Workers Solidarity Movement

The world's 225 richest people have a combined wealth equal to the combined annual income of the world's 2.5 billion poorest people.

THE NORTHERN EXECUTIVE (the wanna-be government of the six counties) is gone for the moment. The leaders of the UUP, SDLP and Sinn Féin had been getting used to the Ministerial high life. They were not eager to let it go.

AT THE MOMENT there are approximately 236,400 people working in the wholesale and retail trade. Most of us working in this sector are badly paid, as unskilled labour usually is. Recently Roches Stores office workers went out on strike for better pay. Some of them were being paid as little as £4.16 an hour. They were successful and got a 25% pay rise.

THE BATTLE AGAINST the latest "social partnership" deal - The Programme for Prosperity and Fairness - in the teachers' unions has thrown up the best chance for decades for the building of a real rank-and-file oppositional group within the three teacher unions. Activists in all three unions - the INTO, TUI and ASTI - have united in "Teachers Against Partnership" and delivered a strong message to the leadership of the unions that passivity among the rank-and-file is coming to an end.

Conference notes the pay claim lodged by TDs seeking an increase of £250 per week. Therefore conference instructs the incoming Executive Committee to lodge a claim for an across the board increase of £250 per week for all PSEU members. This claim is to be lodged with the Department of Finance by 1st June 2000.

I recently found myself on a morning flight from London to Dublin with two leaders - David Trimble and Ken Magennis. If that plane had crashed it can almost be guaranteed that there would have been some conspiracy theory surrounding it. The crash would have meant that this article would never have been written - but in the greater scheme of things it would be remembered due to the fact that these leaders' lives would have been lost.

THE WORKERS Solidarity Movement have, since their inception with the Programme for National Recovery in 1987, identified 'social partnership' agreements as a major problem. Not only do they hold down wages while placing no limits on prices or profits; they also massively reduce ordinary members' participation in their unions, erode internal union democracy, and encourage a denial of independent working class interests.

SWEDISH FASCISTS murdered a long time trade unionist last October. Björn Söderberg was an activist of the 'libertarian socialist' Swedish Workers Central Organisation (SAC) union. He was shot three times outside his apartment in the Stockholm suburb of Satra. He was shot in the head.

Chinese construction worker Chen Xianggui was recently convicted of "gathering people to disturb the social order'', a charge based on his union activism while working in Kuwait. Chen went to Kuwait in 1996 as one of thousands of Chinese overseas labourers and joined a union of foreign workers. As a union activist he helped organise a one-week strike in Kuwait in 1997 over unpaid overtime. The strike was legal under Kuwaiti law. But Chinese authorities revoked Chen's passport in early 1998, forcing him to return to China. He was arrested and held in detention until October 28th last year, when a court in Jintang County in his native Sichuan province convicted him.1

Regular readers of Workers Solidarity will have noticed that this issue is quite late in coming out. We are currently dicsussing our publications (Workers Solidarity and Red & Black Revolution) with a view to making changes in the way they are produced and sold.