Workers Solidarity Movement

Ireland's anarchist paper Workers Solidarity, Issue 101 January - February 2008

Who Needs To Tighten Their Belts?
Average Nurses Annual WAGE: €56000 Finance Minister Biffo Cowens Wage: €270000
Union leaders, employers and the government will soon be sitting down to negotiate a new pay round as part of the Towards 2016 ‘partnership’ agreement. 

Irish Ferries: exploiting workers and insulting Wilde
When Irish Ferries launched their new €50million vessel in Dublin Port on Tuesday 29th January, 400 guests from the tourism, freight and shipping sectors attended the naming ceremony. How many of them, I wonder, took a moment as they quaffed their champagne and nibbled on their canapés to ponder on the news revealed by International Transport Workers Federation inspector, Ken Fleming, that the workers who would be manning the ferry will be paid as little as €4 per hour?

Putting The Gardai Under The Spotlight - The Royal Hotel meeting
Over 200 people packed into the Royal Dublin Hotel on Dublin’s O’Connell Street in early December for a public meeting on the topic ‘Democracy and Policing: How accountable are the gardaí to the Irish people?’ 

Is non-extraction of the Mayo gasfield an answer?
In recent years, with climate change dominating headlines regularly, it has become popular among some environmentalists to propose non-extraction of fossil fuels as a viable way to reduce the effects climate change. But if this idea was taken up what would be the result?

The train that crashed through the anti-condom laws
With women’s control over their own fertility still denied in Ireland North and South, Ciaran Murray resurrects a story from the not so distant past, where direct action, literally got the goods.

A merry Christmas for the gombeen man
Christmas has increasingly become a matter of spending money on presents, rather than spending time with your loved ones. Where this might be hard for some, it can be financially unbearable for others. In order to meet the expectations from the society and avoid humiliation, we take up loans to get through family events such as Christmas.

Solidarity and Betrayal: two sides of a dispute
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.

Thinking about anarchism: religion
When humanity was first coming up with answers to tricky questions like “why does it rain; what happens when we die? what causes events?”, they came up with quite a good answer. Since, in our everyday experience, minds are responsible for causing events and designing complex objects such as tools, a very great mind must be the ultimate cause of everything. This resort to an ultimate designer is especially attractive when trying to understand important parts of people’s lives, such as the weather, death etc.

WSM activity in late 2007
November saw WSM members gather for their national conference. These take place twice a year and all members can attend, submit motions and vote. 

Water charges for schools in Ireland
After a month of fooling around, the government has finally declared that they will implement water charges for schools, backdating them to 2007

You couldn’t make it up!
Remember the good old days - before the election - when the Green party used to be in favour of the anti-war cause and used to support the searching of CIA ‘rendition’ planes passing through Shannon?

That's capitalism