West Bank village faces slow death
Electronic Intifada - 3 May 2008
rr r r r rr r rr r rr r rr rr rrr rAQABA, WEST BANK, 4 May (IRIN) – At the entrance to the small village, laborers continued to work on a cement divider, creating two lanes to make the road safer, while in a side room next to the village kindergarten, Haj Sami Sadiq, the head of the local council, carried on sorting out agricultural development projects for his residents. Sadiq pretends it is “business as usual,” but he knows that at any moment Israeli troops can arrive and begin demolishing most of the village’s structures and even some of the streets.

The attack on Jimmy Carter
Electronic Intifada - 3 May 2008
rr r r r rr r rr r rr r rr rr rrr rFormer US President James (Jimmy) Carter has the ability to appear almost out of thin air, landing in the midst of some of the most complex international crises. He has done it again, this time in going to meet with the Palestinian resistance group, Hamas. For reaching out to this significant section of the Palestinian movement, he is being demonized by both the Bush administration and the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Bill Fletcher, Jr. comments.

Global Unions get Organised Worldwide
UKWatch.net - 3 May 2008
In recent weeks there have been demonstrations outside numerous Marks & Spencer stores, demanding that the supermarket giant stop the discrimination against (mostly migrant) agency workers in it British food supply chains. The demonstrations were organised by Unite as part of its campaign for minimum standards in the meat industry. We are challenging M&S to live up to its promise of ?all products being sourced and manufactured to our high quality and ethical standards?. There was something spectacularly different, however, about these demonstrations. In addition to stores in this country, solidarity demonstrations were also staged outside M&S stores in Manila, Hong Kong, Moscow, Zagreb, Cebu, Geneva, Phuket, Seoul, Budapest, Warsaw, Bucharest and Istanbul. The action was organised in support of the Unite campaign by the International Union of Foodworkers and its affiliated unions around the world. The IUF is one of 10 global union federations ? internationals of unions representing workers in different sectors ? which are gaining importance as unions struggle to respond to the challenges of the global economy. Why would a Russian or Filipino trade unionist be prepared to protest outside a store in their own country ? and risk arrest or harassment from security goons ? in support of agency workers in the British meat industry? Apart from the pleasing post-globalisation twist in the tale, involving workers in ?developing countries? to take solidarity action in support of workers in the North, the worldwide action over M&S illustrates some important new trends in the international trade union movement. The nature of work is changing throughout the world, with the growth of part-time, temporary, vulnerable and insecure employment. The scale of international labour migration is unprecedented. The majority of workers in the world are without properly protected and decently paid work. Unions throughout the world increasingly recognise the acute need to tackle the problem. In particular, they are targeting the increase of agency and contract labour used to create an unjust, divisive and discriminatory two-tier workforce in many industries. Unions ? along with many others – recognise that global retail corporations are the most important factor driving down standards and livelihoods. In effect, these companies control the working lives of millions of people throughout their supply chains. Yet the giant corporations running the retail sector are vulnerable. Like other transnational companies, they are increasingly dependent on long supply lines and cheap transport costs, driven by ?just-in-time? tight schedules, with little or no slack in the system. As demonstrated by the dock workers? dispute along the west coast of the United Sates in 2002, it is no exaggeration to suggest that a strategically-placed picket line in the transport system can bring large parts of the world economy to a grinding halt within a matter of days. Moreover, companies such as M&S are vulnerable to their own marketing pitch. When targeted by Unite, M&S managers ask why and complain bitterly that their competitors are guilty of far worse practices. M&S has introduced its ?Plan A?. This is ?our five-year, 100-point ?eco? plan to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing our business and our world?. Plan A includes this commitment: ?By being a fair partner, we?ll help to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in our worldwide supply chain and local communities.? Unite deputy general secretary Jack Dromey?s response is: ?Prove it. Sign an agreement to ensure that there is no discrimination against agency workers or a divisive two-tier workforce in your supply chains. It is wrong to exploit newly-arrived migrant agency workers and wrong to undercut the workers who have been here for generations.? Unions throughout the world recognise the importance of this campaign, not just for British workers, but for workers throughout the global supply chains of the big retail companies. They must be forced to take a real responsibility for advancing and safeguarding the rights and conditions of their employees. The international action over M&S illustrates important shifts in strategy by the international trade union movement. Unions have had a rough time over the past two or three decades and there are few in the world which have not experienced a dramatic loss of membership and power. Debates continue nationally and internationally on how to reverse the trend. There are still fierce disagreements, but at least everyone is agreed on one simple over-riding principle: unions must invest in basic organising. There is a new organising agenda, which is not simply about the recruitment of new members, but building sufficient organisational strength to challenge corporate power. Some describe this new emphasis as an ?organising model? versus a ?servicing model? for trade union growth. In other words, there is a rejection of membership growth based on union services and marketing (union credit cards, discounts on products) in favour of a more aggressive, targeted and well-resourced drive for better conditions for workers in specific sectors and companies. For some unions, including the T&G section of Unite, the organising model was adapted from American experience, in particular the experience of the Service Employees? International Union, led by the charismatic but controversial Andy Stern. The United Sates has one of the toughest environments for trade unionism in the world and union membership has suffered badly in recent years. The SEIU has bucked the trend and managed to increase membership dramatically over the past decade. It has been particularly successful in organising what some had considered ?unorganisable?: low-paid, often isolated cleaners, caretakers (janitors) and care-home workers. The SEIU?s ?Justice for Janitors? campaign in Los Angeles inspired Ken Loach?s film Bread and Roses. This new approach, now adapted and adopted by other unions around the world, is characterised by major financial investment in highly professional organisation departments involving detailed planning and research, along with tightly-monitored membership targets and campaign priorities. Organising drives are backed up by new corporate campaign methods, borrowing much from techniques developed by campaign and lobbying groups outside the labour movement. More national unions are investing and reorganising themselves around a new organising agenda, but in the modern global economy, organisation cannot be restricted by national borders. The SEIU has its own global organising programme and is co-operating with others, such as Unite, to form the Global Organising Alliance to strengthen transnational organising campaigns. Inevitably, such initiatives make new demands on the organisational capacity of the international trade union organisations ? most notably on the global union federations. To a greater or lesser extent, these are grasping the organising agenda and responding to the challenge of developing truly global union organisation with strategic organising objectives and a new relationship between themselves and individual unions ? and between those unions themselves. The workers outside M&S stores in Thailand, Croatia, Hungary and elsewhere were not just demonstrating in solidarity with meat workers in Britain. They were demonstrating that they are members of a global union federation beginning to build an organising capacity across the world. Dave Spooner is the international programmes co-ordinator at the organising department of Unite.

We Get the Message
UKWatch.net - 3 May 2008
THERE is only one thing worse than suffering electoral meltdown and that is emerging from a disaster with no idea how to overcome it. It is simply useless to repeat the bland twaddle parroted by John Major’s Tory ministers in the mid 1990s that “we’re not getting our message across.” Voters are having no difficulty in understanding the Brown government’s message or in responding to it and they don’t like it. They won’t vote for it and, unless it changes, cataclysmic defeat awaits Labour at the general election. Gordon Brown claims to be a listening and learning Prime Minister, but his actions give a contrary message, despite his belated recognition that doubling the 10p tax rate for five million low-income people has been a political disaster. But this isn’t the only policy decision to have shocked or disgusted Labour’s natural supporters. There are a whole raft of policies that have been chalked up in recent years at Labour Party conference, with decisions carried against the platform and dismissed with cavalier abandon by the party leader, whether Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. When Mr Brown took over the reins of power from his new Labour twin, his spin doctors whispered that, unlike Mr Blair, the incoming leader was Labour through and through and he promised a new start. But neither the propaganda offensive nor the nods and winks of his team have delivered real change. In fact, he has continued his predecessor’s approach of treating the labour movement as the enemy, fighting tooth and nail to appoint his personal candidate, City fund manager David Pitt-Watson, as general secretary rather than Unite union official Mike Griffiths – a decision that is even the more remarkable since Mr Pitt-Watson has left the job without starting it. Mr Brown’s apparent positive response to the conference decision in support of the fourth option for council housing has been illusory. It’s the usual half-baked dog’s dinner of housing associations and part-own, part-rent rather than a programme of council-built, council-owned properties to tackle the acute shortage of affordable housing. The PM has uttered warm words about the need to help agency and temporary workers, but he is the man who authorised his minister to filibuster proposed legislation. He refuses to win easy popularity by taking the railways back into public ownership, even though, in light of the tens of billions of pounds handed over to greedy and reckless banks, no-one will take seriously his claim that renationalisation cannot be afforded. Mr Brown has failed to draw up an industrial policy, being utterly attached to a free-market, easy come, easy go attitude to inward investment that has seen manufacturing jobs haemorrhage out of the economy. And he rides roughshod over widespread complaints about his privatisation programme that hands public assets over to privateers while demeaning and short-changing public-service workers. Unless the labour movement forces a change of political direction or, failing that, of leadership, there will be no fourth Labour term. There will be a return for a Tory Party that is already planning further restrictions on strikes in public services. The time for polite advice is over. The labour movement has to act.

New Labour is Dead
UKWatch.net - 3 May 2008
Power Can’t Shape Truth Forever New Labour has suffered a crushing defeat. The Blair project of promoting and implementing right-wing policies in the knowledge that traditional working class voters would remain solid died on 1 May 2008. Labour?s vote in the local elections in dropped to 24 percent, a point below the Liberal Democrats and twenty points less than the Conservatives (44 percent). Given the scale of the catastrophe, It seems unlikely that Gordon Brown can win the next general election. Awestruck by Margaret Thatcher, Blair and Brown aped her achievements within their own party, squeezing old social-democratic ideas out of themselves, drop by drop. They were all market fundamentalists now. Deregulation and privatisation became a mantra and over the last ten years the social divide in the country between rich and poor increased more than even under Thatcher. Redistribution of wealth was no longer on Labour?s agenda. As the market suffered a series of shocks—-the collapse of a debt-ridden British bank, Northern Rock, led to state intervention in the form of nationalisation. No lessons were learnt. Helping the rich by further tax-cuts, abandoning (under pressure from the Financial Times) plans to tax non-domiciled billionaires symbolised the regime. The neo-liberal model atomised social and political life, weakened democratic accountability and drastically reduced the margins of reformist possibilities within the system. After 9/11 civil liberties were seriously eroded. A fdew weeks ago Brown and his ministers were arguing for increasing the detention of suspects to 42-days without trial. The Conservatives and police chiefs opposed this as draconian. The British electoral system helped to conceal the relentless ebbing of popular support for the Blairite agenda. No longer. The New Labour Emperor is now revealed without any clothes. Power can shape ?truth?, but not forever. That is the lesson of the New Labour defeat. In London the choice was clear. . A Conservative celebrity who carefully cultivates an ultra-reactionary image, Boris Johnson, is a star of TV comedy shows. Given the way that politics has gone to the dogs in so many parts of the democratic world, its hardly surprising that celebrity status and wealth have taken centre stage. A somewhat pathetic and ineffectual ex-policeman stood for the Liberal Democrats or Ken Livingstone, the Labour candidate. Even though Livingstone first won as an independent against New Labour, he subsequently made his peace with Blair and rejoined the party, while preserving an independent stance on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and developing his own foreign policy by inviting Hugo Chavez to visit London. The elections for the Mayor of London reflected the national mood. That Livingstone made mistakes is obvious. The biggest error was not in receiving an eccentric Muslim cleric and annjoying the right-wing press, but re-entering the Labour fold. The basis of his popularity had rested on the fact that he was not a confected New Labour politician. The fact that margin of his defeat appears to be less than the national average reflected this fact, but was not enough to save him. The official result has yet to be declared, but New Labour commentators on TV have accepted defeat. He suffered because he was associated with an unpopular New Labour government. Had he remained an independent and lacerated the Blair and Brown regimes, instead of being photographed with them he would have been home and dry. A city in which 70% of the citizens oppose the British presence in Iraq will now be represented by a pro-war mayor. Who cares if a million Iraqis have died since the occupation of their country, three million have become refugees and millions in that suffering country face the most horrendous conditions in their everyday lives. Anything associated with New Labour was punished. Tariq Ali?s memoir Streetfighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties is published by Verso.