While the recent media spin is suggesting that we’re ‘on our way out of recession’, the reality on the ground is that workers are still facing attacks across sectors in the forms of job cuts and community provisions. Education has been one of the sectors worst hit in this period, with £65m slashed from higher-education (HE) budgets, schools closing left, right and centre, and jobs to go at approximately 100 of the 150 HE institutions in the UK . The situation is as bleak as ever.

In August, around 250 members of teaching staff at Tower Hamlets College (THC), East London went on indefinite strike over threats of compulsory redundancies, and cuts in provision of ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) courses. Catalyst spoke to Rachel, a member of the striking staff, about the background of the dispute, the issues at hand, and the feelings after the strike came to an end in late September.

Workers at Royal Mail have voted overwhelmingly in favour of strike action over management plans for job cuts. 76% of workers who responded to the ballot voted in favour of industrial action. The roots of the dispute go back to the settlement that ended the 2007 national postal strike.

At the time it was announced as a victory, but in fact the CWU union agreed to management plans to cut jobs. The ‘victory’ was that the CWU and Royal Mail management would negotiate the details of the cuts at a local level. Now postal workers are unhappy with the results of those negotiations. One trigger is the Royal Mail’s refusal to “Pay for Change.” In unilaterally imposing such changes by so-called ‘executive action’, Royal Mail have reopened the dispute.

In 1997, councils across Britain came to an agreement with unions to undertake ‘Single Status’ job evaluations to end the discrepancies between manual and white collar jobs. Parallel to this, claims made about the historic pay discrepancies between traditionally male and traditionally female jobs were won at various Employment Tribunals. Historically, workers in female dominated jobs (such as those working around childcare) have been paid significantly less than those in jobs usually seen as ‘men’s work’, such as refuse collection.

Since the Equal Pay Act in 1970 these pay discrepancies had been open to legal challenge, but Single Status was supposed to be an across the board solution that would see every job within the councils evaluated and regarded equally based on the content of the job. In theory, this was of course a good thing.

Six anarchists from the ASI, Solidarity Federation’s Serbian sister organisation are currently imprisoned by the Serbian state.  Tadej Kurep, Ivan Vulovic, Sanja Dojkic, Ratibor Trivunac, Ivan Savic and Nikola Mitrovic are accused of  attacking the Greek embassy in Belgrade remain imprisoned, with (at time of press) no charges yet levelled at them.

The six have been targeted by authorities because of their politics and visibility, and face the ludicrous prospect of international terrorism charges - on the basis that as the embassy is sovereign territory, the attack had crossed an international border. The attack itself caused negligible damage, and has even been claimed by another group.  If international terrorism charges are brought, the Six face over 10 years in prison.

There are political and economic assumptions in the way the existing, social democratic unions organise. They think workers and management have common interests, and that it is in their best interests to form partnerships. For example, to win the support of bosses in catering for the National Minimum Wage, in 1997 Labour allowed them to include workers’ tips in calculating it, in spite of the NMW being a key election manifesto point.

Workers’ interests are considered to be those of the Labour Party or the union bureaucracy. Representation, where politicians, union officials, or lay representatives deal with management works to resolve problems without harming the latter’s interests. Business is seen as the goose which lays the golden egg, but we think that wealth is created not by business but by workers. In contract cleaning, for example, cleaners create the wealth but are sidelined by both unions and management.

8-page leaflet looking at what we can learn from the 2007 postal strike, the 2008 public sector strike and the 2009 Visteon occupation.

The leaflet was produced for a demo against the Labour Party Conference on Sunday 27th September. It is based on several previously published articles and we try to draw the lessons of recent relevant struggles in the UK.

For Workers’ Control

Lessons of recent struggles in the UK

Recent years have seen promising signs of a working class fightback, after decades of attacks on working class living standards.

But it is still early days. What can we learn from recent struggles? How can we turn isolated victories into a class-wide fightback to improve our working and living conditions, and resist the further cuts that have been promised in the next few years? We can start to answer these questions by studying the lessons of recent workers’ struggles in the UK…

South London Solidarity Federation Supports the Tube Cleaners. An article about the Tube cleaners Strike and action reports. July 4th, 2008 taken from LibCom.org

Tube cleaners’ union RMT has demanded an end to “appalling intimidation“ of members involved in a 48-hour strike for a living wage on, one on July 1st-3rd. Tube cleaners also engaged in a 24-hour strike on June 25th-26th.

The union is gathering evidence that cleaners have been bullied, harassed and threatened with the sack and with illegal punitive deductions from their wages if they take strike action.

“Reports coming in from picket lines over the last 36 hours indicate that the employers are so desperate that they are resorting to gangster-style intimidation and using the worst sort of fear tactics to stop more people joining the strike, “ RMT general secretary Bob Crow said today.

This is a leaflet we produced in August 2009, explaining some basics of anarcho-syndicalism.

If you want a copy, please get in touch with us, or download the attached pdf file.

What is anarcho-syndicalism?

Anarchism is a revolutionary political current that declares “freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice and socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.”

Syndicalism is the workers’ movement. Deriving from the French word for Trade Unionism (Syndicalisme), it seeks to unite workers on an economic basis to fight for their interests.

Anarcho-syndicalism is anarchism applied to the workers’ movement. From small educational groups to mass revolutionary unions, libertarian organisation grows and is controlled from the bottom up.