The Union Busters
UKWatch.net - 16 May 2008
Union busting is as old as trade unions themselves. Ever since workers started to form their own organisations back in the 18th century to fight for decent working conditions, employers have tried to break them. In the old days workers would be beaten, imprisoned, and sometimes killed for participating in trade union activities. Better working conditions meant less profits for the boss, and a harsh hand was dealt to keep the rich ruling minority firmly in charge. Nowadays, in developed countries like Britain and the USA, you?d be forgiven for thinking that this kind of oppression towards working people had become a thing of the past. After all, we live in a democracy. But the case studies below show quite the contrary. Although techniques have changed far from becoming a thing of the past, union busting has swelled to become a multi-million dollar industry. After the 1935 US National Labor Relations Act established the right to join a union and bargain collectively, companies seeking to operate union free could no longer use the bare-knuckle tactics of old. They needed more subtle and sophisticated tactics to fight the trade unions. What they needed were private expert companies that they could hire to do their dirty work for them, companies specialising in union avoidance services. Until the 1970s, however, professional union avoidance consultants were small in number and were not yet part of mainstream industrial relations. Most employers kept quiet about the idea of hiring consultants. One consultant stated that employers ?used to sneak to seminars about keeping your plant non-union. They were as nervous as whores in a church! The posture of major company managers was, ?Let?s not make the union mad at us during their organising drive or they?ll take it out at the bargaining table.? That mindset changed dramatically in the 1970s and ?80s, a period of significant expansion for the union avoidance industry, when most employers shed their inhibitions about recruiting union busting consultants. The size of the consultant industry increased tenfold during the 1970s, as employers sought out firms that could help them defeat trade union formation and expansion. Union busting consultants organised thousands of anti-union campaigns, targeting areas of growing importance to unions like healthcare, and white-collar employees. Today, the monopolisation of big business has led to giant companies accumulating enormous profits, and with them, the resource for union busting has grown to unprecedented proportions. Genesis of Union Busting The Logan Report, produced earlier this year by the British Trade Union Congress (TUC), reveals some startling statistics. It is estimated that companies in the USA alone are spending a whopping $4 billion each year on union busting! If you take into account that this money is directed mainly at a small number of workers actively engaged in struggle at any one time, that works out at thousands of dollars per worker. Add to that a staggering 25,000 lawyers that are apparently committed to preventing trade unions developing across the USA, and you have what has been described as a genesis for union busting policy. The Burke Group (TBG), based in California, is one of the worlds? biggest union busting consultants. It advertises itself as a ‘management consulting firm specialising in union avoidance?. TBG has conducted over 800 union busting campaigns since its establishment in 1981, with clients such as Coca-Cola, Mazda, General Electric, Heinz, DuPont, and Lockheed Martin, with whom they boast a 95% success rate! The tactic used by union busters like TBG is to get into the workplace and convince the workforce against voting in favour of union representation, or recognition. As trade unions benefit workers? interests, the only way to achieve this is to lie. Workers are given company leaflets warning that if they join the union they are likely to be permanently on strike. They mislead workers into believing that the union will start harassing them in their homes, risk their job security, and cause them a loss of earnings and benefits. In other words they convince workers into believing exactly the opposite of what trade unions actually offer. One textbook example of TBG?s union busting campaigns was for the Chinese Daily News (CDN), the largest Chinese language newspaper in North America. In October 2000, 152 mostly Taiwanese workers started a trade union organising campaign after management announced plans to cut pay, and force employees to sign a statement that they could be fired at any time. Within a month, 95 percent of the employees had signed union authorisation cards. In response, CDN hired TBG who immediately started an aggressive anti-union campaign. In March 2001, the workers stood solid and voted again for union recognition. The CDN management told the workers that it was prepared to spend $1 million on defeating the union. True to its word, by September 2005, after an intense five-year anti-union campaign, the union lost a rerun ballot. The head of the Newspapers Guild subsequently described the events as the ?fiercest anti-union campaign I have ever been involved in.? But isn?t this against the law I hear you ask? The simple answer is yes! The trouble is that legislation is so weak that it?s cheaper for the company to pay out damages to individual workers in court, than to give in to the trade unions. In 2007, the US Court of Appeals awarded CDN employees $2.5 million for numerous labour law violations committed by the company, but they will probably never gain union recognition. Organisations like TBG have been so successful that, despite some 60 million Americans saying that they would like to join a trade union, national membership currently stands at only 7.5 percent of the US private sector workforce. Bringing It Back Home And if you thought this kind of thing could never happen here, think again! The Burke Group has been accused of bringing union busting tactics to Britain. In fact, a 2008 survey of trade union organising campaigns in Britain found that employers used anti-union consultants in about one fifth of the cases. TBG has attracted large companies operating here in Britain to its sinister services, including T-Mobile, Amazon.co.uk, Virgin Atlantic, Calor Gas, FlyBe, Cable & Wireless, and Kettle Chips. Many of TBG?s anti-union campaigns have had a devastating impact. In the case of T-Mobile, George Rankin, an organising officer from the Communication Workers Union (CWU), has described some of the tactics that were used. He said that TBG sent a 7-minute video to the homes of five hundred and fifty T-Mobile workers in order to convince them against voting in favour of recognition of the CWU. TBG used scare tactics like those listed above. Workers were moved away from trade union influence by outsourcing their jobs to private companies. Trade union members were also intimidated and harassed. The union lost the vote for recognition by two to one. It?s a similar story with Cable & Wireless, and with Kettle Chips. The Graphical Print and Media Union involved in the Amazon case stated that ?we had never faced this level of serious professional resistance before?, after the union also lost the vote for recognition. But the FlyBe case is most revealing. In 2006, Europe?s largest regional low-cost carrier hired TBG when 400 cabin crew tried to join the Transport & General Union. However, midway through TBG?s union busting campaign, the union (now called Unite) persuaded FlyBe to drop TBG, and subsequently a huge shift by the workers in favour of union representation led to an election landslide, with 94% of the workers voting in favor of unionisation in an 89% turnout. Fight Back What does all this show? It shows that if the workers are left to organise they choose the trade unions. It shows that the only way for companies to avoid trade unions is to lie, to cheat, to manipulate, and to attack. It shows that the argument about capitalist society being governed by the natural forces of market trading is utter nonsense. Capitalist society is, in part, maintained by employers who squander billions of dollars to ensure that the rich stay rich, and the poor stay poor. These battles between trade unions and employers effectively mark out the boundary between the workers, and the business owners in society. It is a boundary between two classes. One side is fighting for decent working and living conditions, and the other side fighting to preserve exploitation and maintain its profits. For one side to gain the other must lose. True we live in a democracy, but it?s a parliamentary democracy, where legislation favours the interests of big business owners, not working people. The enormous resources currently being poured into blocking the unions in the workplace serves to exacerbate this problem. It means the discontent of the exploited workforce is trapped beneath the surface of society and will fester until it can find an avenue of expression. The two trade union federations in the USA and Britain, the AFL-CIO and the TUC, have signed a joint agreement to work together to eliminate the intimidation of workers who want to improve the quality of their families? lives by joining or forming a trade union. The two union federations agreed to share information about the activity of union busting firms, to develop a shared database of union busting activity, and create ?Busting the Union-Busters? training materials. Both will jointly lobby governments and relevant international bodies to restrict the activities of the union busters. But, the only way to beat union busting once and for all is to unite the workforce, and join and organise in our trade unions, our own class organisations. A collective problem requires a collective solution. Ultimately we must build a new society based on the needs of the majority, not the needs of the rich minority. These are the foundations of a workers? democracy, of a socialist society.

How to Build a Human Bomb
UKWatch.net - 16 May 2008
When we learnt last week that Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi had blown himself up in Mosul in northern Iraq, the US government presented this as a vindication of its policies. Al-Ajmi was a former inmate of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon says that his attack on Iraqi soldiers shows both that it was right to have detained him and that it is dangerous ever to release the camp?s prisoners(1). On the contrary, it shows how dangerous it was to put them there in the first place. Al-Ajmi, according to the Pentagon, was one of at least 30 former Guantanamo detainees who have ?taken part in anti-coalition militant activities after leaving US detention?(2). Given that the majority of the inmates appear to have been innocent of such crimes before they were detained, that?s one hell of a recidivism rate. In reality it turns out that ?anti-coalition militant activities? include talking to the media about their captivity in Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon lists the Tipton Three in its catalogue of recidivists, on the grounds that they collaborated with Michael Winterbottom?s film The Road to Guantanamo. But it also names seven former prisoners, aside from Al-Ajmi, who have fought with the Taliban or Chechen rebels, kidnapped foreigners or planted bombs after their release. One of two conclusions can be drawn from this evidence, and neither reflects well on the US government. The first is that, as the Pentagon claims, these men ?successfully lied to US officials, sometimes for over three years.? (3) The US government?s intelligence gathering and questioning were ineffective, and people who would otherwise have been identified as terrorists or resistance fighters were allowed to walk free, despite years of intense and often brutal interrogation. Should this be surprising? Without a presumption of innocence, without charges, representation, trials or due process of any kind, there is no reliable means of determining whether or not a man is guilty. The abuses at Guantanamo Bay not only deny justice to the inmates, they also deny justice to the world. Al-Ajmi, the authorities say, initially confessed in the prison camp to deserting the Kuwaiti army to join the jihad in Afghanistan(4). He admitted that he fought with Taliban forces against the Northern Alliance. He later retracted this confession, which had been made ?under pressure and threats?(5). When the Americans released him from Guantanamo, they handed him over to the Kuwaiti government for trial, but without the admissable evidence required to convict him. Among his defences was that neither he nor his interrogators had signed his supposed testimony(6). The Kuwaiti courts, without reliable evidence to the contrary, found him innocent. All evidence obtained in Guantanamo Bay, and in the CIA?s other detention centres and secret prisons, is by definition unreliable, because it is extracted with the help of coercion and torture. Torture is notorious for producing false confessions, as people will say anything to make it stop. Both official accounts and the testimonies of former detainees show that a wide range of coercive techniques ? devised or approved at the highest levels in Washington – have been used to make inmates tell the questioners what they want to hear. In his book Torture Team, Philippe Sands describes the treatment of Mohammed al-Qahtani, held in Guantanamo Bay and described by the authorities (like half a dozen other suspects) as ?the 20th hijacker?. By the time his interrogators started using ?enhanced techniques? to extract information from him, al-Qahtani had been kept in isolation for three months in a cell permanently flooded with light. An official memo shows that he ?was talking to non-existent people, reporting hearing voices, [and] crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end.?(7) He was sexually abused, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of sleep for a further 54 days of torture and questioning. What useful testimony could be extracted from a man in this state? The other possibility is that the men who became involved in armed conflict after their release had not in fact been involved in any prior fighting, but were radicalised by their detention. In the video he made before blowing himself up, al-Ajmi maintained that he was motivated by his ill-treatment in Guantanamo Bay. ?Twelve thousand kilometers away from Mecca, I realized the reality of the Americans and what those infidels want,? he said(8). He claimed he was beaten, drugged and ?used for experiments? and that ?the Americans delighted in insulting our prayer and Islam and they insulted the Koran and threw it in dirty places.?(9) Al-Ajmi?s lawyer revealed that his arm had been broken by guards at the camp, who beat him up to stop him from praying(10). The accounts of people released from Guantanamo Bay describe treatment that would radicalise almost anyone. In his book Five Years of My Life, published a fortnight ago, Murat Kurnaz maintains that one of the guards greeted him on his arrival with these words. ?Do you know what the Germans did to the Jews? That?s exactly what we?re going to do with you.? There were certain similarities. ?I knew a man from Morocco,? Kurnaz writes, ?who used to be a ship captain. He couldn?t move one of his little fingers because of frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him they would amputate the little finger. They brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs.? The young man ? scarcely more than a boy – in the cage next to Kurnaz?s had just had his legs amputated by American doctors after getting frostbite in a coalition prison in Afghanistan. The stumps were still bleeding and covered in pus. He received no further treatment or new dressings. Every time he tried to hoist himself up to sit on his pot by clinging to the wire, a guard would come and hit his hands with a billy-club. Like every other prisoner, he was routinely beaten by the camp?s Immediate Reaction Force, and taken away to interrogation cells to be beaten up some more(11). Fathers were clubbed in front of their sons, sons in front of their fathers. The prisoners were repeatedly forced into stress positions, deprived of sleep and threatened with execution. As a senior official at the US Defense Intelligence Agency says, ?maybe the guy who goes into Guantanamo was a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He?s going to come out a fully fledged jihadist.?(12) In reading the histories of Guantanamo Bay, and of the kidnappings, extrajudicial detention and torture the US government (helped by the United Kingdom) has pursued around the world, two things become clear. The first is that these practices do not supplement effective investigation and prosecution; they replace them. Instead of a process which generates evidence, assesses it and uses it to prosecute, the US has deployed a process which generates nonsense and is incapable of separating the guilty from the innocent. The second is that far from protecting innocent lives, this process is likely to deliver further atrocities. Even if you put the ethics of such treatment to one side, it is surely evident that it makes the world more dangerous. POSTSCRIPT: A few hours after this column went to press, the charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani were dropped, as the evidence extracted from him through torture turned out, unsurprisingly, to be worthless. References: 1. Josh White, 8th May 2008. Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack. Washington Post. 2. Department of Defense, 12th July 2007. Former Guantanamo detainees who have returned to the fight. http://www.defenselink.mil/news/d20070712formergtmo.pdf 3. ibid 4. Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants at US Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Department of Defense, No date given. Abdallah Salih Ali Al Ajmi: summary of evidence. Pp8-9 of the pdf file. http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt_arb/000201-000299.pdf#38 5. Department of Defense, no date given. Summarized Administrative Review Board Detainee Statement. Page 47 of the pdf. http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt/ARB_Transcript_Set_17_22822-2…. 6. No author given, 26th May 2006. 5 ex-Guantanamo detainees freed in Kuwait. Associated Press. 7. Philippe Sands, 2008. Torture Team: Rumsfeld?s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, extracted in Vanity Fair, May 2008. 8. Quoted by Alissa J. Rubin, 9th May 2008. Bomber?s Final Messages Exhort Fighters Against US. New York Times. 9. ibid. 10. Ben Fox, 7th M ay 2008. Ex-Gitmo prisoner in recent attack. Associated Press. 11. Murat Kurnaz, 2008. Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo. Palgrave Macmillan. Extracted in the Guardian, 23rd April 2008. 12. Quoted by David Rose, 26th February 2006. Using terror to fight terror. The Observer.

Lies of Aggression
Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) - 16 May 2008
Summary: On May 15, the White House Moron, in a war-planning visit to Israel, justified the naked aggression he and Olmert are planning against Iran as the only alternative to “the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.” But the White House Moron has the roles reversed. It is not Iran that is threatening war. It is Bush. It is not Bush who is appeasing. It is Iran. source: AntiWar.com read more

U.S. Is Headed in the Wrong Direction, Poll Suggests
Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) - 15 May 2008
Summary: Democratic PartyAmericans are feeling pessimistic about the direction the country is heading, a new bipartisan NPR poll suggests. They’re increasingly leaning toward alignment with the Democratic Party and divided over their choices for president in the fall. source: National Public Radioread more

NIAC Files Defamation Lawsuit against Hassan Daioleslam
Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) - 15 May 2008
Summary: Rajavi Saddam Washington, DC - On April 30, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) filed a lawsuit against Hassan Daioleslam in response to his defamatory articles about NIAC. Daioleslam, who has been identified by former members of the terrorist-listed Mujahedin organization as a member of the group's executive committee, has since early 2007 mischaracterized NIAC's anti-war and pro-diplomacy activities as serving the interest of the Iranian government. His writings have mostly appeared on right-wing blogs and in neo-conservative outlets. source: National Iranian American Councilread more

Iran and Israel: Lost in translation?
Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) - 15 May 2008
Summary: Babak YektafarBabak Yektafar explains the meaning behind Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterates controversial statements calling for an “end to the Zionist regime,” leading different news services to translate his words in different ways, some making them sound more belligerent than others. The Real News Network Senior Editor Paul Jay speaks to Babak Yektafar of Washington Prism to discuss the meaning of the statements. source: The Real Newsread more