Workers Solidarity Movement

NAMA is nothing short of straight class robbery – robbery from ordinary workers in order to shore up the property developers and big bankers who got us into this mess in the first place. It can be described as unfair, it can be described as immoral but in reality it’s naked capitalism at work.

The Workers Solidarity Movement(WSM) has called for a No vote in the Lisbon referendum, referring to it as “a treaty for the rich”, and claiming that “people in Ireland can do a lot better than a choice between the clowns in the Dáil or those in Brussels”.

The Workers Solidarity Movement is twenty-five years old this autumn. A quarter of a century ago anarchists in Ireland came together to establish an organisation to promote and fight for our ideas.

The McCarthy or “Bord Snip Nua” report on public spending outlined a range of proposed cuts in government expenditure. Of the €5.3b in possible savings, it can be safely said that at least €4b of this (and probably more) targets the working class. Indeed, a full third of the cuts are aimed at pensioners and unemployed. In the private sector, attacks on our class continue in the form of pay cuts, short time and lay-offs.

A special issue of Workers Solidarity, no 111 is now online. It concentrates on making the argument for a No vote in the second Lisbon referendum as part of the WSM 'No to Lisbon' campaign.

Download Workers Solidarity 111 - No to Lisbon (Southern edition)

Thomas Cooke workers refused to go quietly when they were tossed onto the dole. Cooks had made £400m profit in 2008 and their boss, Manny Fontela-Novoa, took home €7 million. This was not a failing business.

John Fleming, the west Cork businessman who began his career making sheds and ended up owing the banks €1 billion – the tab for which we will be picking up, no doubt – is a great example of how the other half is dealing with the recession. Whereas you and I have to pinch and scrape, John Fleming can still call on plenty of spare coins – despite his massive debt.

The report into the Leas Cross Nursing home scandal was a shocker. Elderly patients were dying in unexplained circumstances; others had open and infected sores which were left untreated; others still were being restrained and held against their wishes. Odd though isn’t it, given the uproar about what went on there, that so little attention was focused on the businessman who ran Leas Cross. There’s a reason for that.

Dublin football fans will want to forget the August Bank Holiday weekend as the Dubs failed to perform in Croke Park against the might of the Kingdom. But one group of Dublin workers are unlikely to forget the 5 days from Friday 31st July to Tuesday 4th August. When the workers in the Thomas Cook office at the top of Grafton Street in Dublin’s city centre went to work as usual on the Friday morning little did they realise that before going home again they would spend 3 days and (almost) 4 nights in occupation of their workplace, that they would be hauled off at 5a.m. in the morning of the 4th night by a force of 80 – 100 gardai who blocked off the street and battered in the door as if they were on the trail of a dangerous terrorist group, and that they would spend several hours held in the Bridewell Garda station before finally being released by the High Court and allowed to go home.

Several hundred protestors chanting ‘Scabs out. Dockers In’ engaged in a mass trespass on the premises of Marine Terminals Ltd. in Dublin’s docklands yesterday morning (24th August).