The Festering Marriage Of State And Big Business.

       After four years of solidarity and struggle, a group of workers in Mexico see their comrades being imprisoned  with illegal extortionate bail being set. This is how the state apparatus and the corporate world work hand in hand to repress workers demands. This festering cancerous marriage of state and big business will always work to produce a submissive and cheap labour force, useing the full force of the state to intimidate and repress any call for justice. 

       Here in the West we can see large corporations fill our shopping malls and main streets with a glittering array of commodities, but what they conceal from us is the smell of sweat from over worked, under paid cheap labour which produces this array. The opulence of their premises conceals the miserable conditions of the workers who create all that opulence, and who fill the greedy shareholders fat bank accounts. Our shopping malls are built on a foundation of miserable,  and often dangerous conditions, low pay, and at times slave labour. These are the conditions that capitalism fosters and can't live without.

This from IndustriALL:

 Sign the petition page set up by the Calzado Sandak workers here

      Calzado Sandak, a Bata subsidiary, closed its doors illegally four years ago claiming that the plant was unviable. It has now brought criminal charges against the workers who have been picketing outside the plant ever since, accusing them of ‘extortion’. The General Secretary of the union, Gustavo Labastida Adriano is currently in jail and seven of his colleagues, most of whom have worked at the plant for many years, could be arrested at any time.
      “There is a cruel irony here”, says Mr. Raina. “Bata has been able to ignore labour law that protects workers’ rights, and use criminal law to coerce them into giving up their legitimate struggle”.
“In truth, this is a case not of extortion on the part of workers, but of coercion on the part of the company in collusion with the authorities”, explains Mr. Raina. “Although the law says bail for a worker cannot exceed a day’s wages, in this case it has been set at over 2 million dollars. It would take Gustavo 600 years to earn that amount – assuming he still had a job”.

Read the full article HERE:

  Sign the petition page set up by the Calzado Sandak workers here

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Spiraling Into Planned Deprivation.

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       Hello Greece, we in the UK are following hard on your heels, as you plunge into orchestrated deprivation, we are right behind you. Recent figures show that we in the UK saw average hourly wages fall faster than most European countries. Since 2010 UK average hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, have fallen 5.5%. This is worse than Spain, 3.3%, Cyprus, 3%, countries that have faced financial turmoil. The only countries that suffered a worse deteriorating hourly wage were Greece, Portugal and Holland. Compare the UK drop with the European average drop of 0.7% and you see the rate at which we are racing towards the sweatshop economy. The UK workers will have lost £6,660 by the time the next election comes round. The present millionaire cabal sitting in The Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption have presided over 35 consecutive months of falling real wages. The pattern is set to continue as price rises outstrip wage increases, where there are any wage increases.
       Do you honestly see this changing? Do you believe that voting in another smiling suit will make up any of that lost income? Only a fool would accept that a change of party, from tweedle-dee to tweedle-dum will sort out the falling living standards of the ordinary people. I suppose it is wrong to say “falling” living standards, “falling” implies some sort of unavoidable accident, the correct phrase in this instant should be “driven down” living standards. There is no accident in the way things are going and it is certainly not unavoidable. Everything is going to plan, cheap labour and everything privatised, that is the real aim of this financial Mafia plan. We are well on our way to be part of that corporate dream, sweatshop Europe.

ann arky's home.

   

What Will Your Grandkids Wages Be?

       According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, UK wages have fallen more in real terms than ever before. According to Claire Crawford of the IFS “The falls in nominal wages - - - during this recession are unprecedented.” Of course we all know the reason, a deliberate policy by employers, public and private, to use the “crisis” to freeze wages or in some cases cut wages. Workers are facing a continual rise in living costs with inflation running at between 2 to 3%, while aproximately one third of workers who stayed in the same job since the “crisis”, have taken a wage cut or wage freeze. Those who have not, have seen wage increases of well below the inflation rate. Of course any wage increase below inflation is in fact a wage cut.

       With “austerity” set to continue into 2020, can you calculate by how much your income will have fallen in real terms by then? We are well on our way to being the UK section of the European sweatshop economy. With a downwrd spiral forecast until 2020, and then some promise of pie-in-the-sky, you can see what kind of future our kids and grandkids are heading towards.

       Of course this "austerity" business is just for you and I the ordinary guys, those at the top haven't even had a whiff of "austerity". Corporate bodies are holding vast volumes of cash, waiting for the right conditions, a pool of very cheap labour, then they will start to exploit it with a vengeance. Their aim is an abundance of cheap labour, ours is to live a decent life with some dignity, the two are incompatible. The sooner we realise this fact the sooner we can all come together and dismantle this burden on our shoulders and start to create that better world. A world of co-operation in place of competition, of mutual aid in place of profit, a world that sees to all our needs and not the greed of a handful of parasites.

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Employers' Loyalty, Move The Plant To Cheaper Wages.

     An Appeal for solidarity from Labour Start:

 

     The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) is one of the unions that can always be counted upon when we need international solidarity.  

    As the head of the UCLA Labor Center put it, "The UE has been at the forefront of building international labour solidarity, especially worker to worker relationships."

 

Today, the UE is asking for our help.

 

     They're fighting the decision by General Electric to move nearly a thousand good union jobs from a factory in Pennsylvania to a non-union plant in the South where workers earn 40% less.

Please take a minute and click here to send a message to General Electric asking them to keep good union jobs in Erie.

 

     And then forward on this message to your friends, family and fellow union members asking them to do the same.

    We've been able to count on the support of the UE for so many of our campaigns in the past.

 

Now let's show them that we appreciate all they've done, and help them win this fight.

 

Because this is our fight too.

 

Solidarity forever!

 

Eric Lee

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BANISH THEM TO THE "SCUM VILLAGE"!!!

       I read this article in TheTelegraph and thought perhaps I should try to keep it quiet, as it is the sort of thing that our government of pampered Oxbridge millionaires would jump at. Think how it would fit into their austerity plans, think of the savings to the social spending bill, housing thousands in caravans with little or no facilities or amenities. It would be in keeping with their plans for tougher sentences, (more people in prison for longer terms). If you can't get them into prison to form a cheap pool of labour, then dump them in “scum villages” They already have plans to open up the prisons to more of their corporate friends as a means of a cheap captive labour force, not covered by the normal health and safety regulations and with no union rights. This Dutch plan  would just fit nicely into their "deficit reduction" plans.

      Apartheid comes in many forms and in this corporate world, we are divided into our various groups, to be exclude or included. The most common form of Apartheid in the Western world is what I call “financial Apartheid”. You are exclude from whole speres of society because of your lack of money. With this “scum villages” plan you would be excluded because you behaviour doesn't fit their shape of “normal” and you would be banished to the shany towns dotted around their efficient profit producing labour camps.

Extract from The Telegraph article:

Amsterdam to create 'scum villages'

      Amsterdam is to create "Scum villages" where nuisance neighbours and anti-social tenants will be exiled from the city and rehoused in caravans or containers with "minimal services" under constant police supervision.

       The new punishment housing camps have been dubbed "scum villages" because the plan echoes a proposal from Geert Wilders, the leader of a populist Dutch Right-wing party, for special units to deal with persistent troublemakers. "Repeat offenders should be forcibly removed from their neighbourhood and sent to a village for scum," he suggested last year. "Put all the trash together." Whilst denying that the new projects would be punishment camps for "scum", a spokesman for the city mayor stressed that the special residential units would aim to enforce good behaviour.

Read the full article HERE:

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WORKFARE TO WORKHOUSE.

     Not a new article, but still very interesting and relevant. It also makes the connection between workfare and the governments plans for expanding the the prison population by "tough" on crime, "tougher" sentencing. After all a prison population is a captive, union free work population, and more and more companies are using prisons as cheap labour pots.

This from Libcom:

      Workfare isn’t just an austerity measure, it’s part of a longer term restructuring of the labour market. That makes it all the more important to kill it while we still can.

      Workfare has been kicking up a twitter-storm again lately. First with such joys as a permanent job stacking shelves on the Tesco night shift for your £67/week JSA, and unpaid ‘pre-employment training’ which is “mandatory; (...) Claimant informed consent is not required.” Then later it was announced that “disabled people face unlimited unpaid work or cuts in benefit.” This got me thinking. Workfare significantly pre-dates austerity. Labour introduced the New Deal in 1998 during the supposed ‘boom’ years, which was rebranded the Flexible New Deal in 2009. The idea was to ‘help’ people who’d been unemployed for more than 6 months back into work with ‘voluntary’ training and work placements. This went hand in hand with demonising the unemployed as work-shy scroungers – workfare was purportedly to get them back into work.
     In the world of workfare, ‘voluntary’ of course means ‘we’ll sanction you if you refuse’. And if your JSA is sanctioned, it can interrupt other claims such as for housing benefit and cause serious cash-flow problems for claimants. The LSE professor who devised the New Deal was made a Labour peer – Baron Layard – and loads of private sector firms (many with links to Labour) got on the gravy train as ‘providers’. Notionally, this was about ‘helping’ people back to work in a context of relatively full employment and economic growth. The whole thing merrily rolled along until the recession hit, when the scheme was revamped and continued to do exactly the same thing – mandatory unpaid work on pain of losing benefits. Bizarrely, the rhetoric demonising ‘scroungers’ has escalated in keeping with the ratio of jobseekers to jobs. As someone pithily put it on twitter, “JOBSEEKERS: Empirically, there are no jobs, but ideologically, we have potential full employment IF YOU WEREN'T SO LAZY.”

Read the full article HERE:

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