Council Workers Strike

If you are around during the day, there are two events which you can attend to show support for striking council workers, LEFT alternative supporters hope to be out in force!

Wednesday 16 July

Rally at The Point, Mount Stuart Square, Cardiff Bay, 11.30am.

Thursday 17 July

Lobby of the Senedd, the Welsh Assembly, Cardiff Bay, 12 noon.

Solidarity Forever! Support the Local Strikes

The politcal elites are using the credit crisis to drive down our wages, they hope to stabilise their profits by squeezing the working class. They seek to impose a cut in living standards on all public sector workers, as the first step in attacking the wages of all working people.

There has been (or will be) strike action across a huge section of the union movement: Teachers, Postal Workers, Civil Servants, Council Workers, Railway workers, Lecturers and others. If all these unions were strike on the same day - a general strike of the public sector - it would turn an economic dispute into a political blow against New Labour.

Brown has been using divide and rule - in his references to public sector workers enjoying privileges that most workers don't enjoy - but if the attack on pay in the public sector succeeds it will send a clear signal to big business to start cutting wages for workers in the private sector: They divide each to conquer all.

Therefore, each individual struggle of a group of workers against the pay freeze is a fight for all working people, because they are part of a fightback against the attempt to impose a cut in living standards and wages on ALL working people.

In our group we have been trying in a modest way to support groups of workers on strike - taking collections at our workplaces for striking workers, setting up an informal network of rank and file unionists, trying to make people aware that these disputes are in defence all working people, and trying to push for co-ordinated strike action. We also seek to build a grassroots alternative to the union bureaucracy and Labour Party link. Sure it's not perfect, but if we can help build a fighting coalition of the working class on some level, then that will be something.

Supporters of the LEFT Alternative will be on strike this week, and others will be visiting picket lines. It's all about basic working class solidarity. For us, any working class people trying to fight back against the bosses merit support.

This strike is taking place against the backdrop of wider unrest. Currently a huge proportion of people in Wales work in the public sector, the attempt at a wage freeze comes at the same time as workers are already feeling the pinch of rising fuel prices, electricity and water bills, rising council tax, rising food prices. We also know that it's not everyone being told to tighten their belts - for the rich, they've never had it so good!

As socialists we support the trade union movement. We believe that if this strike is successful it will build confidence among other workers to organise and improve the lot of our class. People in Britain now work the longest hours for the worst pay in Europe - why? Because the trade union movement was smashed under Thatcher. Supporting these seemingly small disputes is part of rebuilding the combativity of working class organisations so that we can begin to improve the life and conditions of people in Wales and start pushing back against the continued dismantling of the Welfare State and the reforms won in 1945 like free health care and free education. Because of their strategic power under capitalism, workplace organisation is very important, the best weapon for social justice that we have.

The strikes this week are not just a dispute between one group of workers and the council, but rather about working people as a whole bettering themselves through collective organisation and collective struggle.

A Worker Reads History

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.
Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Greek triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?
Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.
So many questions.

- Bertold Brecht

Women - Free to Work Harder

The following article by Lindsey German was printed in today's Guardian.

Lindsey is National Convenor of the UK Stop the War Coalition, RESPECT candidate for London Mayor & Author of "Material Girls: Women, Men & Work"

The women's economic miracle has passed largely unremarked, but increasing numbers of women over the past two decades have contributed more to global economic growth than either new technology or the rapidly industrialising giants of China and India. In the 1970s many of us thought working outside the home would be liberating for women, freeing them from financial dependence on men and allowing them roles beyond those of wife and mother.

It hasn't worked out that way. Women's labour has been bought on the cheap, their working hours have become longer and their family commitments have barely diminished. Yesterday's G2 special investigation into how employers treat parents highlighted companies offering decent maternity packages, but many firms refused to take part, and the question remained whether a woman's career would survive childbirth.

The reality for most working women is a near impossible feat of working ever harder. There have been new opportunities for some women: professions once closed to them, such as law, have opened up. Women managers are commonplace, though the top boardrooms remain male preserves. Professional and managerial women have done well out of neoliberalism. Their salaries allow them to hire domestic help.

But more women face worsening conditions: the supermarket or call centre workers; the cooks, cleaners and hairdressers; all find themselves in low-wage, low-status jobs with no possibility of paying to have their houses cleaned by someone else. Even those in professions once-regarded as reasonably high-status, such as teaching, nursing or office work, have seen that status pushed down with longer hours, more regulation and lower pay.

Inequality is not just between men and women, but increasingly between "top" women and those at the lower levels of wages and conditions. Class divisions between women appear in starker form than they did a generation ago. Indeed, those at the top often rely on the labour of those at the bottom to sustain their lifestyles.

Role models such as cabinet ministers Yvette Cooper (three children) or Ruth Kelly (four) do not face the problems of most working women. They receive salaries of three or four times the average female wage, have far longer holidays, access to drivers and other benefits. Estimates have put the cost of employing a nanny at £35,000 a year. Even the cost of a full-time nursery place, at £10,000 a year in London, is close to many women's annual wage.

Women's right to work should not mean a family life where partners rarely see each other or their children. Yet a quarter of all families with dependent children have one parent working nights or evenings, many of them because of childcare problems.

The legislative changes of the 1960s and 1970s helped establish women's legal and financial independence, but we have long come up against the limits of the law. A more radical social transformation would mean using the country's wealth - much of it now produced by women - to create a decent family life. A 35-hour week and a national childcare service would be a start.

It is hard to imagine the major employers conceding such demands. Every gain that women have made at work has had to be fought for.

Women's lives have undergone a revolution over the past few decades that has seen married women, and mothers in particular, go from a private family role to a much more social role at work. But they haven't left the family role behind: now they are expected to work even harder to do both.