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More than 200 tugboat workers have voted to strike as part of a campaign for better pensions. Members of the TGWU union based in London, Southampton, Liverpool and Felixstowe have backed industrial action.

I missed the great anti-war demonstration in London the Sunday before last. But I don't feel too bad about this because, along with 500 other people, I was participating in a conference on globalisation and resistance in New York.

The 100,000-strong march in London against the war two weeks ago shattered the myth that almost everyone in Britain supports Tony Blair over the bombing of Afghanistan. If that many people marched, think how many millions supported the demonstration.

Along with about 80,000 others, I will never forget the monster Rock Against Racism carnival in Victoria Park, east London, in 1978. "We are black, we are white-we are dynamite!" was the slogan of the day, as people rocked both to reggae band Steel Pulse and punk band The Clash – who leaned heavily on black music and struggle for their inspiration.

A Post Office disciplinary hearing last week found that Mark Dolan, treasurer of the CWU union branch in North/North West London, was innocent of the charges against him. A worker at the NDO office made a complaint against Mark after he had overheard a discussion about the World Trade Centre suicide attacks. Mark had said he was against the loss of life in New York, but that it was a result of US policies.

Library workers struck across Hackney in east London last Saturday in protest at cuts in their Saturday pay. The strike was excellently supported and very successful. It was a boost to workers and anti-cuts campaigners in their long battle against the vicious Labour-run council.

Anti-war demo sweeps London Even the mainstream media was forced to acknowledge Sunday's marvellous anti-war demonstration in London. TV news and papers had to carry images of the tide of people from all over Britain who poured on to the streets. Yet alongside those images almost all the media repeated the absurd police claim that only 15,000 people had joined the march.

I am Somali woman living and working in London who decided to join Health Workers Against the War. I took that decision after my seven year old daughter came home from school and said it is not right that poor children should be bombed in Afghanistan. If only Bush and Blair had the same morality as a child!

Backstage staff at the Royal Shakespeare Company, based in London, have voted to take strike action at Christmas. The workers, members of the BECTU union, voted by nine to one in favour of strikes.

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.

Three decades ago a mass movement against the Vietnam War shook the US ruling class to its core. At its height 750,000 people marched in Washington and 100,000 in London. The growth of that movement holds vital lessons for the struggle against the US-led war on Afghanistan today.