDITORIAL BOARD THE News Line Editorial Board sends revolutionary greetings for 2019 to all our readers, to the working class, youth and poor of the world. We especially congratulate the people of Syria for their victory against the hordes of Islamists, backed by...
LABOUR activists, community allies and family members came out in force to support UFCW Local 1400 members at Saskatoon Co-op on December 20. They were calling on Co-op CEOs Grant Wicks and Scott Banda to ‘Stop the Greed’ and negotiate a fair contract as part of a major solidarity...
HANAN ASHRAWI, a Member of the PLO Executive Committee, has strongly condemned the so-called Israeli Civil Administration’s decision to grant the approval for the establishment of 1,451 new settlement units in the occupied West Bank and to advance plans for the construction of 837 additional units. ‘Today’s announcement once again...
UNITE has called for urgent reforms into how the deaths of workers and members of the public killed and injured in road accidents involving lorries are recorded, after research found a 50 per cent increase in lorry driver deaths. Following a Freedom of Information request Unite, which represents thousands...
WITH the victory of the Syrian people, led by President Assad over the reactionary Islamists and their US-UK and French backers, the Arab revolution is on the march once again. Hezbollah has announced that if Israel invades the Lebanon they will be beaten back by the Lebanese people, with severe...
IT IS almost exactly one year since the dramatic collapse into bankruptcy and compulsory liquidation of the giant outsourcing and construction company Carillion. At the time it was described by analysts as a ‘Lehman Brothers’ event for the British construction industry and the entire Tory privatisation programme of handing public...
THE SOUTH African Federation of Trade Unions – and unions affiliated with the federation – applied pressure to companies employing their members last Thursday, with unified demonstrations highlighting worker struggles. The federation has put its weight behind members of the Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU) and the National Union...
THE Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) has slammed Israel’s new land grab plans, urging the International Criminal Court (ICC) to speed up its investigation into the regime’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and apartheid against the Palestinian nation. In a statement released on Wednesday, PLO Secretary General Saeb Erekat warned against...
AT LEAST 27 Palestinians were injured, including 14 with Israeli forces’ live fire, while others sustained rubber-coated steel bullets and suffered tear-gas suffocation as Israeli forces suppressed the 21st weekly shoreline march in the northern besieged Gaza Strip, on Monday afternoon. Palestinian protesters gathered at the northern borders of the...
JUST TEN YEARS after the 2008 great banking disaster began – with the working class still paying the price for it with massively savaged living standards – Wall Street has just had its biggest fall since 1931, during the ‘Great Depression’! Lehman Brothers held over $600,000,000,000 in assets in...
CLASHES have erupted between protesters and security forces in Kasserine city in Tunisia following the funeral of a journalist who had set himself on fire over harsh living conditions. ‘For the sons of Kasserine, who have no means of subsistence, today I start a revolution. I am going to set...
A FRENCH delegation, headed by former transport minister Thierry Mariani, has met with Syrian government officials in Damascus and condemned France’s hostile policies toward the Arab country. The delegation met with Syria’s Speaker of the People’s Assembly Hammoudah Sabbagh who stressed the importance of European delegates visiting the country. The...
GENERAL LORD Dannatt, the chief of the General Staff from 2006-2009, writing in The Daily Telegraph, has bemoaned the ‘national embarrassment of almost biblical proportions’ caused by drone fliers being able to bring Gatwick Airport to a standstill. He says with ‘most of Europe already sniggering at the UK...
THE HAMAS resistance movement says it will not agree to the creation of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip, warning that US President Donald Trump’s so-called ‘deal of the century’ is aimed at the establishment of a Palestinian state in the impoverished coastal enclave only. ‘We reject this deal,...
ANTI-BREXIT Labour MPs have responded with fury to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s insistence on Saturday that it is Labour Party policy to leave the European Union. In an interview printed in The Guardian newspaper on Saturday, Corbyn stated that Labour will continue with Brexit if the party wins a...
TRADE unions the GMB and the IWGB last Wednesday won crucial Court of Appeal decisions, agreed by both the Employment Tribunal and the Employment Appeal Tribunal, that Uber drivers are workers. It means that the drivers cannot legally be defined just as ‘contractors’ in order to be denied basic workers’...
FIVE hundred and ninety-seven homeless people died on the streets of Britain last year, up from 482 the year before – in fact homeless deaths in the UK have increased every year since 2014. The figures for 2018 are not available yet, but one thing is for sure, as the...
THE FIRE Brigades Union (FBU) has won a landmark ruling in its dispute with the government over changes made to firefighters’ pensions in 2015. The long and bitter industrial dispute, which included strike action, means that firefighters on the new scheme will have to be put back on...
THE ASSOCIATION of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) have blamed bosses at Sibanye-Stillwater of trying to interdict its protected strike, insisting the company has used underhand tactics to discredit the labour action from the outset. This was as Sibanye on Tuesday filed an application at the Labour Court in Johannesburg...
THE LATEST poll of Russian people has revealed that the number who want a return of the USSR has set a new record. The Levada-Centre has conducted a survey of 1,600 people from 136 towns and villages across Russia and their latest poll revealed that a massive 66% answered ‘yes’...
IN THE WAKE of the Grenfell Tower fire, you would assume that fire safety checks would have increased. However, over the last seven years, fire safety checks across England have actually plummeted by 42%. In a new report by the HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) says...
‘THE FOUNDATIONAL myth of the academies programme – that it would boost educational attainment among young people from disadvantaged backgrounds – must now be laid to rest as just that: a myth.’ Dr Mary Bousted, Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union, was commenting yesterday on the Sutton...
IN their latest manoeuvre to dump the 2016 referendum result to leave the EU, the right-wing of the Labour Party are now manoeuvring to dump not just Brexit but Corbyn as well. The latest round of plotting by Blairite MPs and Labour anti-Brexit ‘activists’ around the group ‘Labour for a...
ISRAELI forces on Wednesday conducted multiple overnight raids across the West Bank and detained at least 28 Palestinians, said the Palestine Prisoner’s Society (PPS). Israeli military police detained at least 15 Palestinians after storming their houses in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of al-Eissawiya. In Bethlehem district, Israeli forces detained two...
THE CANADIAN Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) filed a constitutional challenge last week to block legislation ordering them back to work, passed by the country’s Liberal government three weeks ago. The CUPW has been on a rolling strike since late October. On November 27, over 50,000 postal workers in Canada...
IT IS NOW crystal clear that PM May continues to rule the UK because the Labour opposition, led by Jeremy Corbyn, refuses to put down a motion of no confidence in her government. Speaking on Monday, May announced that she would reschedule the vote on her Brexit plan for the...
POLICE are using cameras to scan the faces of tens of thousands of London Christmas shoppers, testing facial recognition technology, in a move that was attacked by civil liberties campaigners as an ‘authoritarian surveillance tool’. The trial – which took place over December 17-18 in Soho, Piccadilly Circus, and Leicester...
TENS of thousands of Palestinians have attended a huge rally in the besieged Gaza Strip to mark the 31st anniversary of the establishment of the Hamas resistance movement. Hamas was established in 1987 soon after the first Palestinian Intifada or uprising broke out against the Israeli occupation. The movement...
CAPITALISTS are quaking in their boots at the prospect of the next worldwide banking crash. All eyes are on Italy going the same way as Greece, drowning in a sea of debt, triggering a European-wide financial collapse. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), in its latest report, rang alarm...
‘THIS REPORT does not call for zero-hours contracts to be banned! Zero-hours workers are amongst the most exploited in this country, and the most unscrupulous bosses are still going to go ahead and do what they currently do, they are not going to be deterred by these changes,’ Christina...
‘THE poor of our country are suffering! A human calamity is unfolding! The difference is that this is not making headlines because the poor who are suffering are working class and black. According to police up to 13,000 so called ‘service delivery’ protests take place a year. The only...
PM May yesterday attacked former Labour PM Tony Blair accusing him of ‘undermining’ her Brexit talks by calling for a second referendum. In fact Blair’s intervention is a stroke of good fortune for the beleaguered Tory leader, whose mission always was to ‘leave’ the EU but leave the...
EIGHTEEN months after the Grenfell Inferno over 600 people turned out on the Silent March for the Grenfell victims and survivors. A delegation of students from Birmingham who came on the last Silent March returned to show their solidarity. Emma Burgoyne-Williams, one of the students said: ‘We are here...
‘THE SOUTH African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) salutes the workers of France who have been protesting in their hundreds of thousands against President Emmanuel Macron’s “government of the rich”. ‘There have been anti-government protests at more than 2,000 different locations since the movement broke out in...
EUROPEAN Union leaders have said the Brexit withdrawal agreement with the UK is ‘not open for renegotiation’, after appeals from PM Theresa May. She repeatedly declared that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ and now wants any deal that she can get her hands on. With her...
A NATIONAL Education Union snapshot poll of 1,026 teachers in England paints a harrowing picture of the increase in poverty seen in our schools and the daily impact it is having on children and young people. 46% of teachers confirm that holiday hunger has got worse compared to three...
Israeli forces raided the al-Quds University, on Wednesday, in Abu Dis village, south east of the central occupied West Bank district of Jerusalem. Local sources confirmed that a large number of heavily armed Israeli forces raided the campus, ransacking several faculties and offices, causing material damages. Israeli forces searched student...
THERESA May ‘survived’ the vote of no confidence in her leadership of the Tory Party by 200 votes to 117 on Wednesday night – a feat only achieved after she gave the promise that she would stand down as leader before the next general election. To describe her victory as...
CLADDING which burst into flames up the side of Grenfell Tower ‘could have been put out with a simple extinguisher’, cladding company Arconic has outrageously told the public inquiry, to the anger of survivors. Arconic is the company that made the Reynobond aluminium composite panels fixed to the side of...
The Bangladesh government is using proceedings before the Supreme Court of Bangladesh to prevent the Accord on workers’ safety from operating, thereby putting safety at risk, IndustriALL and UNI Global Unions warned in a joint statement on Monday. The Accord has been instrumental in radically improving the safety of garment...
ON MONDAY night, French President Emmanuel Macron used a televised address to the nation to try and head off the insurrectionary wave sweeping the country. Macron’s boast that he would crush the masses has turned to ashes in his mouth and on Monday he made a humiliating climbdown, promising a...
STRIP private outsourcing giant Capita of its NHS contract, doctors’ union the BMA demanded after the shocking news broke yesterday that more than 3,500 women have not received correspondence about cervical screenings, putting them at risk of undiagnosed cervical cancer. This is after a fundamental error by Capita, the company...