Workers’ Fightback – Greek "State of War"/Sussex Solidarity/Junk Mail

“All was quiet until the GSEE union boss Mr Panagopoulos took the microphone to address the protest. Before managing to utter more than five words, the hated union boss was attacked by all kinds of protestors who first heckled him and threw bottles of water and yogurt on his face and then attacked him physically like a giant swarm. With bruises, cuts and his clothes torn, the PASOK lackey struggled his way towards police lines, as the people attacked again and again. Finally he managed to hide behind the Presidential Guard and up the steps of the Parliament where the hated austerity measures were being voted. The crowd below encouraged him to go where he belongs, to the lair of thieves, murderers and liars.”

This extract from a LibCom report gives an indication of the social struggle currently going on inside Greece, a situation described as a “state of war” by Prime Minister Giorgos Papandreou. In a moment charged with symbolism, protesters attacked the leader of the main private sector union, as he addressed a rally against Papandreou’s European Union-dictated austerity plans. Later in the day, riot police sprayed tear gas directly into the face of eighty-seven year old Manolis Glezos. The celebrated veteran of resistance to the Nazi occupation of Greece needed emergency hospital treatment.

Over the past few weeks, a wave of general strikes, sectional strikes, occupations and riots has demonstrated that European governments will not have an easy time making working class people pay for their respective banking elites’ shortcomings. However, trade union leaders continue to work with governments, by seeking to channel dissent in safe directions such as nationalism. Before last week’s general strike, the president of the tax collectors union summed up the bureaucracy’s mood, as he declared that: “It is just a symbolic protest. We understand that the austerity measures are necessary.”

Following the Sussex University occupation against cuts two weeks ago, six “ringleaders” were suspended by Vice Chancellor Michael Farthing. As an official press release made clear, the suspensions were meant to intimidate opposition, being a “precautionary measure” against “disruptive” actions.

However, this measure provoked outrage amongst students, and hundreds of their number showed they were very far from being intimidated by occupying again on Tuesday evening.

A Commune article on the National Convention Against Fees and Cuts claims this is just the beginning, as:

“Many students are taking political action for the first time and have a lot to gain, both practically and in terms of their own perspectives on the situation, from coordinating with others. Meanwhile the threat of higher tuition fees looms just past the general election.”

The NCAFC Facebook group is here, and the blog is here.

The corporate news generally presented the latest Royal Mail/Communication Workers Union agreement as beneficial for all parties concerned. As CWU left critic Roy Mayall notes, the Daily Mail-owned thisismoney.co.uk led with the headline: ‘Royal Mail strikers get more for less work.’ If this were the case, and more posties were being taken on to pick up the difference, then it certainly would have been a happy ending. However, the following ‘devils’ emerge from a closer reading of the details:

• The CWU leadership has accepted the inevitability of closures and “significant” job losses.
• CWU bureaucrats share “the goal of managing headcount reduction without leaving unresolved surplus.” – i.e. sacking people and making the survivors work even harder.
• Under these terms, the automation of sorting will mean more time trudging the streets, with heavier loads.
• The 6.9% hourly pay increase over three years is below the current rate of inflation, and so amounts to a pay cut, even if inflation stays at current levels.
• There will be no more restrictions on ‘unaddressed’ – i.e. junk – mail coming through UK post boxes.

The ‘I care about our Postal Service!’ Facebook group is here, and the larger ‘I Support the Postal Workers!’ group is here.

Workers’ Fightback – Students, Posties and European Workers Confront Cuts

The past ten days have seen big mobilisations against austerity Europe, and the domination of the financial sector over government spending. Last Wednesday, two million public and private sector workers struck in Greece, following protests or general strike calls in Spain, Portugal and the Czech Republic. At its birth, it is apparent that the emerging new movement will be an international one, but it will be obstructed and misled by trade union and ‘radical’ groups which organise on a national basis.

Since the previous Workers’ Fightback update two weeks ago, unions in Germany, France and the UK have taken action to curb their members’ resistance, and defence of their own livelihoods. The German pilots’ union Vereinigung Cockpit called off a strike at Lufthansa on the first day. Similarly, the French General Confederation of Labour sabotaged a nationwide strike against oil giant Total. Concessions had not been won before the bureaucracy called a halt in either of these cases. In Britain, the Unite union announced that the overwhelming mandate for strike action against British Airways would be put “on hold” while they held talks with management.

As thousands of Greek workers took to the streets, their banners could easily have spoken for the working class across much of the world at the moment: ‘Where has all the money gone?’; ‘People are more important than markets and banks’, and ‘Billions of euros for capitalism, but nothing for the workers – rise up!’. Even more simply: ‘Enough is enough!’

An article on The Commune website suggests:

“A further day of action in another two weeks’ time seems likely: but a series of national one-day strikes does not look like a strategy to stop the government. After all, while tolerating occasional demonstrations the state will not shrink from invoking anti-union laws and using riot cops to suppress the most ‘threatening’ wing of the movement. Before the general strike, an indefinite stoppage by 3,200 customs workers saw Greece’s petrol pumps run dry for five days, such that the courts intervened to rule the action ‘excessive’. The union put an end to the strike, even though they could have been given even greater strength by the national strike action.”

Students in the UK have been dusting off the tactic of university occupation, which spread nationwide in the first half of 2009. According to the Fight Cuts at the University of Westminster blog:

“Over 200 staff and students at the University of Westminster have protested, stormed the board of governors meeting [on Monday} and are currently in occupation, vice-chancellors office, in regard to recently proposed tutoring and administrative job cuts.”

This action is in response to management plans to slash 250 jobs by April. Two weeks ago, a motion of no confidence in the vice chancellor was unanimously passed by over 150 staff and students.

The occupiers demand a statement on the avoidance of redundancies, financial documentation being made freely available to unions, and the production of alternative plans for addressing budget problems for the next several years.

This afternoon, Sussex students barricaded themselves inside management offices at their university, against plans to make another 115 redundant. These student occupations must link up with each other, but also turn to the wider working class if they are to have a chance of success.

The Fight Cuts Campaign at Westminster Facebook group is here.

Finally for this busy roundup, it seems that the Communication Workers Union bureaucracy has reached a deal with Royal Mail, regarding the ‘modernisation’ of the postal service. In a message to the union’s membership, deputy general secretary Dave Ward announced that:

“Following 3 months of talks facilitated by Roger Poole, the Independent Chair and ACAS, the negotiating process between Royal Mail and CWU has now reached its final phase. Both parties believe significant progress has been made. A document, will this week, be considered by the Postal Executive Committee.”

Last November, the CWU executive brought a well-supported strike to an end, having received no guarantees on jobs and conditions, other than a seat at the negotiating table. Doubtless, a total or near-total sell-out is being prepared, but the executive will have great difficulty controlling rank and file anger.

Union Sell-outs – Disbelief and Dialectics

Many postal workers and their supporters were left disgusted and disbelieving on Bonfire Night. Billy Hayes and his Communication Workers Union executive had unanimously voted to sabotage a series of strikes which enjoyed widespread support, and guaranteed there would be no strikes until after Christmas. What’s more, they had gained nothing concrete in return. When the new year comes around, Royal Mail will still be looking to make thousands of workers redundant, and attack the conditions of those that remain. In the meantime, posties are already facing a meagre festive period, having lost hundreds and even thousands of pounds in wages on the picket lines.

A message on the ‘I Support the Postal Workers!’ Facebook group summed up the thoughts and feelings of many:

“All the postal workers in Stevenage are furious at the strike being called off. They feel that Royal Mail have got what they wanted eg mail being delivered for Xmas. As soon as Xmas is out of the way Royal Mail will be pushing the changes through and not giving a stuff about the workers. Some feel that they have lost wages for nothing.”

But if Hayes and his team of bureaucrat fat cats had done anything other than cave in to Royal Mail demands, I’d have been forced to examine my whole outlook on life. Yes, I was disgusted, but very far from disbelieving. Of course, that’s all very easy to say with the benefit of hindsight, but then I warned that posties were “…lined up against Royal Mail bosses, the Labour government, and the leaders of their own Communication Workers Union” on October 25th, ten days before the ‘interim deal’ was announced.

So what is it that makes me so annoyingly good (annoying to myself, that is) at predicting political developments? Well, it’s a tool called ‘historical materialism‘, which is the philosophical basis of Marxist thinking. If you want, you can go off and Google how Marx stood Hegel’s dialectic on its head, but for my purposes here, I’ll quote Marx from The Holy Family, which I think neatly summarises his view of how historical events unfold:

“History does nothing, it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living men, who do all this, who possess things and fight battles. It is not ‘history’ which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”

That is the quote, in all its simple glory. People can best be understood as pursuing “their ends”, their material interests. The appreciation of this idea sets Marxism apart from the opportunism of pseudo-leftists, the ‘moral’ pleading of liberal pressure groups, and the utopian anti-authoritarianism of certain anarchist strains.

Once I grasped it however many years ago, this ideology-free way of looking at the world seemed like a kind of uncommon ‘common sense’. It follows from this theory that the CWU executive decided to end the strike not because they really think “workers will get real benefits from the modernisation of the business“, but because they believed it would be in their own individual best interests. As a Marxist, I learned to mentally put myself in the shoes of the protagonists – as a detective might – examining the way social forces impact on the choices open to people, and the way the “pursuit of their ends” leads them to make certain choices.

Let’s take Billy Hayes then, suspected of crimes against the postal workers he claims to represent. The first thing to note is that he no longer sorts or delivers post. His job – which puts (presumably high quality) food on his table and (presumably expensive) clothes on his back – is to be the general secretary of the Communication Workers Union. He is well rewarded for this, receiving a pay package worth £97,647 last year. But he faces conflicting pressures.

On the one side, his membership are angry about attacks on their jobs, pay and conditions. They want a better deal for themselves, and could even throw Hayes out of his lucrative position come election time in April. On the other side, Royal Mail bosses are teamed up with the government, who want to sell off the company, and need to impose those attacks on jobs, pay and conditions to make it attractive to potential buyers. Big business wants Labour to intimidate the working class as a whole, because it is aware that massive cuts must come after the next election, to balance the books of UK PLC, which is deep in the red after the bank bailouts. For Hayes, another factor is the alliances he will have made with the powerful during his period in office. Many compliant union bureaucrats have been rewarded with titles and House of Lords seats in the past, for example.

Over the past three and a half decades, as hyper-globalisation and profit crises have brought neoliberal governments into power around the world, trade union bosses have everywhere followed this march to the right. Owing their privileges to their role as industrial cops – helping the state to beat down their membership’s living standards – they fear rank and file working class solidarity across industries and borders far more than they fear the capitalist class. From this perspective, it was inevitable that the CWU executive would want to throttle a strike movement that was receiving significant popular support, just when all 120,000 CWU members were set to walk out together.

What then of the leading left parties – the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party – both of whom sometimes claim to be Marxist, in favour of working class revolution? How have they reacted to Hayes’ betrayal?

The SWP were mildly critical of the strike suspension. Yuri Prasad’s 7th November article argued that it was a poor tactical move, with a huge post backlog having built up, and Christmas on the way. Prasad also claimed that “There is no reason for the CWU to have signed up to such an agreement”. This statement clearly abandons Marxist analysis (did the CWU ‘randomly’ sign the agreement then?), and is designed to cover up the real role that union bureaucracies play in controlling their membership. Prasad dared not try to explain why prominent SWP member and CWU vice president Jane Loftus voted for the agreement. Instead, the piece meekly called on rank and filers to keep “arguing hard for the return of national action” (i.e. exclusively within the confines of the current union structure). Three weeks later, Loftus resigned from the party.

The Socialist Party’s position on this strike is even more reactionary. In their 11th November lead article ‘Postal workers force management back’, the Socialist Party declared that the deal “does allow the CWU to regain some element of trade union control in the workplace and therefore does push back the attacks of the bosses.” It offered no evidence to back this up, but lionised the bureaucrats as heroic leaders:

“The job of leadership is to know when to advance and when to retreat. In the postal workers’ case it was clear that it was the bosses who were in retreat. But also what has to be taken into account is the readiness of your own troops to continue to advance as well. Many postal workers were looking to Christmas as time to be with their families and to have a well earned rest.”

In other words, the deal was the absolute best that could be won, given the postal workers’ lack of willingness to fight on. This turns reality upside down.

Even more tellingly, the editorial put particular emphasis on the parts of the agreement that speak of unions playing a further part in the ‘modernisation’ process’: “This issue of trade union ‘control’ is important,” the article continues. “It lies at the heart of the battle in the postal workplace. It means the difference between the workers having some form of protection against a bullying management and none at all.”

This is the CWU bureaucracy that has already overseen the imposition of a pay freeze, over fifty thousand job losses in the last seven years, the raising of the retirement age to sixty-five, and now an effective strike ban. The very bureaucracy which, according to the deputy general secretary’s recent comments in the Guardian, wants to hold elections less frequently, so they are no longer in “perpetual election mode” – i.e. have to pretend to be concerned with members’ interests. Yet their possible control of workplace structures is something to celebrate?

Given that both the SWP and SP leaderships pursue strategies of integrating their members into union bureaucracies (the SP have two people on the engineering section of the CWU executive, neither of whom have publicly spoken on the deal), their betrayal of postal workers’ interests is not a shock. But it’s not necessarily any fun being right the whole time, especially when you’re right about how your team is losing.

No, Marxists use dialectics to argue and plan for a workers’ movement worthy of the name, and ultimately for communism from below, because they know that no-one else could make revolution for us, no matter who they say they stand for.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world…”, Marx wrote in 1845. “The point, however, is to change it.” Marxist analysis can help us do just that.

Workers’ Fightback: Union tops sabotage posties and firefighters/Austria university occupations

The postal strike was sabotaged by the leadership of the Communication Workers Union last Thursday, when chief negotiators called off two scheduled days of all out action following eleventh hour talks, and left their dues payers in dark about the sell-out being prepared in their name.

The inevitable betrayal came at talks brokered by Trades Union Congress boss Brendan Barber. Like CWU general secretary Billy Hayes, Barber’s privileges depend on forcing through bargains that enormously favour big business and the government, at a time when all major parties are backing massive cuts in public spending, to cover the gambling debts of the financial elite. For this reason, they fear nothing more than rank-and-file workers building up momentum and solidarity. This is especially true given a BBC poll, which showed widespread support for the posties, despite the mainsteam media propaganda going decidedly against them.

The bureaucrats have guaranteed Royal Mail there will be no more strikes until Christmas, and so are essentially offering their services as industrial police to ensure this happens. The executive includes Socialist Workers Party member Jane Loftus, but she also voted to accept this interim deal, effectively selling her comrades down the river for a seat at the top table.

So what now? An article in The Commune suggests that:

“In the next two months, things could go one of three ways. The workers may be sold out passively, rank and file pressure may generate further official action, or spreading unofficial action may develop. It is in the grasp of workers to avoid the first possibility, and maximise the chances of the other two being effective. CWU members should push inside the union for the action to be resumed, insisting on the most democratic forms of rank and file control. But they cannot rely on this strategy being successful. Therefore, they should also be prepared, should it be necessary, to take, support and spread unofficial action, from office to office, from one end of the country to the other.”

The ‘I Support The Postal Workers’ Facebook group is here.

The problem facing unionised workers in all industries is a structural one; union leaders have different interests to rank and filers, and so must try to further those interests by making backroom deals with those who propose cuts to jobs, wages and conditions. In a further example of this, Sheffield Fire Brigades Union officials also capitulated to management just hours before a strike was due to begin over shift patterns.

The ‘Support the South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue Operational Fire Fighters’ group is here.

Finally, following the California university occupations a month ago, students in Austria are building a much larger movement against poor conditions, and the so-called ‘Bologna process’, which is aimed at the standardisation of university cuts across Europe. As well as protest marches around the country, Vienna students have now occupied the Audimax central lecture hall for two weeks. There have also been occupations at Heidelberg and Münster. According to the WSWS:

“The students’ demands include the abolition of tuition fees, the lifting of entrance restrictions at universities and colleges of further education, more rights for students to influence what happens in higher education, better equipment in all educational establishments, as well as the provision of sufficient and well-paid teaching staff.”

However:

“It is necessary to discuss and develop a political perspective that wages a struggle against the capitalist social order. It is necessary to do the very thing that the ruling class fears most: to orient the protests to the working class.”

The ‘In Solidarity with the occupations in Austria for Free Education!’ Facebook group is here.

Workers’ Fightback: Update 21

Postal workers in the UK have now taken five days of strike action against the attacks on their jobs and working conditions, spearheaded by Royal Mail and backed by the government. RM are responding by rolling out Britain’s largest strikebreaking operation since the pivotal miners’ strike of 1984-85. However, Communication Workers Union bureaucrats – who have been doing their best to dampen down rank and file anger since the early summer – have claimed this is “not a sticking point”.

Last Wednesday, members of the Nottinghamshire Industrial Workers of the World branch leafleted outside the Station Road Jobcentre Plus branch, urging centre users not to cross picket lines and undermine the strike. Actions like this are vitally important, because the new workers’ movement is starting from a historical low in terms of class consciousness and knowledge of industrial tactics, and under-25s make up nearly four in ten on the UK unemployment roll.

Two days of all-out strikes are scheduled for Friday and next Monday. The ‘I Support the Postal Workers!’ Facebook group is here.

In another historical milestone struggle, Ford workers in the US have emphatically rejected the latest sacrifices proposed by United Auto Workers president Ron Gettelfinger, with nearly three quarters voting no on the deal. It is the first time a national deal has been rejected stateside since 1976, and the first time at Ford since 1972. Since then, the UAW has helped to wipe out 750,000 US auto industry jobs, leaving Detroit and other manufacturing centres utterly devastated.

Union executives around the world and in every industry have argued that economic globalisation means that cuts are necessary sacrifices, and a whole generation of workers have grown up in that environment, giving more to their bosses, and getting less back, while the bureaucrats have enriched themselves. Ford workers have seen 45% of their colleagues made redundant since 2006, and have overwhelmingly decided that enough is enough, drawing a red line in the sand. They must link up with their counterparts at Chrysler and General Motors (the other two members of the ‘Big Three’, who had similar deals foisted upon them by Gettelfinger and President Obama at the start of the year), and workers internationally. The nationalist, pro-capitalist perspective of the business unions has been exposed as a dead end, but now the case has to be made for workers’ control.

Finally for this week, more than four thousand undocumented workers are taking strike action and holding occupations in Paris. Their demand is for the same legal rights as indigenous French labour. Under the slogan ‘Colonised yesterday – exploited today – tomorrow regularised’, the strike wave is far larger than a similar uprising in spring last year, which involved six hundred workers and won two thousand regularisations. According to an article in The Commune:

“This exemplary movement perfectly illustrates the contradictions of capitalism. In order to maintain profits, this system has for years carried out a policy of outsourcing and casualising the labour force. This logic is pushed to its extreme with undocumented migrant workers. Furthermore they suffer growing state and police repression with the development of Fortress Europe, a racist Europe, which lauds the free circulation of capital yet allows thousands of people to die every year in the Mediterranean.”

Workers’ Fightback: Update 20

Postal workers have begun their national strike against job cuts, worsening conditions and potential privatisation, with two days of stoppages. In doing so, they have engaged in a political struggle to save a service everyone in the UK relies on, and they are lined up against Royal Mail bosses, the Labour government, and the leaders of their own Communication Workers Union.

Royal Mail has done much to provoke the strike, with management bullying becoming endemic all over the country over the last six months. In response, local workforces have held unofficial wildcat walkouts, requested held many local ballots and strikes, and finally dragged their union tops into a national strike they have desperately tried to avoid.

Throughout this time, general secretary Billy Hayes (who claimed a £83,530 salary and £14,190 in pension contributions when selling out the 2007 strike) and his deputy Dave Ward have offered management their services as peacemakers, and a moratorium on strikes. In the last minute talks before Thursday’s strike, Ward proposed “a three-year agreement aimed at providing long-term stability for the business, employees and our customers” on the sole condition that attacks on postal workers are “introduced by agreement”.

A leaked internal ‘Strategic Overview’ showed that Royal Mail want to make the strike an “enabler” of these attacks, which include tens of thousands of sackings and the impossible speed-ups which these would make necessary. The document claims that even if the CWU bureaucracy doesn’t force through a deal, “there is “shareholder, customer and internal support for implementation of change without agreement” (emphasis added). The only ‘shareholder’ in Royal Mail is the state.

From the government’s perspective, the smashing of this strike would serve to intimidate not only postal workers, but also the workers across the public sector who will face huge cuts after the next general election. For this reason and so many others, it is vital that posties receive maximum solidarity from the working class.

A three day strike is scheduled to begin on Thursday. The ‘I Support the Postal Workers!’ Facebook group is here.

Meanwhile, striking refuse workers show no sign of giving up their struggles against wage cuts, despite the severe hardship they are suffering. On Wednesday, 92% of strikers at a mass meeting rejected Leeds council’s “final offer” of substantial attacks on pay, sick pay and conditions. This was despite a Yorkshire Evening Post article alleging that GMB and UNISON negotiators had all-but caved-in to the council’s demands. The ‘Leeds supports its Refuse Collectors’ Facebook group is here.

Similarly, Edinburgh street cleaners are angry with council leaders’ suggestions they are “set to give up their protest”, according to Indymedia. The ‘Edinburgh Muckraker’ reports that nothing has changed since their mass meeting on 9th October, when hundreds of council manual workers agreed to continue their work-to-rule and overtime ban. “Nothing’s changed,” a street cleaner argued, “This is council PR”. The Edinburgh Evening Post had reported the council’s claims as fact on the 19th.

Meanwhile, there was been more unrest in Greece, which last year saw a huge uprising, trigged when a cop fatally shot fifteen-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Since the election of a new ‘Socialist’ government at the start of the month, there has been massive police repression in the Exarcheia district of Athens – traditionally an anarchist stomping ground. Meanwhile, the death of twenty-year-old Pakistani immigrant Mohamed Kamran Atif at police hands sparked clashes with the state forces, and a short-lived occupation of the town hall, which received the support of the local Municipal Workers Association before it was brought to an end. According to LibCom, the Workers Association demanded:

“…that the forces of repression leave from within the boundaries of the historic City of Nikea. The occupation of the City Hall by the protesters is a political act, and the attempt to criminalise it is unacceptable and undemocratic.”

Workers’ Fightback: Update 19

If your post hasn’t been arriving as regularly recently, it’s because UK postal workers are desperately trying to save their pensions, their jobs, and the future of the service you rely on. In doing so, they are confronting Royal Mail, the government, and the leaders of ‘their own’ Communication Workers’ Union.

Posties are currently deciding whether to hold a national strike, having forced the union bureaucracy’s hand with a series of local stoppages – both official and unofficial. If – as expected – they decide to take the action, it will be against attacks on working conditions agreed by CWU general secretary Billy Hayes and his team at the end of 2007. The deal was aimed at making Royal Mail attractive to buyers, and though Business Secretary Peter Mandelson can’t find one in the current market, he’s determined that the company should press on with plans to cut the payroll by 40%.

Although the corporate media has started stoking fears that the Christmas post could be delayed, for example, it has been silent on the chaos that would follow if so many posties were forced out of work. Neither is it examining the potential impact on the remaining 60%. As industrial commentator Gregor Gall suggested in an article on The Commune website:

“Ironically, the only serious hope for a stable and lasting resolution to the current dispute is the prospect of a national all-out postal strike. This would use the autumn return to official parliamentary politics to put pressure on the government to tell Royal Mail management to negotiate an acceptable outcome. It looks like it’s going to be a case of going to war to bring about peace.”

The ‘I Support the Postal Workers!’ Facebook group is here.

In a historic development, plantation workers in Sri Lanka have openly declared that they oppose ‘their own’ unions, who have clearly stabbed members in the back one too many times. In their statement, the newly formed Balmoral Estate Action Committee announced that:

“We, the workers of the Balmoral Estate in Agarapathana, have formed our own Action Committee to fight for our rights and call on workers throughout the plantations and other sections of industry to do the same.

“We have taken this step because we have no faith in any of the trade unions that have sold us out time and time again. All the plantation unions are working with the employers and the government to force us to accept another two years of poverty-level wages.”

Furthermore:

“Workers cannot put any trust in the unions, which operate as industrial policemen for the government and employers. We say workers everywhere must rely on their own independent strength. That is why we are calling for workers in other estates as well as in factories, schools, hospitals and other workplaces to form their own action committees independent of the unions. We are all finding it impossible to make ends meet.”

As the economic crisis facing working class people intensifies, it is becoming increasingly apparent that trade union bureaucrats act as “industrial policemen for the government and employers”. In the UK and around the world, the same lessons must be learned, and acted upon.

436,000 Liverpool Residents Snub May Day March

Imagine a May Day march with no chants, no demands, and very few banners. Who’d want to go to that? What if the keynote speaker was a parasitic class collaborator, who had recently sold out tens of thousands of workers? Would that inspire anyone? Not really.

So no surprise that only a handful of dedicated people joined the Trades Union Congress’ annual death march, which is in effect nothing more than a sedate procession commemorating our ongoing defeat at the hands of the profit system.

The diehards proceeded from the Casa pub on Hope Street to the Victoria Monument in Derby Square. There they joined a small group of people who had been listening to live music.

The first speech – delivered by journalist and campaigner Ewa Jasiewicz – was by far the most inspirational. This can be put down to two factors. Firstly, she read statements of solidarity from Iraqi trade unionists, who are in constant danger of attack from both the US-led occupation and various sectarian militia. Secondly, because Jasiewicz read it with considerable passion, something a million miles away from the calculated platitudes of the bureaucrats who shared the stage with her. “We look forward to the day when we have a world based on co-operation and solidarity”, the declaration ended, “We look forward to a world free from war, sectarianism, competition and exploitation”.

By contrast, the addresses of Communication Workers Union bureaucrats Billy Hayes and Jane Loftus were exercises in sickening hypocrisy, only a mile from the Copperas Hill local base of the strike the pair sold out just half a year ago. Last July, General Secretary Hayes gave a speech in the city, and described Royal Mail’s proposed new contract as a “carve up” between Royal Mail bosses and their “rich mates”. He then spent the next few months working with those bosses to control and undermine the resulting industrial action (including wildcat strikes in Liverpool), and compelling the postal workers to accept almost exactly the same appalling terms and conditions originally offered. In fact Hayes’ rambling May Day speech was remarkable only for the fact that he did not mention the dispute at all! Certainly, none of the Copperas Hill workers seemed to have been there to cheer him on!

The next speaker was Maureen (no surname was given), an asylum seeker originally from Nigeria, who declared that she was “so glad to hear that there’s something like solidarity in the United Kingdom”. She appealed for help with her case, and support for “human rights” generally.

The contribution of CWU President and Socialist Workers Party member Loftus was perhaps even more two-faced than that of her general secretary. Though she voted against the settlement during the negotiation process, she did not alert postal workers to the sellout that was being prepared in their name. Even when the deal had been agreed and was put to a vote of the CWU membership, this supposed ‘revolutionary’ did not speak out against it. At Thursday’s rally, Loftus only dedicated a few words to the massive struggle her union had taken part in, and did nothing to shed light on her own role in bringing about a massive defeat for postal workers.

The address by Steve Farley was almost entirely nondescript and unmemorable. In a year when the government has handed his Public and Commercial Services union members an effective pay cut, he had nothing of any substance to say beyond the empty buzzwords of “solidarity” and “socialism”, and the invoking of former ‘glories’ such as the rule of the Militant-led council in Liverpool.

There is nothing less radical than the endless repeating of cliches, especially when they are not followed through with sustained and coordinated action. Apart from Ewa Jasiewicz’s contribution, all the platform contributions were so vague as to be interchangeable with those made at countless other May Day rallies. This is poisonous, because its effect is to alienate people from a day which originated as a festival of resistance. There is never any analysis of why we are getting hammered, there is just the endless repetition of the fact that we are. This breeds hopelessness, and helps explain the diminishing turnouts.

Every object that is sold or distributed on this planet, and every service offered, is the product of labour. Every penny that a boss makes off that labour is stolen from the person who actually did the work. The people who shape the world – the working class – allow it to be that way, because they feel isolated from each other and do not feel their true power. Anything which obscures this reality is part of the problem, not the solution.

Billy Hayes does not sort or deliver post. Instead, he lives off the membership fees of people who do. It is therefore in his interests for the CWU to have as many members as possible, but he knows that to achieve this he must make sure his members accept Royal Mail’s drive for profitabilty, or else Royal Mail will bypass the union, more redundancies will be made, and he will lose his privileged position.

When production and distribution was largely organised on national lines, union members could force their leaders to extract significant concessions from the employers. However, production and distribution is more global with every passing day. This leads to cut-throat competition around the globe, with governments fighting to promise business leaders the best rates of profit. Trade union leaders are fully behind this drive for profits, because of their position relative to the workforce.

With the two notable exceptions of Ewa Jasiewicz and Maureen the asylum seeker, the platform at the Merseyside May Day ‘rally’ was covered by the decaying corpse of the trade union bureaucracy. The unfolding economic crisis is truly global, and will require international solidarity on a scale that has yet to be seen. Very few of the Liverpool people who will fight that fight were at the Thursday rally. The missing hundreds of thousands are part of the sleeping beauty which must be awakened by economic necessity. When the new working class movement comes, its May Day must sweep away the bureaucrats who keep us apart.

Click here for photos, video, and audio.

New Anarchist Newssheet Hits Merseyside Streets!

A group of Merseyside anarchists have produced the first edition of our new newssheet, ‘Shout!’. There are articles on Capital of Culture (or capitalist vultures), academy schools, the postal strike, the plans for the new Royal hospital, where our recycling REALLY goes, and asylum seeker support. Click for the PDF if you want to read and distribute, or simply scroll down for the text version.

Liverpool: Capital of Vultures
When Liverpool was made the European Capital of Culture 2008 there were parties in the streets. Liverpudlians were told to have new hope and the publicity machine pumped out images of smiling and excited scousers. An estimated 2 million more visitors are expected to come to the city, bringing money and investment that is expected to improve Liverpool’s economic state. And yet, as the years have passed and with 2008 on our doorstep, the city still looks like a bomb has hit it. Derelict homes in the suburbs and massive building sites in the city centre, new shops for wealthy visitors and smaller hospitals for the people that live here. There is an increasing feeling of unrest in the city and residents are starting to feel cheated. So what is really going on?

Whose Culture?
The capital of culture is not for the people of Liverpool, whatever councillors might say about ‘regeneration’. Instead it’s an invitation for big business to come into the city like a flock of vultures and pick up all the tastiest scraps, leaving the rest of us nothing. Huge grants of European and government money, sweetheart deals and a captive audience. All in return for a handful of temporary, dead-end jobs with no skills or long term prospects and a ‘regeneration’ scheme more concerned with getting visitors, and their money, in and out than creating a decent city for people to live in. The ones who benefit will be the owners of multinational corporations who don’t even live in the city. It is just another move towards making every city in the world have exactly the same shops where everyone can buy exactly the same clothes with their ever smaller wage packets.

Where’s the Money?
Liverpool council were given a HUGE cash injection by the government. The promise then was that the people of Liverpool would not have to pay any more tax to fund the event. So what the hell happened this year? Suddenly the council are £29 million short of funding and it needs £7 million of this just to maintain council services. Well the council can’t borrow money off the government because they are now forwarding their money to the Olympic games (another bonanza for the already rich). So they have decided to go against what they said a few years ago and tax the people of Liverpool, re-mortgage buildings like Millennium House and take out a huge £20m loan that people like us will have to pay for later. The council tax increase is expected to be 3.7%.

Shops not Homes
And what about housing? Well according to a BBC report, house prices are going up since the award came to the city. Many people in working class areas are struggling to keep up with their rents, and some in Toxteth and Edge Lane are even fighting compulsory purchase orders, which threaten to steal their homes for a fraction of their worth, so yet more developers can come in!

All the investment appears to be going to the centre of Liverpool. The further into the suburbs you go the worse it gets. There are areas of Liverpool that are becoming no-go areas with gang culture on the rise and derelict buildings everywhere. Will the effects of capital of culture really benefit these people? Will it reach out into the lives the need the help the most? That’s for you to decide.

Not surprisingly, with all the extra money sloshing around, Liverpool’s politicians and bureaucrats have their noses firmly in the trough. Read up on all the dirt at http://liverpoolsubculture.blogspot.com

Education, Education, Privatisation!
So the capital of culture award has turned the city of Liverpool into the centre of a feeding frenzy for multinational companies. Gentrification is pushing the working class out into the run-down suburbs. Opportunities for getting a decent job or trade under your belt are getting fewer and fewer. Is there any other way that capitalism is destroying our lives? Well rest assured that now you can send your children to a brand new academy school.

The North Liverpool Academy is the amalgamation of students from Anfield and Breckfield schools. In 2006 the government decided to blend together the most ‘failing’ schools in Liverpool, throw in a dash of money from a sponsor in the private sector (Stanley Fink from stockbrokers Man Group Plc) and season it with a specialisation in Business and Enterprise. What a great idea! It is too early to tell what the outcome will be. However, merging failing schools in the past has not brought great improvements. Ofsted inspectors branded the Bexley Business Academy in Kent as ‘inadequate’, highlighting poor teaching and lower than expected exam results.

So much of this country has been privatised. Has capitalism finally infiltrated our schools as well?

Mersey Posties Show the Way
This summer and autumn, Merseyside postal workers were on the front line of action against Royal Mail’s proposed new contracts, which threaten jobs, pensions and working conditions, whilst opening the door to a sell-off of the postal service.

Posties in Liverpool and Birkenhead were among the most militant in the country, taking illegal ‘wildcat’ action for over a week, after they got back from an official strike to find Royal Mail had changed their working hours without consultation. Eventually the strike was defeated and Royal Mail got what they wanted, but only because workers were stabbed in the back by their ‘leaders’, and were unable to create strong enough links with other workers facing cuts.

Unions Cave In
When Royal Mail and the Communication Workers Union (CWU) finally reached an agreement, it quickly became clear that union bureaucrats had gladly caved in to pressure from post bosses on one side, and the government on the other. The new deal contained almost exactly the same terms that CWU general secretary Billy Hayes had denounced as a ‘carve up’ between Royal Mail bosses and their ‘rich mates’ just three months earlier, so posties have been expressing dismay and anger.

The union tops started undermining the efforts of rank-and-file posties from the beginning, staggering strikes so as not to cause Royal Mail too much pain, then calling the legal strikes off entirely for two months of talks! Their greatest fear is working class people organising themselves and finding they have no use for their so-called ‘representatives’. Many of them have strong links to New Labour, so while they may occasionally talk ‘left’, they are in reality lined up behind Brown’s campaign for the slashing and burning of wages and working conditions.

Winning for Ourselves
But it isn’t about the individual politics of the individual reps, it’s about a structure that has been used time and time again to keep working people down. By refusing to bow before the law, and organising in an anarchic way (without bosses), the Merseyside posties have set a great example to workers in other areas and other industries. We don’t need to go cap in hand to big business or to government. We can and must organise our own workplaces, our own neighbourhoods, and our own lives.

Renewing the Royal? Ripping Off Patients!
The Liverpool Primary Care Trust’s (PCT’s) plan to rebuild the Royal Liverpool hospital using a costly PFI scheme rumbles on, and as more details emerge the deal gets worse and worse. At a cost of £225 million (sure to increase if PFI schemes elsewhere in the country are anything to go by) the hospital will be completely rebuilt on a smaller new site with the loss of 200 beds and all kinds of knock on effects on the quality of care. Worse than this, the Trust will not own the new building but will instead rent it back from the private company that builds it, despite having paid for everything in the first place! Only in the upside down world of business and government could this ever be called ‘improving care for patients’ and ‘value for money’.

The real reason for all this, as always, is profits for the usual suspects. Refurbishment of the existing buildings, which are just over thirty years old, was not even seriously considered, despite a sham ‘consultation’. As the ‘Renewing the Royal’ website tells us,

‘refurbishment would be an unviable risk for the health treasury and private sector’. In other words, the money’s only there if it can go into private pockets. The needs of business to make a killing come first; the needs of patients to go on living are a very poor second.

PFI schemes all over the country have left trusts with unsustainable debts, leading to cuts in services and job losses. A 2007 report from the independent Centre for International Public Health Policy in Edinburgh concluded that PFI schemes are responsible for a wave of cuts over the last few years, cuts that will only increase over the life of the contracts. Any new scheme adds to this pressure. Keep Our NHS Public are campaigning hard on Merseyside and are one of the few forces taking on the trust over this. They meet on the third Wednesday of every month in the Peoples Centre, Hardman Street, and have an email list at http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/KeepOurNHSPublicMerseyside.

Councillor Turner – You’re a Joke!
Liverpool was recently voted the least sustainable city in a survey with nineteen others. While other places are tapping landfill for methane, cutting car use, building low-carbon houses and creating zero-carbon neighbourhoods, we’re stuck in the ha’penny place. What was the Council environment spokesperson’s response? Cllr Bernie Turner could only bleat about salmon in the Mersey and parks built 150 years ago. She’ll brag about how much recycling we’re doing. But she won’t tell you huge amounts of what the Council collects is still going to landfill. Liverpool’s bosses want reckless economic expansion, building more roads to carry more cars, choking the city. Yes, we can spend an hour or so in a polluted park and the rest of our lives in an urban hellhole where hundreds die each year from cold, from lung and heart disease or a dozen other diseases caused by pollution or stress. And they call this ‘success’, ‘progress’. Councillor Turner, you’re a dangerous idiot. And that’s no joke.

Stand Up for Asylum Seekers
Liverpool based group Asylum Voice is organising a demonstration in solidarity with all asylum seekers in this country and especially with those in Liverpool. We demand the right to work, the right to healthcare, the end of Section 4 and forced deportations and the end of all border controls. If there are no borders for the flows of capital in the world, then there should not be any borders for human beings either. The demonstration takes place on Wednesday 19th December 2007 at Reliance House, Water Street in Liverpool, from 12.30 till 1.30 pm.

This protest is also a reaction to the inhuman treatment of Alphonsus from Nigeria. The National Asylum Support Service wants to remove him from Liverpool to Salford, despite the fact that he has secure accommodation here. In Salford he would find himself isolated, without the support network necessary to campaign for his right to stay.

Asylum Voice desperately needs to raise funds to launch campaigns against deportations of people. Therefore any support is very welcome and needed! Asylum Voice can be contacted at the email address: asylumvoice@yahoo.co.uk. Meet members of Asylum Voice at their regular meetings every second Thursday in Next To Nowhere on Bold Street.

Anarchist meetings
Find out what anarchists on Merseyside are up to, or come and help out. All in Next to Nowhere social centre in the basement, 96 Bold Street (www.liverpoolsocialcentre.org):
● Anarchist educationals third Thursday of the month (Dec 20th, Jan 17th)
● Liverpool Social Forum second Tuesday of the month (Jan 8th)

41% of Posties Accept Stitch-Up Deal/Motion Carried

64% of those postal workers who voted have accepted the stitch-up ‘settlement’ offer from Royal Mail bosses. However, there was only a 64% turnout. So after weeks of strike action, lost pay and backstabbing from Communication Workers Union bureaucrats, the original contract proposed by Royal Mail will go through practically unaltered, despite the fact that 59% of posties still refuse to back it.

Many workers have reacted angrily to the news, with one employee on Royal Mail Chat stating:

This is a s**t deal!.. We better all head to Tescos and HOPE that we get jobs there! Cause this job is f****d! If I get my hands on those crooked union reps or royal mail management bastards, they’re all dead I tell you!