Monthly Archives: August 2022
THE biggest strike of the summer so far continues today, as 115,000 postal workers fight for a ‘dignified, proper pay rise’. Royal Mail Group members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) continue national strike action following on from last week’s major strike, to be followed by further strike action on...
YEMEN’S Ministry of Public Health and Population has given a detailed report on the devastating effects the Saudi-led coalition war – which it launched in 2015 – has had on the people of the country. In a press conference held in the Yemeni capital Sana’a on Sunday, the Ministry focused...
OVER 100,000 Royal Mail workers are striking again today. 30,000 BT Openreach engineers, along with 10,000 BT call centre workers are also on strike, demonstrating what the Communication Workers Union (CWU) has called a ‘serious determination’ not to accept a miserable flat rate pay increase imposed on them. CWU members,...
THE Ukrainian army’s continued bombardment of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) is destructive, dangerous and even suicidal, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said yesterday. ‘As for the behaviour of the Kiev regime, it is impossible to describe it in any way other than suicidal,’ she said. ‘The endless attacks...
Palestinian prisoner Khalil Awawdeh remains on hunger strike today, Tuesday 30th August, 171 days into the protest against his detention without charge or trial by the Israeli occupation authorities. Two other detainees, Ahmad Musa, 44, and his brother, Addal, 34, have also been on hunger strike for 21 days in...
THE SKYROCKETING increase in energy bills is driving the health and education services to the wall, with leaders in both these vital services warning that cuts across the board to staffing, pay and provision are inevitable. Schools and hospitals are not covered by the energy price cap, meaning, that while...
WORKERS pressure is mounting on the TUC to call a general strike to bring down the Tories at its Annual Congress in Brighton next month (see advert this page). However, the UK’s two largest trade unions, Unite and Unison, said yesterday that they are seeking to ‘co-ordinate strike action’, but...
ONE media worker has been sentenced and jailed and another detained amid rising attacks against the press by the military junta in Myanmar. A freelance photographer was violently detained by junta troops, and former photojournalist Ko Zaw Zaw was sentenced to three years in prison on August 20 and 24...
STOCK markets in the US ended last week sharply down following tough comments by the head of the country’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell. He said the bank must continue ‘forcefully’ to raise interest rates to stop inflation from becoming a permanent aspect of the US economy. During...
‘OUR members deserve fair pay and will be taking action for as long as it takes to get it,’ said Communications Workers Union (CWU) General secretary Dave Ward at a lively picket outside the Whitechapel Delivery Office at 6.30am yesterday. He continued: ‘They have lost confidence in the company that...
WITH inflation and the increase in the cost of living, the French student unions are challenging the government on the eve of the start of President Emmanuel Macron’s new five-year term. In its latest survey on the cost of student living, published in mid-August, the UNEF (Union Nationale des Étudiants...
THE UK’s energy bills are set to jump 80 per cent to an average of £3,549 per year from October, regulator Ofgem announced on Friday, describing the huge increase as a ‘crisis’ that needs to be tackled through urgent and decisive government action. Meanwhile, the caretaker PM Johnson has already...
115,000 postal workers are out today in a 24 hour strike for a ‘dignified, proper pay rise’, the Communication Workers Union (CWU) said yesterday. Members of the CWU – which represents Royal Mail Group workers – are starting a series of national strike actions today, Friday 26th August.
This will be followed...
MILLIONS of South African workers and youth on Wednesday took part in a national strike called by the country’s two largest trade union federations, COSATU and SAFTU over the rising cost of living. The strikers marched to Union Buildings, the seat of government in the capital, Pretoria, while demonstrations were...
AS WORKERS well know, the coming winter is going to be a desperate affair with sky-high inflation and food and energy rationing, leaving families hungry and shivering in the cold, and turning millions of workers and their families into paupers. This is the price that the working class is paying...
SEAFARERS union RMT has written to the Secretary of State for Transport, Grant Shapps, to demand a meeting to discuss the government’s failure to take action against P&O Ferries after it broke the law in dismissing nearly 800 seafarers in March and replaced them with agency crew. Despite the illegal...
WHILE there is a decline in Washington’s standing as a superpower, the United States is facing another harsh reality – the decline of the US dollar as it falls from international grace in one country after another. All indicators show that the amount of US dollars held in reserves by...
THE working class is now facing the fastest and biggest rise in the cost of living for four decades. At the same time, many bosses are benefiting from higher inflation and posting bumper profits. There are billions being made by the bosses in the business of drilling for oil,...
THE CWU (Communication Workers Union) is taking national strike action this Friday with 115,000 Royal Mail workers stopping work. Further action has been called for Wednesday August 31, Thursday September 8th and Friday September 9th. The CWU tweeted: ‘If you are in London on Midday on Friday please come and show...
A SENIOR Iranian diplomat has condemned the lack of progress in the implementation of the UN 1995 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) resolution and the 2010 action plan on the Middle East, saying the Israeli regime must eliminate its stockpile of nuclear weapons. Iran’s ambassador and permanent representative to the United...
OVER half of UK households, that is millions of workers and their children, are experiencing food and fuel poverty, i.e. facing starvation and freezing this winter with inflation set to rise above 18%! Philippe Commaret, a senior executive at EDF Energy UK, has confirmed that people face a ‘catastrophe’ with...
BARRISTERS have voted to take indefinite action, refusing appear in court, and take new instructions from September 5th over fees and legal aid cuts, the Criminal Bar Association (CBA) announced yesterday. A CBA statement said: ‘Following another extensive period of consultation with ordinary members and leaders of the Criminal Bar,...
THE Russian embassy in the United States has warned that Washington’s behaviour on the world stage risks direct conflict between the nuclear states. This comes in the wake of the US testing a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile amid escalating tensions with Moscow over the Ukraine war.
Washington had postponed the launch...
PALESTINIAN prisoners are staging a mass hunger strike in Israeli prisons to protest against crackdowns and mistreatment by the prison officials. They say their strike, which will last two weeks, aims to protest repeated inspection of cells by Israeli prison guards. The decision to begin the hunger strike was made by...
DOCK workers at the UK’s largest container port yesterday began an eight-day strike, for the first time in 30 years. About 1,900 members of the Unite union at Felixstowe in Suffolk walked out in a dispute over pay. Unite said members rejected a below inflation 7% pay offer from the Felixstowe...
THE UNITED Nations and other international organisations have condemned Israel’s military raids on the offices of Palestinian civil society and rights groups in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah. In an unprecedented escalation, Israeli forces stormed, searched, and sealed the headquarters of seven human rights organisations in Ramallah and...
VARIOUS Tory idealogues are in extreme disarray as the capitalist crisis develops rapidly, with the western imperialist powers willing to gamble on a nuclear war with Russia to try to prevent a socialist revolution at home, with policies that involve egging on the Ukraine to attack the Crimea, bringing...
THE Margaret Thatcher look-alike, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, is seeking to sound like, look like and act like Margaret Thatcher, as she vows to take on and smash the trade unions in the UK. Within a month of becoming the Tory PM, she plans to bring in new anti-union laws...
THE most significant of a growing wave of strikes in Britain will go ahead with an eight-day walkout. This is after after pay talks broke down with employers at Felixstowe port in Suffolk, England.
Nearly 2,000 Unite union members voted to go on strike starting on August 21 and ending on...
RMT pickets at Elephant and Castle Underground station were joined by supporters from Unite Community and members of the public yesterday morning. RMT member Ebony Kingston spoke to News Line: ‘I support the strike against’ 600 job cuts. They're also meddling with our pensions and terms and conditions, as well...
RMT pickets yesterday morning called for a general strike to win their dispute by bringing down the government. Wale Agunbiade, RMT Branch Secretary at Liverpool Street station, said: ‘The public and members support we’re getting is very good. ‘People understand why the strikes are taking place, they know that we’re underpaid and...
IN THE span of less than 25 hours, two shooting incidents took place in two areas in the occupied West Bank. In both incidents, the shooters were Israeli soldiers and the assumed targets were Palestinians. The Israeli government policy says: Shoot to kill first and ask questions later, if...
THE Unite trade union has issued a press release that dangles before its members and the working class the pledge that the union would use its enormous power to ‘create a Workers’ Economy’. On examination however this stirring call to arms turns out to be nothing more than a campaign...
OVER 50,000 RMT members across Network Rail, London Overground, London Underground and other 14 train operating companies will walk out on strike this week, following no breakthrough in any talks. Strike action will take place on the rail network today and Saturday and on the Tube and London Overground tomorrow,...
UNIONISATION drives are sweeping Starbucks and Amazon workplaces across the United States from East to West, with strikes gaining powerful huge support from the public, especially from other unionised workers. There are now hundreds of US Starbucks stores where workers have voted to unionise – but the company has only engaged...
THE OUT OF CONTROL UK inflation rate has hit double digits – 10.1% according to the Office for National Statistics. It says it’s at a higher rate than analysts were predicting – the last time price rises were in double digits was in February 1982! Rising food and drink prices...
A BALLOT of Royal College of Nursing members in Scotland has shown the majority are willing to take part in strike action – with the RCN saying the results are the clearest sign yet that industrial action could take place across the UK later this year. The number of members voting...
THE ACCUSATION that the Tory government is paralysed waiting on the outcome of the leadership battle between Truss and Sunak is very wide of the mark. Despite all their internal warfare, the Tories are advancing with plans to take on and smash the working class and the trade unions, plans...
‘We made a mistake in the house,’ said one of the Israeli occupation soldiers, trying to justify to the mother of Mohammad Ibrahim Shaham, 21, the execution of her son in cold blood in front of his family. At 3.30am yesterday morning, Ibrahim Shaham woke up, alarmed at banging on...
THE MARIKANA mine massacre of ten years ago has never curbed President Ramaphosa’s political ambitions, but he’s never been able to escape the fallout from that tragic day either. The President said he welcomed a recent judgment in the Johannesburg High Court that found striking mine workers who were injured...
LABOUR leader Keir Starmer returned from holiday at the weekend to announce his new ‘robust’ plan to freeze the cap on electricity and gas prices for six months from October. This is scarcely a new plan. A week ago, the Liberal Democrats called for the Tories to stop the energy...
‘WE HAVE had massive support from the public,’ the ASLEF rep Lucio Buffone told News Line when he spoke out on the well-attended picket line at Paddington Station in central London on Saturday morning. There were picket lines outside railway stations all over the country as drivers at nine train...
CHINA has called on US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to express remorse and apologise for the atrocities committed by the Americans in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, if she cared so much about human rights. Speaking at a regular briefing on Friday, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin criticised Pelosi’s...
UNITE has revealed that Harrods is the ‘first employer’ to threaten staff with the new law allowing agency workers to break strikes and engage in union busting. A letter sent on August 8th to staff working in store services, engineering, maintenance and security, states: ‘Recent legislative changes relating to the...