Workers Solidarity Movement

A fresh outbreak of Covid 19 in a meat plant in Waterford this week brings to a total of 44 the number of clusters in meat plants across the State in the past 6 months, or some 1,600 confirmed cases of the virus. One cluster is unfortunate, two might be carelessness, but forty-four is capitalism. The sustained outbreaks of COVID 19 in Ireland’s meat plants reveal how the meat industry and its management really operate on the basis of unchecked power and exploitation. And that’s a problem for us all. 

Photo: Standing room only. Meat plant workers on the 6am bus to work in Waterford.

Credit: @Deisesupes

Today, China is the driving engine of global economic growth. A major crisis of the Chinese economy will almost certainly drag the global economy into the next recession in the 2020s. This may turn out to be far more damaging than the Great Recession of 2008.

Minqi Li is a political economist at the University of Utah and an advocate of China’s Maoist New Left [1]. His most recent book, ‘China and the 21^st Century Crisis’, outlines capitalism’s next looming crisis. Regardless of the proximate cause, this coming crisis will be economic, political, and ecological. It will also be global.

In 2015, 2 years after graduating from an animation school in Paris, I found myself participating for the first time in a struggle as a unionised worker. At the time my interest in the anarchist critique of our current institutions was increasing, but having no first hand experience of class struggle, I couldn’t relate to what anarchism had to say about unions. By telling the story of this fight, I hope to show how much can be learnt from a single campaign and why action is the best way to assimilate theory and perfect it. I also hope that the specifics of this story will be a useful addition to the wealth of past experiences anarchists can learn from.

A new intention to #Strike4Repeal has been announced as we still wait for a referendum and as importantly to see what it is we will get to vote on.

Pledge to Strike 4 Repeal here: https://goo.gl/forms/DTDfA9tQ0kZ0HQ6F3

An Irish anarchist reports from recent victory in Sydney against wage theft in the hospitality industry. The Sydney Solidarity Network was formed a number of years ago along the lines of the Seattle Solidarity Network.

Why have there been pickets outside massage parlours on Dorset St? Do they really pose any danger? Do these protests help those who work there, or actually make them more afraid and isolated? Watch the video below.

Note to readers: Passed by National Conference, July 2017. This paper sits under the WSM's Anarchism, Oppression & Exploitation and Class and Exploitation position papers.  It doesn’t repeat the material to be found in those papers.

Work and Workplace Organising

        A Workers Solidarity Movement Position Paper

Details of the latest national plan agreed between the government and union leaders have appeared in the media today, as usual well ahead of the union leaders bothering to tell their membership anything. Then union leaders intention is to present workers with a ‘take it or leave it’ choice accompanied by dire warnings that there is no choice.

The deal as expected is pretty rotten and in effect ensures that the pay cuts imposed on public sector workers from 2009 will at least partially be in place for some workers a full decade and a year later in 2020. What’s even worse is that the worse pay and conditions imposed on workers employed after 2012 are being set in stone rather than overturned. This despite it seeming an essential basic demand of a union that workers doing the same work should receive the same pay.

This is the audio of a talk – Sex Work 101 - given by a member of the Workers Solidarity Movement after a WSM Dublin branch meeting in April 2017.

Inter city bus workers in Ireland launched widespread secondary pickets at 4am this morning. Solidarity from transport workers at the other services picketed meant that most of the country ground to a halt as morning rush hour approached, almost all trains, Dublin bus and light rail services did not operate.