Choices.

(Image: Daily Record/Tom Ross)

        Stefan King, reputed to be worth a cool £54 million, owner of Glasgow's Corinthian, Delmonica's and The Social, has suggested that his staff take three months unpaid leave to save their jobs, not to save his company of course. He has also put it in such a fashion that he is doing them a favour. This is the same Stefan King who was back in 2015 reputed to be paying staff below the minimum wage, and in 2019 had questions raised by the Gambling Commission about suspected money laundering at his Corinthian gambling club.
        No doubt as the catastrophe that is Covid19, and the ticking time bomb that is the Brexit fiasco, burst upon us, we will see more of these type of offers coming from those extremely wealthy corporate beasts as they try to milk the situation for all it is worth.
        As unemployment soars and social services diminish, there is very hard times in store for us the ordinary people. What are we going to do about this sledgehammer of poverty and deprivation that is about to strike us? Shall we appeal to our lords and masters the political ballerinas, to please take our taxpayers money and give it to the corporate world so that they will employ us again? Or will we look inwards towards our communities and organise mutual aid, self help, co-operatives and take what we need for the welfare of all our people. Commandeer those workplaces that we deem to be necessary for the health and well-being of our communities. Take control of our own lives and decide how we want to live without the exploitation of the profit driven capitalist system, owned and controlled by muti-billionaires, who by the way, while you and I have seen our struggles stiffen,  have seen their wealth grow immensely during this pandemic. The choice is ours to make, accept more of the same, or take control of the change we want to see.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

Our Quiet March To Fascism Continues.

         The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.   Benito Mussolini

         About six years ago I wrote a wee piece, "Inch By Inch We Lose Control", about how I believed we were taking a quiet march to fascism, the following is just a rehash of that article, as I believe we are still taking that quiet march in the same direction, though we are now much closer to that destination.

      Like a tape-loop message, I keep repeating, that we are marching quietly towards full blown fascism. It won't be recognised by the jackboots on the streets, nor by people being locked up for not living to the laid down norms. No, the state has moved on from from those days, though that method will still be held in reserve to be used if needed. It will be much more subtle than that, just slowly bit by bit, the state introducing ever stronger legislation to control every aspect of your life. The establishment making more and more arbitrary decision over our heads. They have already neutered the spontaneity of the trade unions by legislation, and tied protesters in legal loops. There other things that pass almost unnoticed, but show state power acting out what can only be called dictatorial acts, unchallenged. The ever creeping CCTV surveillance, advanced facial recognition, trolling through your phone and internet activity. The interweaving of state and corporate bodies in the interest of “growth” and to the detriment of the people. The introduction of the “minimum wage” gave the employers a low legal standard to adhere to and moved the struggle for improvement away from the employer to the state. Wars are and will continue to be waged, despite the will of the people saying otherwise, remember Iraq, millions on the streets in protest, but the war went ahead. Hardly the hallmark of democracy.
      Surreptitiously and brutally, the all knowing, all powerful, all for your own good, state, reaches in and controls every aspect of your life, for no other purpose than to safeguard its own power and privileges, and it can do it at will, through its various agents, backed up by its own biased judiciary. Who do you believe has the right, the benevolent character, and the humanity to take control of your life? No doubt your answer will be nobody, then why do we tolerate the faceless ones, behind closed doors in their marble corridors of power, to control all avenues of our life?

And another quote from one of the masters of fascism:

       It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity.

Benito Mussolini

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A Time Of Celebration And Good Cheer!!!

      While the babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, spews out images of throngs of people fighting their way into shops to spend hundreds of pounds in an attempt to buy happiness in a colourful box, let's not forget the reality of modern day Britain. The Britain where millions of us live, the Britain of the daily struggle, of trying to keep our heads above water. A world where we are surrounded by unimaginable wealth, but are witness to beggars, rough sleepers, homeless, food-banks, child poverty and fuel poverty. the question is why?

      Behind the veneer of designer names and brightly coloured shopping malls, there is another world. A world where hopes and dream die, and opportunity never knocks.

      Zero hours contracts and the minimum wage are the establishments method of guaranteeing poverty. Don't expect them to try to alleviate the problem, it suits them the way it is. It creates a pool of cheap labour.

      Poverty kills both the young and old, and those it doesn't kill, it scars for life. So who is responsible for those scars and those deaths?

      Poverty, a preventable phenomenon,  turns good people into bad parents, but not by their own desire.

      Fuel poverty in one of the richest countries in the world, is a crime, who is responsible?

     Don't expect the top layer of parasites to do anything about poverty, they need it to keep getting fat bank accounts. If we want to be rid of poverty, we will have to do the fixing ourselves.

      No matter how they do the numbers, no matter the illusion they try to weave, the truth is that the UK has millions living in poverty, Why?

     Food banks, a necessity in modern capitalist Britain, while the Oxbridge millionaires talk of a growing economy, Why?

      Employers will gladly pay you the minimum wage or less, if they could get away with it, and some do.

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Crooks And Liars All.

     Once again our lords and masters in the Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption have shown their duplicity, and what they think of the minimum wage. It seems that our Oxbridge millionaire Tory MP's are being advised on how to get round minimum wage legislation by naming interns as volunteers. Hey presto, you don't have to pay them at all. Fairness, justice and we are all in this together.

This from The Void:

      The breath-taking hypocrisy of both the Tory Party and the TUC was laid bare this week after an astonishing document emerged which advises Tory Party MPs on how to dodge minimum wage legislation by renaming interns as ‘volunteers’.
     The leaflet, which was published on the Graduate Fog website, provides legal advice on minimum wage legislation along with a template letter that can be used to fob off any enquiries to MPs about their use of unpaid interns.  This shoddy attempt to dodge the rules on paying workers comes in the same week that David Cameron announced in Parliament that his Government was naming and shaming firms which don’t pay minimum wage.

Read the full article HERE:

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BURGER KING WOULD MAKE YOU SICK.

         Fast food, fast buck, that seems to be the mantra of the fast food outlets They all pay low wages and some even below the minimum rate. With Domino Pizza trying to screw the drivers and Burger King, union busting and intimidating migrant workers, the pattern is repeated across the globe.

This from International Journal of Socialist Renewal:

By Joe Carolan

August 24, 2012 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- 

       Workers employed by the Burger King fast-food chain, organised by the Unite Union in Aotearoa/New Zealand, are suffering a sustained union-busting campaign, and are now fighting back.

Burger King workers are the lowest-paid fast food workers in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Most are on the minimum wage, even some who have worked there for 15 years. Managers on salary are forced to work extra hours, and sometimes work for less than the minimum wage per hour. Many workers in Burger King are migrant workers, mostly from the Indian subcontinent. They face a bonded labour system. They are terrified of speaking out about mistreatment in case the company revokes their visa sponsorship .

           Now the company has tried to bust their union, and is seeking an injunction stopping them from speaking to the media and conducting teach-ins in the community. Unite has taken the company to the Employment Authority, detailing the company's illegal anti-union activities, in a battle that is now shaping up to be the McLibel case of the South Pacific.

          Unite union appeals to workers in other countries to organise pickets outside Burger King outlets in all the great cities of the world in solidarity with our fight.

Our fight is for the low-paid precarious workers.

Our fight is for the invisible migrant workers.

Our fight is against 21st century bonded labour and slavery.

Workers of the world unite! Down with the Burger King!

[Joe Carolan is campaigns officer for the Unite union, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Phone 029 44 55 702 or email joseph@unite.org.nz. Heaps of videos, photographs and information at Unite's blog at http://unitenews.wordpress.com.]

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POVERTY IN THE UK!!

      It is odd that so many people believe that capitalism is a system that brings prosperity to all. Even as the evidence stacks up against it with poverty increasing across the world, it is still accepted by too many as the only game in town.

       Poverty in the UK tends to be invisible when it comes to the mainstream media. They are more likely to focus on poverty elsewhere. Yet poverty in the UK is considerable by any standard. Some figures compiled by Oxfam give an indication of just how poverty blights the lives of so many across the UK.

      In the UK 13 million people, more than 1 in 5, live in poverty, with the majority of both children and working age adults in poverty living in working households, 55.3% of children and 52.9% of adults. Bang goes that excuse that they are poor because they wont work!!. How does poverty translate in to real life? One example would be that a child born in the poor district of Calton in Glasgow has a life expectancy of 54, where as a child born in the more affluent area of Lenzie on the outskirts of Glasgow has a life expectancy of 82. They are separated by about 10 miles.

       In the supposed affluent UK, 1 in 8 men and 1 in 4 women earn less than £7 hour and almost 50% of home owners earn less than the minimum wage. In this land of advanced capitalism a staggering 3.9 million children live in poverty with more than half of these in working households. The reality of this is that children born into poverty are more likely to have lower birth weight, higher infant mortality, and poorer health than their counter parts born into better off homes.

       Another feature of this advanced capitalist society is the fact that the number of households in which no-one has ever worked has almost doubled since 1997. According to the Office of National Statistics, 1.7% of all households were permanently jobless by the second quarter of 2010, up from 1% in the second quarter of 1997. Of course as we know, capitalism is an unfair system so these figures are not spread evenly across the country. For example in the more affluent East England it is just 0.5% jobless households, compared with inner London which stands at 6.5%.

Everything seems to working fine!!

 

      As the gap between rich and poor gets wider by the year and the number of poor increases, surely we will reach that point where we say enough is enough. After all capitalism is just a man made system, one that benefits the few at the expense of the many, it is not created from tablets of stone or ordained by a supreme being. Men created it, men can destroy it, and create a more fair and just system that benefits all our people, not just a handful of parasites.

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