Workers Solidarity Movement

In early December classroom assistants in the North returned to work after a series of strike actions which had gone on since September. This action by the classroom assistants showed in stark form the two faces of the trade union movement. On the one hand there was the tremendous bravery and solidarity shown by the workers themselves in standing up to attempts to bully and harass them back to work. On the other hand was the duplicitousness and skulduggery of some trade union bureaucrats who not alone did their best to undermine the dispute but actively worked with management and politicians to betray the workers.

In early December classroom assistants in the North returned to work after a series of strike actions which had gone on since September. This action by the classroom assistants showed in stark form the two faces of the trade union movement.

Argos workers throughout the 26 counties are holding another one-day strike on the 18th December.

As the grey misty rain fell throughout the day – you truly knew it was winter. The fact that over 300 bus workers were gathered in this dog of an afternoon outside Dublin Bus HQ would indicate that we all have entered the season of discontent.

Drivers from Harristown Garage are marching on Dublin Bus Head Office in O'Connell Street tomorrow (Wednesday 14th) . The march starts at 11am from the Garden of Remembrance on Parnell Square.

Thursday 22nd November

This is an archive of some talks given to WSM meetings between 1991 and 2007 on the general subjects of class politics, trade unionism and the changing nature of the working class.  For more articles and talks check the relevant subject indices

The main trade unions in education are sponsoring this confrence in Dublin. Anyone can attend, and it will be particularly useful for teachers, students and others in the education system who want to resist the increasing commercialisation of schools and universities.

In recent times, with the increasing influence of business interests on the state, and with the near destruction of social security, workers’ existence is becoming more and more insecure. Precarity is a term that has been developed alongside casualisation to describe the changes wrought by these and the form of working class existence that has developed because of them. Rather than the job-for-life and job security associated with such, workers’ are being coldly moulded into an acceptance of labour that rests on the whims and qualms of the bosses rather than an environment that it is within the workers‘ power to effect and change.

The International Transport Workers’ Federation reports that Mansour Osanloo, President of the Tehran Bus Workers’ Union continues to be incarcerated in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran and is being denied essential medical treatment to save his eyesight, despite the Iranian regime refusing to allow the General Secretary of an Indonesian transport workers’ union to visit him this week under the pretext that he was receiving medical treatment.