Workers Solidarity Movement

As the cost of living and rate of inflation has hit a 10 year high, over 200 construction workers at Kilroot power station in Northern Ireland decided to take matters into their own hands without intermediaries in solidarity with a victimised worker who was ‘asked’ to leave the site after raising health and safety concerns.

Orange and Green politicians sometimes find it incredibly easy to come together, especially when it’s to stop progress.

On July 5th 2005 the IWW in Grand Rapids and the CNT in Seville called for a world wide day of action on Starbucks restaurants. We know people have many issues with Starbucks from their flagship role on Capitalist Globalisation to their overpriced cup of froth laughably posing as coffee. This day of action, though, set out not to attack the company per se. Our aim was to encourage workers within it to get organised and unionised or, at least, to start thinking about it. Specifically we were supporting the call for solidarity for Cole Dorsey fired for organising workers into the IWW in Grand rapids in the USA and Monica: organising for the CNT in Seville Spain.

Anarchists, trade unionists and social justice activists placed a placed a lunchtime picket on the offices of Lionbride in Dun Laoghaire on Friday the 4th of July as part of an International Week of Solidarity with Jakub G, a longstanding Polish Lionbridge employe who was fired for encouraging fellow workers to join a union to protect their pay and conditions in Lionbridge's Warsaw office.

It’s not incompetence, it's sabotage - Would you put people with a financial interest in running down the public health service in charge of our hospitals?

The Health Services Executive in Cork is spending nearly four times as much giving work that used to be done by a HSE employee to private profiteers. A worker in the Environmental Health Unit (which deals with everything from transport to pest control) used to get a maximum of €700 a week until he retired this year. Now the same work is being given to a private firm, who charge €2,625 a week.

It was a victory for people applying common sense and cutting through capitalist bullshit. What the prosecution had feared most was the jury acquitting the 9 because they believed them when they said that they had sabotaged Raytheon's computers in order to disrupt the company's activities. These activities are supplying the world's most lethal weapons of mass destruction to the world's most human rights abusing regimes.

The construction industry and the property market have well and truly collapsed. House prices have already fallen by about 20% since 2006 and the fall is set to continue for some years still.

The ongoing debate about how school pupils should transfer from primary to post-primary school in Northern Ireland raises fundamental questions about the type of society we want to live in.

Working people in the Irish Republic have been hearing a lot from the representatives of their exploiters lately about the need for us to exercise ‘pay restraint’ and to ‘moderate our demands’ in these difficult times.