Monthly Archives: August 2020
IRAN’S Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif defiantly addressed reporters on the sidelines of a meeting of the Iranian cabinet in Tehran on August 12, 2020. Iran is firmly confident that a US resolution seeking to extend the arms embargo against the Islamic Republic indefinitely will not be adopted by the...
SEATTLE’S chief of police has thrown in the towel and quit on the same day that the city council voted to reduce the police budget and lay off police officers. Seattle has been one of President Donald Trump’s key battlegrounds in his war to get his supporters to confront and...
THE FIGHT to defend the jobs, pay and conditions of the 70,000 workers employed at Heathrow Airport has now reached its decisive hour. On 5th August British Airways sacked its 42,000 employees, notifying them that some may be allowed to return to work if they sign new contracts by 31st...
OFFICIAL figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released yesterday show that gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 20.4% in the three months to June this year – the biggest quarterly decline since records began in 1955. This followed a decline of 2.2% in the first three months of...
THE NUMBER of jobs collapsed by 220,000 on the quarter, said the Office for National Statistics yesterday – the largest quarterly decrease since May to July 2009 at the peak of the financial crisis after the worldwide banking crash of 2007/8 – while those on zero-hours contracts has risen...
TERRIBLE recent news of retail closures and job cuts across Britain’s high streets prove the truth of the dire warnings that the CWU (Communications Workers Union) has raised about the damage being done to the Crown Post Office network over the past few years. ‘Sadly, over the past few weeks,...
CONGRATULATIONS to President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus. He received over 80 per cent of the vote in the Belarus presidential election and saw off the western imperialist-backed challenger Svetlana Tikhanovskaya – who received just 9.9 per cent. Lukashenko has commented on the large-scale street protests that took place in the...
‘WAGE theft is flourishing in Australian universities, with at least three elite institutions in the midst of underpayment scandals!’ says the National Education Union (NTEU). The union announced last Friday that it is ‘ramping up calls to increase penalties for employers who steal from their workforce and give unions greater...
YESTERDAY the Tory government started to make good its pledge to mobilise the full might of its state armed forces against a handful of desperate men, women and children attempting to cross the Channel in rubber dinghies. The RAF confirmed that its Atlas surveillance aircraft was utilised to support a...
A DEFIANT meeting of Alpha catering workers was held yesterday midday at Cranford Park, Heathrow. The workers unanimously dismissed Alpha Catering’s plan to cut the hours of its 1,298 employees down from 40-hours-a-week to just 20-hours – and impose a massive wage cut. Unite officer Tracy Bent told the assembled workers:...
HILLINGDON TUC is holding a ‘Stop the BA Jobs Massacre’ Rally in Defence of Jobs at 12 noon in Cranford Park, near Heathrow Airport today. The rally is taking place immediately following an 11am Unite meeting of aviation catering supplier workers in the same location, where 3,000 workers are facing...
MORE THAN 10,000 nurses, other NHS workers, trade unionists and supporters marched from St James’s Park to Parliament Square on Saturday on a demonstration called by the NHS Workers say No to Pay Inequality group. It was part of a nationwide protest where thousands of nurses demonstrated all over the...
PM BORIS JOHNSON has said that there is a ‘moral duty’ to get all children back into schools in England next month. Writing in The Mail on Sunday, he said it was the ‘national priority’. A government source said that in the event of future stricter local lockdowns, the PM’s...
A BLEAK day for staff ‘forced out by company greed’ will scar spiteful BA indefinitely the Unite union said yesterday, It added: ‘On the day that more than 4,000 staff are being forced to leave British Airways and the remaining workforce will discover their intended fate, their union, Unite, has...
THE UNI Global Union has condemned ‘in the strongest terms’ the labelling of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) as a terrorist organisation – and is demanding an end to the persecution of trades unionists and activists in Zimbabwe. ZCTU was branded a terrorist organisation by Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU-PF...
THE LEBANESE bankers’ state has collapsed, undermined by the worldwide capitalist crisis which has plunged the country into a desperate situation of bankruptcy, mass unemployment, low wages and pauperisation, with the masses permanently in the streets calling for the state to be smashed by a revolution. Lebanese capitalism is rotten-ripe...
THE BBC has threatened pensioners with bailiffs if they don’t pay the licence fee, after spending £38m on 800 staff to enforce collection. Bailiffs will be sent into their homes to seize and sell elderly people’s possessions if ministers decide to support replacing the criminal sanction for licence-fee evasion with...
‘THE SOUTH African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) founding congress in April 2017 warned our members, and the entire country, that both of the ANC’s contending factions were corrupt in varying degrees’. SAFTU’s warning was recalled and re-issued last Monday, August 3rd. It went on to advise both members and all...
AS THE END of the Tory furlough scheme looms, the reality of millions of workers being thrown on the scrapheap in the coming months is causing fear amongst the bourgeoisie and the trade union bureaucracy and a massive tide of anger in the working class. In an effort to dampen...
OVER 600 British Airways workers demonstrated outside Heathrow airport yesterday. 42,000 were sacked that day by BA management and will only be re-employed if they sign new contracts on very different and much worse terms and conditions. They assembled at Tarmac Way car park where they gathered before setting off to...
THE ZIMBABWE Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) has vowed to continue mobilising workers to protest until the government addresses their legitimate grievances. In a statement on Sunday, ZCTU president Peter Mutasa said the ZANU PF-led government is now behaving like the racist Rhodesian and Apartheid governments by seeking to kill...
ON TUESDAY the price of gold hit a record high of $2,000 (£1,530) an ounce, an increase of more than 30% this year. According to analysts at the Bank of America, gold prices will surge by a further 50% to $3,000 an ounce in the next 18 months. The significance for...
FROM TODAY all 42,000 British Airways workers who have not signed up for voluntary redundancy will be regarded by BA as being willing to accept new contracts on September 1st! This act of dictatorship is taking place while BA workers are protesting against plans by the company to cut up...
LEBANON’S Foreign Minister Nassif Hitti submitted his resignation to Prime Minister Hassan Diab on Monday in protest at what he described as the government’s mishandling of the financial crisis. ‘Given the absence of an effective will to achieve structural, comprehensive reform which our society and the international community have urged...
THE LEADER of the Unite trade union, Len McCluskey, said on Monday that the deal offered to British Airways’ pilots would be acceptable to tens of thousands of Unite crew and staff members currently threatened with drastic ‘fire and rehire’ proposals by BA’s chief Willie Walsh. Speaking on BBC Radio...
A DANGEROUS phone triage scheme for A&E at Wales’ largest hospital is to be launched tomorrow in which patients are expected to ring before turning up. Their call will be answered by a receptionist rather than a medical professional, then they will be ‘assessed’ over the phone as to...
THE UNION Unite claimed yesterday that the deal offered to British Airways’ pilots would be acceptable to tens of thousands of its cabin crew and staff members currently threatened with drastic ‘fire and rehire’ proposals. The pilots ‘deal’ however is an atrocious sell out! It means there will be a temporary...
WASHINGTON’S already tense relationship with the 82,000-strong Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces militia coalition suffered a major blow in January after PMF deputy commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was assassinated in Baghdad in a US drone strike alongside Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani. The Trump administration’s only interest in Iraq is to loot...
THE TORY defence secretary Ben Wallace has been ordered by a judge to come up with an explanation as to why the British government has deliberately withheld evidence that indicates UK special forces troops executed 33 civilians in Afghanistan in 2011. The court gave Wallace until the autumn to explain...
A unit of the British Army’s Special Air Service (SAS) has been accused of carrying out night missions in which they executed civilians in Afghan villages between 2010 and 2013. According to court documents the SAS unit killed over 33 Afghan people in 11 different night raids on homes. The evidence had...
THE NATIONAL Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu) has called on health staff to stay away from work on 28th August to protest against the lack of PPE (personal protective equipment) provided to frontline workers and against daily victimisation experienced at work. Frustrated and disgruntled, Nehawu has put plans...
THE Unite general secretary Len McCluskey has urged BA to step back from its ‘opportunistic fire and rehire’ plans, which will send thousands of dedicated employees to the dole queue. McCluskey said: ‘There can be no doubt that this crisis is having a profound impact on the aviation sector … ‘Given...
‘ENOUGH is Enough,’ chanted a rally of 500 angry NHS workers outside Downing Street on Wednesday night. They are angry that they have been excluded from the public sector pay increase and are demanding a 15 per cent pay rise and an end to public sector pay inequality. The rally was...
THE US GROSS domestic product (GDP) in the biggest economy in the capitalist world, has plunged by a titanic 32.9% in the second quarter, from April to June, figures released yesterday show. The economy contracted more than in the worldwide banking crash of 2007/8, more than the Black Monday stock...
AN outbreak of coronavirus has left Surrey firefighters struggling to maintain fire cover after their brigade management failed to properly implement vital health and safety measures, says the Fire Brigades Union (FBU). As many as seven fire engines have been unavailable at any one time from the outbreak – 30%...