LECTURERS AND senior admin staff brought universities to a standstill this week as 50,000 members of the AUT union struck over pay. Students protesting over New Labour's top-up fees scheme joined them on Wednesday.
ANNE, A civil servant on strike this week phoned to say how great it was to see Socialist Worker sellers at the picket line. "We felt part of a wider movement and it was so good to see young people who had been active about the war and other issues coming down to support us. They brought their solidarity and also their knowledge. I hadn't heard about the postal strike last year or several other disputes that are happening at the moment. Your paper is a real service."
SUPPORTERS OF Respect: The Unity Coalition have been gearing up for their challenge to New Labour in the 10 June elections. Meetings have been taking place around the country to begin gathering together the growing numbers who want to be part of organising that challenge.
MASS DEATH could soon come to a neighbourhood near you, and George Bush's Department of Homeland Security would be helpless to prevent it. The terrorist in this case could be a mutant offspring of influenza A subtype H5N1-the explosively spreading avian virus, or bird flu, that the World Health Organisation (WHO) worries will be the progenitor of a deadly global plague. The most lethal massacre in human history was the 1918-19 influenza pandemic that culled more than 2 percent of humanity (40 to 50 million people) in a single winter.
'THE PHONES are buzzing, and there's tremendous enthusiasm from the top to the bottom of the movement. Some 21 union general secretaries are backing the campaign. The TUC general secretary, Brendan Barber, is writing to trade unionists urging them to get involved.
ACROSS THE country socialists have been at the centre of building the Stop the War Coalition. This has reached parts no other movement has ever reached, and mobilised numbers the like of which we have never seen before. But it is not just over the war. Already Respect: The Unity Coalition is building up into a serious challenge to New Labour in the 10 June European and Greater London elections. Unite Against Fascism has brought together people in opposition to the BNP on a welcome and unprecedented scale.
LATER THIS month Socialist Worker is producing a special 12-page newspaper in addition to its usual weekly issue. It will mark 20 years since the Great Miners' Strike of 1984-5. It will be full of analysis, interviews and pictures of the year when the state took on the miners. It will be printed on special high quality paper and be distributed along with Socialist Worker on 25 February.
"FORD MAKES £92 million profit, and we're called greedy car workers!" Those angry words came from David Wood, one of 8,000 car workers on strike on Monday in Solihull and in Gaydon, Warwickshire. They work for Land Rover, which is owned by Ford. The multinational wants to ram through a two-year pay deal giving them less wages than workers at Ford's Jaguar plants, and worse working conditions.
OUR ALL-OUT indefinite strike to defend union rights at Leicester College is going from strength to strength. We started our strike on 2 February, and a mass meeting last week voted to stay out as long as it takes to win. Management have been trying for the last year to make us accept worse conditions. Then at Christmas they simply posted out new non-negotiated contracts, cutting holidays, pushing through Saturday working and worsening other conditions. This is union-busting as well as attacking conditions. Our strike is solid, with around two thirds of strikers attending picket lines. Management's claim that 85 percent of lessons are "running normally" does not impress students called
David "Rocky" Bennett was a talented drummer who loved football. He had two children. Those who knew him called him a "lovely man". But Rocky was just 38 when he died on 30 October 1998. He died in a psychiatric clinic in Norwich after four nurses held him face down for nearly half an hour.
BLAIR IS increasingly like someone trying to extricate themselves from a net. The more he struggles, the more he is enmeshed. He has not been able to end the shockwaves from the war on Iraq.
"OUR HISTORIC aim will be for ours to be the first generation to end child poverty forever, and it will take a generation. It is a 20-year mission, but I believe it can be done" (Tony Blair, March 1999).
