Monthly Archives: April 2021
‘A CHINESE mining company is taking over plots of land in South Africa, paying residents small lump sums to give over mining rights to their land. SAFTU (The South African Federation of Trade Unions) learns with disgust the dirty tricks of how the mining company, Nkwe Platinum Limited, is attempting...
LAST WEEK, an explosive letter from 25 senior retired French generals was published in the right-wing Valeurs Actuelles magazine threatening President Macron with an army coup. The letter, which has also been signed by a further up to 7,000 serving or retired army personnel since it was first published on...
ISRAELI authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Tuesday. The finding is based on an overarching Israeli government policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians and grave abuses committed against Palestinians living in the...
YESTERDAY, US president Joe Biden announced to a joint session of Congress his plans to unleash a massive round of government spending amounting to an extra $4 trillion (£2.9 trillion). The two packages are the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan. The American Families Plan, estimated to cost $1.8tn,...
BIOMEDICAL scientists, who have been on the frontline of Covid-19 testing at a Lancashire NHS trust, will stop doing night, weekend and late shifts as part of a month-long strike action over ‘bad faith’ by bosses who reneged on an upgrading pay agreement. Their union Unite warned that the impact...
ON THE eighth anniversary of Rana Plaza on Saturday 24 April, UNI Global Union and IndustriALL demanded fashion brands commit to a new legally-binding global agreement to succeed the Bangladesh Accord, which is due to expire at the end of May. The Accord has transformed fire and building safety in...
AN international leading human rights watchdog, the Human Rights Watch (HRW), has accused the Israeli authorities in a 213-page report titled ‘A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution’ of seeking to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians through grave abuses committed against...
THE UNITE union yesterday launched a nationwide campaign to ‘end the growing practice of fire and rehire’ through a programme of strike action alongside mass leafleting of workplaces. Fire and rehire, which forces workers to accept worse pay and conditions in order to keep their job, has been described as...
AS Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip prepare to vote in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections on May 22, the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) Negotiations Affairs Department has published this article to highlight some issues relating to Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli detention. ‘THE question...
YESTERDAY the Unite union announced it is launching a campaign to end fire and rehire with ‘coordinated strikes and actions across the country’. In a statement Unite said: ‘Workers, trade unionists and supporters around the country will come out on strike, arrange solidarity actions and leaflet workplaces, as pressure mounts...
‘HEADS must roll for the humiliation and misery inflicted on decent, upstanding people,’ the CWU (Communication Workers Union) insisted yesterday. It is demanding criminal investigations into senior Post Office figures who oversaw the criminalisation of hundreds of postmasters, including jailing many of them. This demand comes after 39 postmasters had their...
STATEMENT BY SAFTU ‘BETWEEN the 21st and 23rd of April 2017, 1,500 delegates representing 24 unions with diverse organisational and historic backgrounds, assembled in Ekurhuleni east of Johannesburg, to commit ourselves to rebuilding a progressive trade union movement of South Africa.
During those three days, a baby was born! The name...
THE CWU postal workers trade union yesterday insisted that criminal investigations must take place ‘into senior Post Office figures who oversaw the criminalisation of hundreds of postmasters’. The union is making its demand after 39 postmasters have had their convictions for theft, fraud or false accounting quashed by the Court...
JUDGES have quashed the convictions of 39 former postmasters after the most widespread miscarriage of ruling class justice in the history of UK capitalism. The 39 were convicted of stealing money, and some were imprisoned, after the Post Office installed the Horizon computer system in branches.
The system was flawed but...
‘THERE is no place for famine and starvation in the 21st century,’ teachers representing the National Education Union (NEU) are insisting this week: ‘History will judge us all by the actions we take today.’ Criticising a UK government statement/plan to cut UK international aid from 0.7 to 0.5% of Gross...
TENANTS of the Grenfell Tower warned time and again about the dangerous building they were living in, but their cries for action fell on deaf ears – they were ignored, insulted and made to feel like ‘troublemakers’ and ‘sub-citizens’ the Inquiry heard last week. The Kensington and Chelsea Council’s TMO...
A DAMNING report published yesterday entitled ‘Track and Trace’ by Transparency International has shone a light on the Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) scandal, where at the beginning of the pandemic, the Tory government gave government contracts to all manner of businesses to produce masks, gowns and gloves. A fifth of...
SALARY negotiations between South Africa’s government and public servants for 2021 have gone awry. Trade unions representing public servants have tabled a wage increase proposal of over 7%. Meanwhile, the government is doubling down on a three-year pay freeze. After bending over backwards for public servants in awarding them inflation-busting...
AS THE DATE for the Tory government to end its financial support to British companies looms so the warnings about a cataclysmic crash of ‘zombie’ companies are becoming almost a daily event in the pages of the financial press. Yesterday, the major corporate insolvency company Begbies Traynor issued a ‘Red...
BLAME for the the crash at Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire on Wednesday 12 August 2020, in which three people were killed, has been laid firmly at the door of Network Rail for failing to maintain the area around the track. Train drivers union ASLEF welcomed an interim report by the Rail...
ON SUNDAY night, the investment bankers, venture capitalists and hedge funds, who own the six biggest football clubs in Britain, announced that they were joining with six major European clubs to create a European Super League (ESL). The ESL plan was simplicity itself – create a tiny bubble of 12...
UNITE has reported that bosses at JDE (Jacobs Douwe Egberts) in Banbury will stop workers from taking summer holidays to thwart an overtime ban, starting on 1 May, stepping up the ‘fire and rehire’ dispute that has already sparked outrage. The revelation came on the eve of proposed talks between...
A PROTEST against GP practices being taken over by US health insurance giant Centene Corporation – branded as ‘the accelerating privatisation of the NHS by stealth’ by the union Unite – is being held in London tomorrow (22 April). Campaigners, including members of Doctors in Unite (DiU), will be staging...
PALESTINIAN president Mahmoud Abbas has offered his congratulations to his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad on the annual anniversary of Evacuation Day, the day when the last French soldier left Syria at the end of the French mandate on April 17, 1946. In a telegram, the President expressed his heartfelt wishes...
YOUNG people are bearing the brunt of the jobs crisis. Under 35s accounted for 80% of the 811,000 payroll jobs lost in the UK in the year to March! This was while the unemployment rate dipped to 4.9% in the three months to February – down from 5% previously. Also,...
THE GRENFELL Tower fire Inquiry heard from the residents themselves yesterday including Lee Chapman the secretary of the leaseholders association who had repeatedly raised concerns months before the fire broke out that the building was unsafe. Chapman’s complaints included ‘huge concern’ about gas pipes left exposed in communal areas. But he...
IRAN’S President Hassan Rouhani says the lifting of all US sanctions will create ‘a new atmosphere’ for the Islamic Republic’s economic cooperation with the world. In a meeting with Serbian Foreign Minister Nikola Selakovic in Tehran on Sunday, Rouhani condemned the United States’ illegal sanctions and economic war against the...
The Czech Republic on Saturday expelled 18 Russian diplomats after claiming that two alleged Russian spies were behind a deadly explosion at a Czech ammunition depot in 2014. In addition, the 18 were accused by the Prague authorities of being secret agents also involved in the explosion. The Russian diplomats...
‘TORY SLEAZE is bigger than ever,’ Labour’s Shadow Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster Rachel Reeves said yesterday after senior Tory MP Bernard Jenkin warned that it could bring the Johnson government down. In a lengthy article in yesterday’s Observer newspaper, Jenkin, Chairman of the House of Commons Liaison Committee,...
PALESTINE has called upon the international community as well as signatories to the Geneva Conventions to take on their responsibilities concerning protection of Palestinian detainees being kept in Israeli prisons and detention centres. The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates said in a statement that Israel must be held...
THE NATIONAL Audit Office (NAO) has launched a probe into supply chain finance firm Greensill Capital following its collapse, which threatens to end the UK steel industry. Last month, Greensill appointed Grant Thornton as its administrators, warning that it was in ‘severe financial distress’.
Now the NAO will investigate Greensill’s involvement...
BUS drivers in London have launched a fresh wave of strikes as their union Unite announced further strike action involving bus drivers employed by London United, a subsidiary of the French owned company RATP, in the long-running dispute over pay and attacks on workers’ conditions. Increasing action
Workers at all seven...
SINCE GREENSILL Capital collapsed last month, all that is rotten throughout Parliament has been stirred up and has bubbled to the surface. The collapse of Greensill puts the future of companies like Liberty Steel on a knife edge, threatening thousands of steel jobs. The scandal surrounding Greensill Capital, the role...
A PROTEST of striking Manchester bus drivers took place outside the Mayor’s Office yesterday afternoon, demanding that Andy Burnham takes action to stop the ‘fire and rehire’ policy of their employer Go North West. The drivers are on indefinite strike. They delivered their declarations to London City Hall and the...
THE HOUSING Ombudsman has launched an investigation into damp and mould in buildings – which has shown just how widespread it now is throughout the UK. And following his report about ‘unliveable’ conditions in a number of homes in the London borough of Croydon, ITV News Correspondent Daniel Hewitt says...
ON WEDNESDAY, up to 500 engineers were sacked by British Gas for refusing to sign a scab, wage-cutting new contract under the company’s fire and rehire onslaught on its engineers. These were the workers who took the stand of refusing to sign up to new contracts that would cut wages...
FORTY striking pickets gathered at the Gas Training Centre in Dartford yesterday, to protest against the ‘Fire and Rehire’ policy of Centrica, who now run British Gas. Gary Pearce, the regional gas organiser for the GMB union, told News Line, that all the gas engineers that do not sign the...
RUSSIA will do everything possible to guarantee its security and the safety of its citizens, should the crisis in Ukraine drastically deteriorate. However, Kiev and its Western patrons will bear full responsibility for any escalation, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters on Tuesday.
‘They continue to provide supplies, increasing...
YOUTH unemployment in the UK has shot up over the past year according to the latest research carried out by the Resolution Foundation think tank. Since the start of the pandemic there has been a large increase in unemployment for young people aged 16-24. Workers in the hospitality, retail and entertainments...
Young Socialists and Workers Revolutionary Party present the May Day Rally Saturday, 1st May 1st from 3pm Jail cladding bosses for Grenfell deaths!
Stop fire and rehire now with a general strike!
Bring the Tories down!
Socialism is the only answer! Assembly location:
St Marks Park (Kensington Memorial Park),
St Marks Road, North...
Saturday May 1st 3.00pm
BRITISH Gas is to sack its entire 10,000-strong workforce today, in a vicious attack which has been met with strike action over months by the gas engineers in the latest round of ‘fire and rehire’ by bosses attempting to impose cuts to pay and conditions. Striking gas engineers have refused to...
A STRIKE wave is set to hit schools, colleges and universities across the UK during the summer as teachers and lecturers vote overwhelmingly in favour of ‘sustained industrial action’ to defeat attacks by education bosses and the Tory government on their jobs, pensions, pay and conditions. University and College Union...