Unions

Worker occupation: essential self defence

Life under Capitalism, Socialism, Unions
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The Socialist Worker reports on the worker occupations of the Visteon car parts factories:

Visteon workers occupying the Belfast factory

Around 80 workers occupied the building on Wednesday morning and remained there throughout the day. They are staying overnight. More workers, locked out by the company, stayed outside the site to show their support.

Workers were told that they would not be paid for last week’s work at the meeting on Tuesday. Many have no savings and no idea of how they are going to make ends meet over the next few weeks.

“They’ve treated us like dogs,” Richard Bruce, who had worked at the site for 17 years, told Socialist Worker. “We’re not even going to get paid for our last week’s work or for our work on Monday and Tuesday. But the workers in Ireland occupied – so we thought, now it’s our turn to do something.”

Many of the workers felt that the attack was preplanned – even though they had no notice of it themselves. Several said that vans from factories supplied by Visteon had taken away their tools from the site last Friday.

One worker, Terry, said, “Even the vending machines were emptied yesterday morning. Everyone knew we were going to be sacked.

“There are parts piled up inside our factory. They’ve made sure that the car plants can still be supplied – everything’s been prepared for this.”

In a crisis like this factory occupations are essential for worker self defence. It’s the only weapon left to workers whose labour is no longer valuable to their bosses anymore, to take physical control of plant space, and as important, the valuable tools, reserves and machinery they contain. It’s a desperate, short term measure, but one that can work and on which more permanent solutions can be build, as we saw in Argentine in the early noughties.

A Choice of Tyrannies

Civil liberties, Crime, Policing, Tories, UK politics, Unions
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You can have the blue one or the red one. Yellow is not an option.

I have to admit that I quite admired the Conservatives’ David Davis for his principled stand on the erosion of civil liberties; even if it was somewhat hypocritical, given his support for 28 day detention, at least he had the gumption to stand up, even if in the end the whole effort proved a damp squib. Davis tapped into an enormous wellspring of public unease and anger over the UK’s gradual transmogrification into a petty police state.

There is a demonic versatility to Blair’s laws. Kenneth Clarke, a former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, despairs at the way they are being used. “What is assured as being harmless when it is introduced gets used more and more in a way which is sometimes alarming,” he says. His colleague David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is astonished by Blair’s Labour Party: “If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit – in some cases eradicate – habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would have locked me up.”

The Tories, particularly the one-nation faction, had in Davis a prime opportunity to ride a wave of public support into power, if only they could have overcome their natural authoritarian flog ’em and jail ’em tendencies and their complicity with the prisons industry and the police. But of course they couldn’t and can’t and to think they ever would is fantasy. Tory policy is what it always is, in favour of the status quo, of increased police powers and of the protection of property before people.

This is made crystal clear in today’s announcement on police surveiilance from Dominic Grieve, Davis’ replacement as Shadow Foreign Secretary :

Police would be given greater powers to conduct surveillance operations on people suspected of crimes such as burglary and vehicle theft under plans the Conservative Party will announce today.

Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, will pledge to amend the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act so that police no longer need to secure authorisation to conduct surveillance on those suspected of non-terrorist offences.

The changes would mean that the police would automatically be able to:

· Use covert video or listening devices in premises or vehicles.

· Watch premises to identify or arrest suspects.

· Conduct visual surveillance of public locations.

· Patrol, in uniform or plain clothes.

· Use thermal imaging and X-ray technology.

· Conduct surveillance using visible CCTV cameras.

In his statement, Grieve will say it is time to amend the rules governing surveillance because they place a “disproportionate burden” on police trying to investigate non-terrorist crimes. A review by the Association of Chief Police Officers of the act, which is designed to ensure that the invasion into people’s privacy is in proportion to the crime, found that police often spend hours filling out forms for relatively minor surveillance operations. The review found that it takes an average of five hours to complete the forms for what is known as directed surveillance authorisation.

So just to get this straight: that nice Mr Cameron, so relaxed and liberal – hug a hoodie! – is proposing to allow the police to spy on anyone they like, whenever and however they like, on their own say-so, for any reason, no permission required. Even Blair didn’t try that.

Davis has clearly lost his internal campaign to make the Conservative party the party of civil liberties (at least for the purposes of winning elections) though there was never much doubt he would lose, despite so much popular support. The rump of the tory party is as pro-lawnorder and a firm fist as ever. Just read some of the comments on Conservative blogs, for example, to get the flavour of party opinion. If commenters had their way the police would be given the power to do anything they like to thwart those nasty crims and moslems – because of course those nice handsomne police officers would never use it against nice people like them. Nothing to hide nothing to fear, etc. etc. Curfews for chavs? Brilliant. Moslems to be electronically tagged? A little light torture? Ideal. More cameras, more tasers, more ASBOs, more jails – for ‘them’, not us.

Cameron knows this about his party and knows he must appease both them and the arms dealers, hedge funds and others with business interests in penal policy who support his party financially. It’s clear that to do so he plans to out-draconian one of the most draconian governments in British history.

If anyone ever expected anything else from the Tories, then they’re fools who should read some recent history. Google ‘Orgreave Colliery’ or ‘Poll Tax riot‘ or ‘Battle of The Beanfield‘ or ‘Criminal Justice Act 1994‘. and see the kind of people the Conservatives were and still are:

MI5 ran an agent to monitor the activities of Dave Nellist, the Labour MP and supporter of the far left Militant group in the 1980s. It asked the West Midlands police special branch to find an agent to infiltrate the Labour party in Coventry and cultivate Mr Nellist, then MP for the city’s south east constituency.

The police special branch also ran a spy in the inner circle of the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill. Given the close relationship between the special branch and MI5, there is no doubt the spy’s information was passed to MI5.

The agent, codenamed Silver Fox, provided valuable information about the tactics of the leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers and helped to break the 1984-85 miners’ strike, according to former special branch officers.

The disclosures are made in the second programme in BBC2’s True Spies series, to be broadcast on Sunday. It also includes an interview with David Hart, a millionaire who was Margaret Thatcher’s unofficial adviser. He says he employed former SAS soldiers to protect the families of working miners during the strike.

You’d think Labour would remember those days. You’d think they’d remember when Labour party members and trade unionists were routinely spied upon, followed, falsely accused and even blacklisted from certain professions and jobs. From Labour’s own Employment Relations Bill in 1999:

The blacklisting of trade union activists was a major issue in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The activities of the Economic League came in for a good deal of criticism. The League provided member companies with a system for checking potential recruits “to see whether they are known to the League as active members or supporters of one of the revolutionary groups of the far Right or far Left”.It was alleged that the League maintained a card index of names obtained from sources such as press articles about demonstrations or industrial action. Many of these people would have been active trade
unionists.

But no, New Labour buried their memories with their principles. That’s what’s always enraged me most about New Labour’s wrong-headed and profoundly illiberal promulgation of so many badly drafted, illogical and tyrannical laws – that not one minister has ever realised that what they were doing was handing the weapons to the opposition to use against them.

The profound stupidity of this policy, if we can dignify such a collection of cowardly panic measures as coherent policy, proves their complete unfitness to govern, even leaving aside Iraq, PFI and all the rest. What party gives its political enemies the tools to repress it?

The voter is in an impossible position. Choose Cameron, you get greedy, unpleasant baby Thatchers armed with added technology and expanded police powers. Imagine Orgreave with tasers. Choose Brown or whoever succeeds him, get the same, allied to breathtakingly callous incompetence. Choose the Lib Dems, get – what exactly? No-one knows. What would Clegg do? Who is he? What does he stand for? Again, no one knows. You can go look it up but you’ll be no wiser. What earthly bloody use is Clegg or his party?

Oh well, when Cameron and the Tories implement the hated ID card scheme (and they will, once in power, they won’t be able to resist it and besides too much money’s already been spent) then we can find out Clegg’s political views from that.

O Frabjous Day, When The Bailiffs Call On New Labour

Corruption, UK politics, Unions
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Labour cash crisis could bankrupt party leaders:

“The party’s constitution is like a five-a-side football club, or the local cricket club. The big difference is that the most club officials and managers could expect to have to fork out is an unpaid bill for hiring the pitch. In Labour’s case, it’s tens of millions of pounds.”

New Labour, like the country who followed its lead, has financed its dreams on the never-never and now it’s deep, deep in the hole and the executive are personally liable. Unsurprisingly it doesn’t look like the unions will stump up, not after the way they’ve been treated and no matter how many new hollow agreements Labour offer.

There’s a bloody good reason why the party’s constitution makes the executive severally and jointly liable for debts – so that executive members would consider their potential personal loss and not get into debt, because it would be on their own heads. So who did New Labour’s golden girls and boys, most of whom have yet to hold down a proper job and have, most likely, never even had to balance the household books, expect to make up the repayments when they took the debt on? I swear that New Labour’s authoritarian incompetents have been thinking their party expenditure’s been paid by the taxpaying mugs all this time, just like their own exorbitant personal expenses.

Er, no. They are personally liable for the debt they and their party have run up and that could mean the application of their own draconian laws against them.

That means that means if they don’t pay, the creditor can take pretty much all they own in satisfaction of the debt and associated charges – and do it with menaces. I hope that each member of Labour’s excutive, starting with Gordon Brown, each get a bailiff’s visit from their very own government-licensed thugs. Like this politically conveniently-timed raid on peace protestors just before the Iraq invasion:

Bailiffs evict peace protesters

Peace protestors who occupied a derelict building in the centre of Bristol for 12 hours have been evicted by bailiffs.

The bailiffs smashed their way into the building near the Council House, which had been occupied since 0700 GMT on Friday by an unknown number of people from anti-war and housing action groups.

They said the money being spent on the war could be spent instead on housing in the city.

The eviction happened on the eve of the anti-war march in London, which will be attended by protesters travelling in 66 coaches from Bristol.

Or perhaps they’d prefer a visit like this, to someone having problems paying their council tax -which has doubled since Labour came to power:

…in the first instance they turned up and tricked my husband into letting them in,he knew he shouldnt,but they made him believe letting them in was his only option,you know how they like to scare and bully people!,anyway,he let them in,they did a very vqague walking possesion,agreed payments of £30 a week(which we couldnt afford,but as i said,hubby felt intimidated),anyway,this was to be paid by cheque because they dont accept helpful payment methods such as standing order.
We kept the payments up to date,but thought instead of sending a cheque every week,we would send one for the whole month in advance,so payments were all up to date,just easier than weekly cheques.
Then a different bailiff to the first one,turns up on our doorstep asking for my hubby,so i ask whs calling,he says im mr ****** from chandlers,im here to take possesion of goods to the value of £1879,for outstanding ct.
So i explain to him that the latest cheque has just been cashed,he says yes it has,im not here to dispute that your account is up to date,as it is in perfectly good order,unfortunately,you agreed to pay in weekly instalments,and you’ve been paying monthly,so you’ve defaulted on the agreement,and if you cant pay by tomorrow at 6am,i will come back with the police!!,we tell him theres no way we can find that kind of money(if we had money like that,we’d have been able to pay the ct in the first place!!),so he says hes prepared to accept £958 tomorrow and reinstate the agreement for the rest,then my hubby made a flippant comment about him being generous,so the bailiff gets his head firmly wedged up his backside and says fine,i’ll be back tomorrow,i want the full amount,so i go after the idiot and persuade him to take the £958,he then says to call him when i have the money.

After alot of panicking(where the hell am i supposed to find nearly a grand by the morning??),i get in touch with my brother in law,who does debt management,and ask if he can help,after alot of shouting and crying to the council,who told me it was tough luck,its in the hands of the bailiffs and theres nothing they can do about it cos im not on benefits(ha,if i was on benefits,i wouldnt have to pay the bloody council tax!!),i got him to speak to them for me,he managed to get the council to agree that the bailiff should never have turned up here and we didnt have to pay him the money,and if he came back i was to tell him to bugger off!.

Anyhow,mr ****** turns up at 10 am,and i tell him to go away,the council say he has no business being here,and he replies that,yes,the council have called him off,all there is to pay today is £180,which are there charges,so my bil who is on the phone tells him to sod off we dont owe him anything,he cant charge us for a visit he shouldnt have made in the first place,so he hangs the phone up on my bil and proceeds to take a clamp out of his van to clamp my car,so i pay him the £180 cos im on my way to work,he reinstates the old agreement,but to monthly payments,and off he goes.
So,my bil has put in a complaint with chandlers and north somerset council,the bailiff is denying threatening to clamp my car(my neighbour saw him,clamp in hand!!),and when i last checked the account,chandlers had added £1300 worth of charges!,we have paid over £600 off the bill and its higher now than when it started,the council have had £109 paid to them,and chandlers are laughing all the way to the bank!!!!!.

I can’t see any more just desert than that for those who cheered on New Labour’s authoritarian incompetence and their war crimes, and who in doing so have enabled another decade of Tory rule to come.

I want to see each and every one of them, jointly or severally, humiliated and stripped of everything they own, left on the street to sink or swim according to the vagaries of their own housing policies and forced to survive on the pittance they call the Job Seekers’ Allowance, just like the millions of others they have written off as the underclass. Let their children eat turkey twizzlers alone in a B&B while Mum or Dad begs for a crisis loan at the DWP.

It would be a start.

SEIU goons attack, harass and stalk

Life under Capitalism, Unions
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This is sickening. The SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, invaded a conference at which members of another union and dissidents from their own union were present and physically attacked them:

Representatives of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) on Saturday night physically attacked supporters of the California Nurses Association (CNA) and others attending a conference organized by the Labor Notes magazine in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan.

The SEIU, which is involved in a bitter jurisdictional dispute with the CNA and its affiliates over union representation for nurses in California, Nevada, Ohio and other states, sent hundreds of International staff and other members to disrupt the conference, where Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the CNA, had been scheduled to speak.

According to a statement posted by Labor Notes, union members and others at the conference were punched, kicked, shoved and thrown to the floor by SEIU staff members and supporters who forced their way into the conference banquet hall. A recently retired member of United Auto Workers Local 235, Dianne Feeley, suffered a head wound after being knocked to the ground and was hospitalized. Dearborn police responded and evicted at least three busloads of SEIU supporters. No arrests were made.

The CNA said DeMoro cancelled her appearance at the event after the SEIU began sending “roving bands of staff to the homes of CNA/National Nurses Organizing Committee board members in California Thursday and Friday, stalking and harassing them” at their places of work and their homes.

What drove these SEIU goons to attack fellow unionists is unclear, but it seems to fit in a long history of anti-union bullyboy tactics employed by this “union”. As the article cited above makes clear, the SEIU is more interested in cutting sweetheart deals with employers than defend the rights of the workers they represent, while aggressively competiting with other unions for members:

Earlier this year, SEIU Vice President Dennis Rivera intervened on behalf the governor of Puerto Rico to help bust an independent union representing 40,000 public school teachers, in order to force them to affiliate with the SEIU. Shortly after a meeting between Rivera and Governor Acevedo Vila, where the SEIU leader allegedly pledged financial backing to his long-time friend in exchange for the governor’s support for the SEIU-affiliated union, Vila decertified the independent union and suspended its dues check-off. This provoked a bitter strike by teachers, to which the governor responded with riot police.

In California, the SEIU struck a secret deal with a group of nursing home chains, in which the companies agreed to drop their resistance to organizing drives in return for the SEIU’s agreement to lobby state politicians to pass a tort-reform measure that would limit patients’ ability to sue over neglect or abuse.

The decision to attack the Labor Notes conference follows a bitter turf war between the SEIU and the CNA-affiliated National Nurses Organizing Committee over organizing Catholic hospitals in Ohio. The CNA said a deal between the SEIU and Catholic Healthcare Partners to hold a snap union recognition election—excluding the participation of other unions—set “a dangerous precedent of employer-union collusion.” The CNA sent representatives to Ohio to urge nurses to vote down the SEIU. The SEIU denounced this as “union-busting” and said it led to the cancellation of voting at nine hospitals last month.

It’s clear that the increasing resistance against these tactics is threatening the SEIU and its leadership, which might be why they sent their thugs in. Shameful behaviour from any organisation, let alone a union.

Bush tries to silence unions on anti-worker policies

Life under Capitalism, Unions, US politics
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Says Nathan Newman:

And of course, all retirees have an interest in preserving income from social security, but by Bush administration arguments about the state of pension law, union administrators should ignore the interests of those retirees and stay on the political sidelines — even as corporations use their capital to mobilize to stomp on political rights.

The problem in politics is not just that those with money get a disproportionately large voice. Even when workers have money to speak, the corporate right seeks to silence them through legal assault.