occupations

Today an IPO eviction order was served on Carnegie Library in Lambeth, which has been occupied since 1st April to stop it being closed down and turned into a commercial gym. Milet Library on the deprived Angell Town Estate has also been closed down and Waterloo Library and others are threatened.  I visited the library on Sunday.

COME down for 1pm and join in the LARGEST demonstration (so far) against privatisation at Sussex University, and to show that universities nationwide are NOT FOR SALE!

Facebook event

IF coming from outside of Brighton, please organise a coach to come down from your local area. Stay in the occupation the night before and if you please, stay for a celebration afterwards...

Free coach from London.

With encroaching privatisation across campuses, we need to stand up and make it heard: OUR UNIVERSITY IS NOT FOR SALE!

more details to follow, including speakers, but get planning!

The University is a Factory - SHUT IT DOWN!

@occupy_sussex

While delegates from Labour councils across the country met at the BT Convention Centre in Liverpool, likely at public expense, to discuss how best to implement cuts while keeping their council seats under the banner of “Austerity With Fairness”, members of Liverpool Against the Cuts, Birmingham Against the Cuts and comrades from across the country decided to forgo a police pen outside the Convention Centre in favour of occupying the council chamber inside the Town Hall, making it, temporarily at least, the People’s Chamber.

Members of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT union and CGT union have gone on indefinite strike and occupied their workplace at the IMESAPI lighting plant in Granollers, Catalunya, Spain, demanding an end to the redundancy package which would see four of the 21 workers let go.

The workers – now 23 days into their strike – are responsible for maintaining the street lights throughout the small Catalan town, and therefore are of critical importance to the town council. IMESAPI itself is a part of the huge ACS conglomerate owned by Florentino Pérez, the multibillionaire engineering tycoon known internationally as the owner of Real Madrid FC.

Crucially, all of the workers at the Granollers plant belong to either the CNT or CGT unions, who have vowed to back the strike as long as it continues, unlike the mainstream Comisiones Obreras union,who signed off on similar redundancy packages at IMESAPI plants in Barcelona (which saw a failed strike) and Tenerife.

SOLIDARITY WITH THE LA SENZA SIT-IN

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UPDATE - From the La Senza Sit-In Facebook page:

"Victory!!!!! Thank you to everyone for the support!!! We are going to donate all the money we were given to AWARE!"

Congratulations from North London SolFed

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Four women workers as the Dublin La Senza store have taken the bold step of occupying their workplace to ensure they get fair redundancies.  The protest has met with overwhelming support and the local community has come out to support these courageous workers.

On Sunday 8th January 2012, Merseyside Police attempted to illegally evict Occupy Liverpool from their city centre squat. A member of Liverpool Solidarity Federation was in attendance to observe and lend assistance to the occupiers.

North London Solidarity Federation hereby expresses its solidarity with Bloomsbury Fightback and the activists involved in the Bloomsbury Social Centre initiative in their resistance against the imminent threat of violent eviction by SOAS management.

This morning the weekly protests got very lively as the rank and file electricians occupied the Grattes Brothers HQ. With only a few days left of the ballot for strike action, we gathered at 6.30 outside the gates of the building site at Kings X. Electricians and supporters leafletted the workers going in and there was a short attempt to block the gate but the police kept a pathway open so people could still go in to work. After listening to some speakers, we marched around the back of the site and blocked the access road, stopping some trucks going in. However we soon realised that this was a smokescreen and we were going for another target.

This autumn, or spring in the southern hemisphere, Chile has been witnessing a series of student-led protests which have seen tens of thousands of people take to the streets. The movement has also included student occupations, and linked up with striking workers. The movement began by demanding free education up to university level, as much of Chile’s education sector is privately run for profit, excluding many.  But it has grown to include striking miners and environmental protests, fuelled by the economic crisis and united in anger against the right-wing government.

As we speak, hundreds of thousands of people are gathering in city centres across the world in order to stand against the status quo. We’re all here to voice our discontent with the way that our society and economy are organised, and the suffering and damage this causes to our lives, but what do we want to put in its place? And how will we get there?

The world is in crisis. All around us the global economy is failing to answer the needs of ordinary people. In the UK, the government has introduced round after round of spending cuts, attacks that are directed at the vast majority of the population. Savage attacks on the unemployed, sick and disabled sit alongside mass public sector redundancies, and attacks on parents accompany increasing prices through the VAT increase. That we are right to reject this world is not in question.