Workers at the Euro Packaging factory in Birmingham have organised a series of strikes against low pay and bullying managers, and now they've voted to go all out. Some of the strikers and Respect candidate Salma Yaqoob spoke to Salma Iqbal about the dispute.
OVER 200 health workers in the Unison and Amicus unions at Sunderland Royal Infirmary staged an unofficial walkout on Thursday of last week. They were protesting against changes to their pay under the government's Agenda for Change scheme-the biggest ever shake-up of pay and conditions in the NHS. Sunderland hospital is an "early implementer" site being used as a test-run for the government's plan. A week before the walkout, management started to send out letters to inform staff of their new pay bands.
FOR THE anniversary of D-Day, the landings in Normandy, President George Bush will visit Paris and Rome to mark their liberation. In reality he will spend little time in either city, fearing demonstrations against the American occupation of Iraq. Neither the Americans nor the British liberated Paris. An insurrection by French resistance forces freed the city.
CAROLINE IS a Unison shop steward in Birmingham. She works at a small day centre for people with learning difficulties. Because she has a network of regular paper readers around her she was able to organise a workplace meeting recently at short notice.
THE MY Lai massacre was one of the US army's most notorious war crimes. On the morning of 16 March 1968 the soldiers of Charlie Company marched into the Vietnamese village of My Lai. Three hours later they had massacred over 500 people-men, women, children and babies.
“Lots of us hated what we saw. But if you spoke out you got the wrath of the whole army down on your head. You had to do two years military service. If you fell foul of the system they added time on. “One instance really sticks in my mind. We were doing village searches,...
A KIND of merger mania has begun to grip the bureaucrats in the TUC and in major unions as unions like the GPMU and KFAT are swallowed up by bigger organisations.
I'M GOING to keep to very simple truths. Moral truisms are so widely rejected-and the human consequences are quite serious. They are often disdained by the powerful who set the rules. We have just been living through a period that dramatically illustrates this. The last millennium ended and the new one started with an extraordinary period of self adulation by Western intellectuals.
SOCIALIST WORKER has argued hard over the last year that the US/UK occupation of Iraq won't bring peace. We've supported groups of workers like the firefighters, postal workers and nursery nurses who have taken on Blair's government. And the paper has argued for an alternative to New Labour. Now Respect is set to challenge Blair at the polls and there are just three weeks to go until 10 June.
THE NAZI British National Party (BNP) is hoping to make a breakthrough in the European elections on 10 June. The BNP hopes to capitalise on the disillusionment with New Labour and a low turnout. But the forces exist that can stop the BNP. Unite Against Fascism has been drawing those forces together in unprecedented numbers to campaign against the Nazis.
INDIA'S RIGHT wing Hindu chauvinist party, the BJP, suffered a shock defeat in last week's general elections. It had a net loss of nearly a third of its parliamentary seats, while its main opponent, Congress, had a net gain of a third. At the core of the BJP is an organisation with some similarities to European fascism, the RSS. It lay behind a murderous onslaught on the Muslim minority in the state of Gujarat that caused some 2,000 deaths just two years ago.
'GEORGE BUSH'S administration is in a terrible mess. They have been extraordinarily arrogant since the attacks on 11 September 2001. But now they are on the defensive over the reports about the torture of Iraqis. They are very shaken by this.
