Support the IWW Dispute at John Lewis





Colleagues,

 

Please do what you can to promote the latest protest in support of the impressive IWW action in support of outsourced cleaners at John Lewis.

 

The IWW is making phenomenally important progress in organising often marginalised workers in the UK. The text from the IWW press release issued yesterday is below. This dispute is of critical relevance given its bringing together of the demand for a living wage and on behalf of largely migrant workers - the fight here couldn't be more important. It needs your support.

PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Monday 12 November 2012

John Lewis Cleaners in New Pay Dispute

Today, Monday 12th November, the Industrial Workers of the World union (IWW) have lodged a fresh pay dispute on behalf of outsourced cleaners at John Lewis. This follows an IWW cleaners strike at John Lewis in Oxford Street earlier in the year – the first strike in John Lewis history.

In the run up to Christmas and January sales, John Lewis can expect to see profits spike, bringing in £millions. Meanwhile, our members working in their buildings are earning minimum wage of just £6.19 p/h.

Budget cuts have seen their workloads increase, leading to stress, sickness and depression. But with no sick pay, they have to carry on regardless. Meanwhile, poverty pay means home life is a daily struggle.

The cleaners, working at four John Lewis sites in South London including the famous Peter Jones store in Sloane Square and the company HQ in Victoria, are not part of John Lewis’ famous ‘partnership’. Instead they are employed by a contractor, Integrated Cleaning Management Ltd. (ICM), part of the giant Compass Group Ltd.

But now these second class workers have had enough.

Following extensive attempts by the workers to improve their situation, their union IWW entered a new pay claim with ICM on 26th October. Clear, realistic and reasonable, not to mention necessary, the pay claim aims at an immediate and backdated increase to £6.72 p/h for cleaners, £8 p/h for supervisors, plus a timetable of discussions aimed at securing full London Living Wage of £8.55 and full sick pay.

ICM have not been able to respond within the agreed 14 day period and therefore IWW have today lodged this fresh trade dispute. If no resolution is forthcoming, IWW and our members are ready and willing to pursue any lawful action available, up to and including lawful industrial action in the run up to Christmas and January sales.

Contact: south@iww.org.uk for more information.

Notes for the editors:
1. IWW is an independent industrial union, organising workers in all industries. Please see www.iww.org.uk for more information.

2. The new London Living Wage rate of £8.55 (£7.45 outside London) was announced last week by Mayor Boris Johnson during Living Wage week hosted by the Living Wage Foundation and KPMG. In the same week it was announced that 5 million workers (1 in 5) in the UK do not earn a Living Wage, the minimum amount necessary to live properly on.

3. IWW cleaner members, employed by ICM and working at John Lewis Oxford Street took strike action in August 2012 demanding a Living Wage and an end to hours cuts. They stopped hours cuts and won an increase from £6.08 p/h to £6.72 p/h.

4. Photographs of the previous strike at Oxford Street are available from Peter Marshall at http://www.demotix.com/users/peter-marshall/profile

 In Solidarity

Ian
 





MA ILTUS Cohort 2012-14: The Hard Work Starts Here

Colleagues,

I am very proud to introduce the students of the 2012-14 MA international labour and trade union studies (ILTUS) at Ruskin College, Oxford.

Drawn from a variety of countries, unions and sectors the new cohort are amongst the very best in the history of Ruskin's work with labour movement activists globally. I look forward to working with these sisters and brothers on our innovative MA programme.

Over the next two years (one year for the full-timers) these trade unionists will uncover, discuss, analyse and interpret the major challenges that labour movements face globally, and explore the extent to which we can respond to these challenges.

Our students will then go on to complete a  dissertation which allows them to generate an original insight and awareness of how we can secure the long-term future of trade unions.

The work of MA alumni is spread across labour movements and, whilst we wait for Ruskin's new MA ILTUS students to get started on their own areas of research, here is (very small) flavour of the output of our past students:

Carol Jess (MA 2008-10) wrote her dissertation around the phenomenon of partnership working within the financial services sector. Carol has just had an article published by the Global Labour Column of the Global Labour University: http://www.global-labour-university.org/fileadmin/GLU_Column/papers/no_112_Jess.pdf

Mary Compton (MA 2010-12) wrote her dissertation around the negative impact of neo-liberal policy in the UK and India in the achievement of millenium development goals. Mary runs the Teacher Solidarity website: http://www.teachersolidarity.com/blog/

Walton Pantland (MA 2008-10) wrote his dissertation on the subject of whether cyberunionism offered a model for union renewal. Walton runs the Cyberunions website (http://cyberunions.org/about/) and contributes to the website and online resources of Union Solidarity International: http://usilive.org/

Ariel Castro (MA 2008-09) wrote his dissertation around a comparative analysis of trade union education models in the Phillipines and the UK. Ariel now works for the ILO but came to the UK as head of education for the Phillipines TUC. In 2009 Ariel contributed a chapter to the GURN publication Trade Unions 2009 - Strategies for Confronting the Global Crisis, Multilateralism and Trade and Investment Agreements: http://www.gurn.info/en/gurn-special-publications-1/gurn-special-publications-1

In Solidarity

Ian

20:10:12 - Who Let the Plebs Out?

What a great day! A smaller turnout than last year but still, the British labour movement still represents the biggest civil society resistance to austerity in the UK. I was pleased to be accompanied by my youngest daughter, Isabella, who was particularly keen to see the site of 'Plebgate' and spent a wholly enjoyable period of time hurling abuse at the Tories whilst stood outside number 10. The banners and placards shone in colour, design and humour, as ever, and I have tried to capture also the momentum, anger and vitality of today's march and rally.

Farwell Eric Hobsbawm

Colleagues,

 

What a tragic irony that just the day after posting the item below, on the diminished state of the Labour Party (the new 'one nation' party according to Miliband today), the renowned Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm passes away.

 

There have been some fantastic pieces in the papers today, and no doubt there will be many others, with related essays, conferences etc.I just wanted to add here a minor, personal reflection which is that Hobsbawm, alongside his contemporaries Raphael Samuel (of whom I had the great experience of being taught at Ruskin), EP Thompson and Christopher Hill, helped shape my understanding and appreciation of the importance of radicalism in British, and international, history.

As a young, black trade unionist at Ruskin in the 1980s Hobsbawm helped to locate my experience as intrinsic to a centuries long tradition of working class men and women who feel naturally inclined to a collective expression of their identity through political and occupational means.

 

For anyone unfamiliar with the work of Hobsbawm please review these few articles (plus obituary)  in today's Guardian.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/01/eric-hobsbawm-history-man?intcmp=239

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/01/eric-hobsbawm-history-lost-voices?intcmp=239

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/01/eric-hobsbawm

In Solidarity

Ian

Whatever happened to the Labour Party?

Colleagues, there is a great, short piece in today's Independent by Owen Jones, author of Chavs, and now a leading light of the UNITE-GMB backed think tank CLASS (www.classonline.org.uk). As the Labour Party conference kicks off in my home town of Manchester today, the piece asks a simple question. Who does the party represent?

As a party, like many others globally, created organically from within previously established trade union movements, today's Labour Party is radically at odds with any traditional notion of whom the party fights for and represents. In reflecting on the Party's loss of the last general election, and an eye on the electoral base critical to success in 2014-15, Owen writes:

 

In part, the Labour leadership has not come to terms with why it lost the election. New Labour strategy was based on keeping so-called “Middle Britain” on-board, which didn’t mean those living on the median annual income of £21,000, but affluent types living in leafy suburbs. But while five million voters abandoned Labour in its 13 years in power, the Tories only won a million more. According to Ipsos-Mori, there was only a 5 point drop in support from middle-class professionals; among skilled workers, it was a 21 point drop. If Labour can’t win back these working-class voters, it will never win another general election.

 

The full article is here and well worth readng: www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/whatever-happened-to-the-labour-party-8191251.html

 

The troubled relationship between the Party leadership and a traditional working class core isn't a new phenomenon, but what concerns me most is the future relationship between the two traditional wings of the movement. Over the weekend Miliband sought to trash Len McClusky's attack on Balls' statement on how 'ruthless' Labour will be in government in tackling the deficit - including the retention of the public sector pay freeze.

 

In Miliband's own words he would have no time for 'sectional interests', a very interesting term, and one that tells you everything about where the sees the relevance of the trade union movement in the Labour Party's future.

 

In a scorching critique of New Labour's debilitating effects on the UK labour movement from 1997-2010 Gary Daniels and John McIlroy (http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415426633/) helped shape an understanding of the legitimate demands that trade unions could and should make of a future Labour government.

 

In particular the trade union movement, as the largest single civil society organisation challenging the basis and impact of austerity in the UK, carries a legitimacy that the Party cannot simply ignore. Moreso, a positive engagement with the coherence of the movement's message on austerity offers the Party a credible, rational means to claw back some sense of identity and location in British political life.

 

Any comments/questions welcome.

 

In Solidarity

 

Ian

Fight silently: Worker resistance in China

Colleagues,

The new academic year is upon us, and a fresh MA labour & TU studies group is just about to start at Ruskin - when I have a pic of the new cohort I'll post it here.

In thinking through how best to frame for the new group what besets and promotes the opportunities for organised labout globally I am struck by an article by Ju Li (Binghampton Univ) in the September edition of that fantastic free resource the Global Labour Journal (http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/globallabour/).

In this piece Li presents a a snapshot, fousing on workers in state-owned enterprises in China, of the rise in official labour protests and worker resistance. As Li outlines there has been a fascinating increase in the proportion and type of disputes across China.

Whilst Li suggests that workers in state-owned businesses are not amongst the most militant, they are part of a worrying trend for the Communist Party, and one that I have followed closely for over a couple of years.

Li writes:

Labor unrest, whether in the form of collective confrontations or law suits, has increased dramatically in contemporary China. Recent statistics from the Supreme People’s Court showed that the number of participants in industrial disputes in China has grown from around 10,000 in 1993 to 317,000 in 2009, with the total number of participants increasing from 0.7 million to over 5.4 million

(China News 11 March 2010). This means that in 2009, approximately one fourth of China’s 21.7 million industrial workers (China Statistic Yearbook 2009) were involved in some form of labor dispute. Similarly, according to one scholar’s estimation (Yu 2010), in that same year, there were around 90,000 mass incidents throughout China, one third of which were labor-related. This puts the number of strikes and collective worker protests in 2009 at around 30,000.

The article goes on to document the myriad ways in which labour protest manifests itself, and what the fundamental implications of this trend are. Li is not optimistic that labour protests in the state sector will be at the forefront of any trend towards the development of independent labour organisations. They are indeed however, part of a very interesting picture emerging from an economy vital to global capitalism.

If independent labour movements spring up here, the opportunities to challenge the worst excesses of capital in China are worth thinking about now.

You can read the full article here and you can investigate China using different links from this blog including the China Labour Bulletin:

http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/globallabour/vol3/iss2/1/

Any thoughts/comments in reply are very welcome.

In Solidarity

Ian

PS There have been several new books published recently on labour protest in China, email me and I can send details.

Pakistan: Make Textile Factories Safe

Colleagues,

I am writing to ask for your support for the joint IndustriALL/LabourStart campaign based on the recent, shocking death of 300 Pakistani textile workers in Lahore.

The campaign seeks compensation from the government for the families of the dead workers, the arrest of the factory owner and action against ineffective governmental departments.

The text below is taken from the text given on the Act Now pages of LabourStart's campaign site, and there is a link below to support the campaign.

Over 300 workers were killed in devastating factory fires on 11 September at a garment factory in Karachi and a shoe factory in Lahore, Pakistan.


Various reports indicate that workers could not escape the fire because the factory buildings lacked basic fire safety standards and emergency exits.

The fire at Ali Enterprises, the garment factory located in Hub river road, Sindh Industrial Trading Estate (SITE) in Karachi killed more than 289 workers.

Many of them died of suffocation as they were trapped in the basement. A large number of workers suffered grievous injuries as they jumped from the building to safety.


It is reported that the factory was illegally established and identifying the dead is extremely difficult as the workers were not registered with government authorities nor received written contracts.

In another fire accident at the four-story shoe manufacturing unit at Lahore about 25 workers were killed.

IndustriALL Global Union joins with unions in Pakistan to demand the government pay compensation of five million rupees (53,000 USD) to the families of the workers who were killed, and two million rupees (21,000 USD) to injured workers and that the workers continue to receive their salary.

Unions are also demanding the government arrest the employer and charge him with murder and take action against the labour department and government authorities that failed to ensure the safety and health of these workers.

Send your message in support of these demands to the Pakistan Prime Minister today.

http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=1570

In Solidarity

Ian