Supporters of the Socialist Alliance have been out campaigning on the streets of Ipswich in the run-up to the parliamentary by-election which was to take place on Thursday of this week. It is the first by-election of Labour's second term. Local campaigner and former builder Peter Leech is standing for the Socialist Alliance. Peter's campaign has centred round opposing the war in Afghanistan.
Around 160,000 postal workers will soon start a strike ballot over pay. The CWU union's deputy general secretary, John Keggie, announced the move at an anti-privatisation rally in Edinburgh on Saturday. Basic starting pay for a delivery postal worker is as little as £145.66 per week before tax. The top basic pay is £242.76 before tax outside London. Even with the maximum inner London allowances, the basic pay is a maximum of £291.58 a week before tax.
BT has thrown down the gauntlet to its workers' CWU union. BT completed its termination of the contracts of 279 London engineering workers last week. BT plans to close its FirstCall division next March, where over 1,000 permanent BT staff have been redeployed after cuts elsewhere in the company.
Workers at a south coast factory are furious at the company's plans for compulsory redundancies, and also at their AEEU union leaders' pathetic response. BOC Edwards in Shoreham-by-Sea is part of the major BOC company. The factory employs some 700 workers, mostly AEEU members.
Journalists at the Independent newspapers were celebrating an astonishing vote in their fight for union rights. A whopping 99.6 percent of journalists at the Independent and Independent on Sunday newspapers voted yes to union recognition in a ballot. Eighty percent of all staff eligible to vote turned out.
Over 350 people joined a march in Edinburgh against privatisation on Saturday of last week. There was a strong delegation of over 100 postal workers, a group of medical secretaries who have just won a major battle against low pay, civil servants and others.
Workers at the world's biggest fish and chip shop chain, Harry Ramsden's, went on an eight-hour strike two weeks ago for better pay and conditions. The strike involved 40 workers at Harry Ramsden's in Guiseley, near Bradford. The workers are members of the TGWU union. They held a lively picket line outside the restaurant holding placards saying, "We want a batter contract."
In three weeks time tens of thousands of people are planning to join major protests in the Belgian capital, Brussels. The protests will focus anger at the job losses mounting right across Europe as global recession bites. And they will also voice fury at European leaders' backing for the US-led war on Afghanistan.
Their bloody record 1960-75 Vietnam: two million dead
"Our Friends." That's how US president George W Bush describes the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Britain's defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, says the Northern Alliance "are not nearly as bad as people have been suggesting".
War upon war, horror upon horror. That is what faces not only the long-suffering people of Afghanistan, but millions of others across the globe if the most powerful capitalist state in the world, the US, has its way.
