Fifteen workers of the Heavy Equipment Production Company (HEPCO) were sentenced to prison and flogging in Iran. Their crime: organising a strike action. HEPCO, an Iranian company that produces road construction equipment in Iran and the Middle East, was privatized last year. The plight of workers began right after the privatization. Before privatisation, 8000 people
Tag: Trade Unions
Shut Carlow Street: We’ll run our own union
UCU activist Jose Collina reflects this year’s universities pensions strike, won and lost. Four weeks on strike, another three weeks arguing about what next, we finally came up with answer — back to work, with no guarantees, only a vague hope that a joint panel populated by the nominees of our mendacious employers and ever-vacillating
Boots pharmacy workers kill the yellow union
The 86.63% vote to de-recognise the Boots Pharmacists Association (BPA) ends six years of wrangling as anti-union bosses tried to avoid letting staff organise. Trade unionists have been fighting the case since 2012, when after initially agreeing to talks about recognising the Pharmacists’ Defence Association bosses pulled a fast one by using the breather to recognise its
Hundreds to protest against outsourcing at University of London
Hundreds of people are expected to protest today at the University of London’s Senate House demanding an end to outsourcing of Uni’s essential staff. The protest is organised by the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain’s (IWGB): the biggest union at the University of London’s central administration buildings. IWGB has launched its Back in-House campaign in September
Victory for LSE Cleaners
The London School of Economics cleaners will now officially be employees of the LSE from 5th March 2018. The move follows a series of strikes organised by United Voices of the World Union: a members- led trade union of mainly migrant and precarious workers, since late 2016. The strikes highlighed the disparities in sick pay, paid
Uruguay: Trade Unionist Murdered by a Strike-breaker
Marcelo Silvera, the interim president of the Cargo Transport and Related Branches Union (SUTCRA) was murdered on the morning of 3rd January by a strike-breaker. On that day, a strike was in effect in a transport company Transportes Viana in the northern department of Rivera. Marcelo Silvera, while taking his young son to a doctor, noticed
Amid TUC decline, Britain’s radical unions grow
The Trades Union Congress is facing a decline in membership that many within the organisation are recognising as a crisis. At the same time more radical unions are not only growing but actively winning time and again. What do they offer that the TUC doesn’t? The TUC’s membership crisis is a generational one. Of those
France: Revolutionary syndicalists call week of debates to ‘kill the ostrich’
Activists with the Comités Syndicalistes Révolutionnaires (CSR) have announced a major new initiative to “kill the ostrich” of failing industrial unionism with its head in the sand, planning a week-long series of debates and training for the summer. The training and debate days from July 10th-16th will be open to international militants. Their main themes will be
France: How union leaders destroyed the movement against El Khomri
A militant reflects on the struggle against the Socialist Party’s El Khomri law attacking working rights, which brought 1.2 million workers into the streets last year and sparked widespread resistance. Unions played a key role last spring in the movement against the “work” law. But their political gymnastics of collaboration with the government cost us the fight. Let
Germany: FAU welcomes challenge to law attacking small unions
Anarcho-syndicalist union FAU has welcomed legal action from the German Association of Journalists (DJV) and pilot’s union Cockpit as the campaign to try and knock down a controversial Bargaining Unit Act designed to shut down small unions, known as the Tarifeinheitsgesetz (TEG), grows. The Act, which was passed in 2015, says that in an industry with more than one union