THE MEDIA coverage of the walkout at Heathrow missed the two most important issues - what conditions are like for the check-in staff and why they are so angry. Workers on BA's check-in counters are on between £200 and £240 a week before stoppages. Tabloid editors and columnists wouldn't get out of bed for that. Far from costing BA money, its low paid workers have contributed to huge profits over the years.
FAR FROM being a drain on the economy, workers from abroad keep key industries and services in Britain going. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) showed last week how some parts of the NHS would "cease to function" without nurses from South Africa and the Philippines. Guardian journalist Felicity Lawrence has uncovered how "in food processing there is a hidden army of labour on whom we all depend".
SINCE DAVID Kelly's death, I have been seeing everywhere the parallels with the Watergate scandal that brought down US president Richard Nixon in 1974. And it's not just me. Liberazione, the Italian daily, filled its front page with Blair, a Union Jack and one word, "Blairgate". Bush is in trouble over weapons of mass destruction too.
UNOFFICIAL strikes are illegal, hated by the press and are not supposed to happen anymore. But they're back. The workers who walked out at Heathrow revived traditions of union militancy from the 1970s. Ian Morris was a leading militant among Heathrow's engineering workers back then. He spoke to Socialist Worker.
THE BLAIR government is now in a deep crisis. The war has left a bloody and costly occupation behind in Iraq. The trail of lies and deception is now reaching back into the heart of the government. The movement built by the Stop the War Coalition struck the whole governing system with such force that its aftershocks are still reverberating through the corridors of power.
NOBODY SHOULD expect the resistance to the US occupation of Iraq to go away after the killing of Saddam's sons last week. The actions against the occupying troops have accelerated and US troops are suffering increasing casualties.
NEW LABOUR'S announcement of a £7 billion road building programme last week was a U-turn of dramatic proportions. It is one for which people and the environment will pay dearly. The plan marks the final abandonment of New Labour's pledge to solve Britain's transport crisis.
THE demonstrations against the G8 summit in Evian, France, a month ago showed that the anti-capitalist movement is alive and well. Around 100,000 people took part in the biggest protest, shattering the predictions of some critics. They had said just a few tens of thousands would turn up.
ON 5 December 1996 paramilitaries gunned down a trade union negotiator, Isidro Segundo Gil, at the Bebidas y Alimentos bottling plant in Carepa in Colombia. They later kidnapped another union leader at the plant, who managed to escape. The right wing thugs then burned down the union offices and set about terrorising the remaining workers into leaving the union. Behind this murder lay one of the world's most famous and profitable companies. Bebidas y Alimentos is a Coca-Cola bottling plant.
LIBERIA IS a typical colonial country. A few tens of thousands of the population are "Americo-Liberians", Negroes whose ancestors were once slaves in America but returned and settled in the country during the early days of its colonisation. After the First World War America found herself confronted with the necessity of competing against the British rubber monopoly.
FIFTY YEARS ago next week, on 27 July 1953, the Korean War ended. In the course of three years it had claimed over two million lives. Most were civilians. The warring armies settled in almost exactly the same positions they had been in at the start of the war - facing each other off across the 38th parallel.
THE SPIRIT of the international movement against war and capitalism surged through the Marxism 2003 event in London last week. There were thousands of trade unionists and activists present from all over Britain, and hundreds from other parts of the world.
