Tag: Strikes

[Royal Mail: battle for us all Royal Mail: battle for us all]

Original article, by Jerry White, via World Socialist Web Site:

It has come to light that the federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler approved last month by the Bush administration with the support of the incoming Obama administration includes a stipulation that effectively bans strikes or work stoppages by autoworkers.

Original article, a reprinting of a pamphlet by Harry DeBoer, via Socialist Appeal.

Here is Harry’s recollection of a key incident in the wave of strikes. “On July 20, I was called to go to a warehouse because a bunch of cops were going to move a truck. About a thousand policemen were there. Around ten o’clock the captain came up to me and said, “Look, we don’t want a mess here.” I said all you have to do is move your cops away and don’t move any trucks. He checked with his superior and came back: ‘It’s a deal.’ It was a phony deal. At 12:30 the police went back to the warehouse. We went back, too, thousands of pickets, all unarmed. The police surrounded the truck and started moving it. Nine or ten or us in an open-bodied truck moved in front of it to stop them. So help me, police on roofs started shooting from all directions right into the workers. About fifty were injured. I was one of them, pretty near lost my leg. Two strikers got killed. The governor’s investigating committee put it this way: “Police took direct aim at the pickets and fired to kill” and “at no time did pickets attack the police.” Governor Olsen had a perfect right to arrest them for murder. Instead he declared a state of martial law and called out the National Guard. They surrounded the union headquarters and put most of our leadership in the stockade.”

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Police Break Up Today’s Protest

This past Spring (Fall in Argentina) Argentina’s president, Cristina Kirchner, decided to raise export taxes on grains. This has led to more than three months of bitter protests by farmers, essayed here, and to shortages of meat, oil, flour and fuel.  Kirchner has refused to repeal the tax increase, which she claims will cut inflation and increase food supplies to the poor. Farmers have responded by cutting off transportation routes in an effort to strike back at the government. And the government has said in response to blockades of roads by farmers that it would guarantee free travel on all roads in Argentina.

As a result, food that normally ships to Europe and Asia has not made it to port, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of spoiled milk have been dumped on rural routes, and there are huge shortages of food in the capital city and elsewhere.  In other words, after more than 3 months, there remains a complete deadlock.

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