TAMING THE UNIONS - The mirage of a social Europe (by C. GOBIN)
By : Le Monde Diplo - Monday May 30, 2011 France and Italy have undertaken to introduce a 35-hour working week. But this step forward has been greeted with serious reservations by most European Union governments, and with downright hostility by employers and heads of finance. The key word is now flexibility. But it remains to be seen at this month’s European Council summit what hope there really is for a "social Europe". What is sure is that European trades unions have been hopelessly slow off the mark. by Corinne Gobin (...)
read more, comments... RESALE RIGHT - lasts days for fair resale right contribution
By : SNAPcgt - Wednesday March 9, 2011 Consultation on the implementation and effect of the Resale Right Directive (2001/84/EC) Period of consultation From 07.01.2011 to 11.03.2011 All citizens and organisations are welcome to contribute to this consultation. Contributions are particularly sought from artists, art market professionals, and collecting societies managing resale right royalties. The Commission Services are preparing a report on the implementation and effect of the Resale Right Directive (2001/84/EC), as provided (...)
read more, comments... (video) Koch brothers play self-serving role in Wisconsin battle
By : Juan Lopez - Thursday March 3, 2011 Multi-billionaire corporate magnates Charles and David Koch, major behind-the-scenes players in the dispute between Wisconsin public employees and Republican Gov. Scott Walker, stand to gain more than meets the eye from this epic battle. Buried deep inside Walker’s 144-page contested budget bill are 10 lines, unrelated to employee takeaways or union rights, which would allow the state to sell to or contract with a private corporation any state-owned heating, cooling and power plant, (...)
read more, comments... (video) Epic battle in Wisconsin is a taste of our power
By : Wisconsin - Thursday March 3, 2011 Siân Ruddick looks at the stuggle in Wisconsin, which is changing the US The battle in Wisconsin has seen hundreds of thousands of US workers rediscover their power. In the most powerful protests for many years, public sector workers—with the support of students, war veterans, pensioners, local campaigners and even some police—have brought the city of Madison to a standstill. They have shown the US right that they will face determined resistance to any attacks they try to push (...)
read more, comments... (videos) New Jersey rallies to support Wisconsin workers
By : Norman Markowitz - Wednesday March 2, 2011 Thousands of trade unionists rallied in front of the state Capitol in Trenton last week in solidarity with the public workers of Wisconsin who are fighting back against, Scott Walker a righting governor trying to do in 2011 what he would not have dared to do in 1911, when Robert La Follette, Sr., the leading progressive reformer in the nation, was Wisconsin’s United States Senator. La Follette more than a century ago had led Wisconsin to become the most advanced state in the nation (...)
read more, comments... ARTISTS for RESALE RIGHT in EUROPE
By : snapcgt - Wednesday March 2, 2011 CITIZEN CONTRIBUTIONS opened until 11th of march 2011 Resale Right has been created to allow artists or their heirs to get some profit back from the resale of their works. Very often, artists sell low prices artworks which are resaled later much more expensive value. All citizens and artists unions can contribute to the european consultation to promote resale right in all Europe. Contributions are particularly sought from artists, artists unions and collecting societies managing resale (...)
read more, comments... 11-hour picket slams Gannett union-busting
By : Rick Nagin - Tuesday March 1, 2011 In what may seem like a case of David and Goliath, 60 broadcast technicians and engineers at WKYC-TV Channel 3 are standing up to the Gannett Corporation’s nationwide union-busting rampage. Facing a savage attack on their union, the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (NABET) Local 42, the workers got badly needed support from their brothers and sisters at other stations Wednesday, Feb. 23, in an 11-hour silent picket line in front of Channel 3 studios. (...)
read more, comments... Video: Rep. Donna Edwards: “Today, We Are All From Wisconsin!”
By : William Hughes - Saturday February 26, 2011 On Saturday, Feb. 26, 2011, a Union-led solidarity rally, backed by a wide coalition of progressive groups, was held in Annapolis, MD. The action was in support of the ongoing “Wisconsin Protest.” One of the featured speakers at the spirited event was Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD).
read more, comments... Pioneering Spanish trade union leader Marcelino Camacho dies at 92
By : MADRID - Friday October 29, 2010 Marcelino Camacho, one of Spain’s foremost union leaders and the first secretary general of a top workers’ federation, has died at 92. Camacho died in a Madrid hospital Friday after several days in serious condition, his union, Comisiones Obreras said. A committed communist, Camacho fought in the losing Republican army during Spain’s 1936-39 Civil War and then spent 10 years in prison as a staunch opponent of the 1939-75 military dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco. (...)
read more, comments... SEPTEMBER 7TH 2010 INTERNATIONAL ACTION DAY
By : World Federation of Trade Unions - Tuesday August 31, 2010 The World Federation of Trade Unions -WFTU- calls upon the trade union movement and progressive organizations of the world to act, to participate, to join us on the on September 7th 2010, International Action Day. In 2009-2010, we live in a period of global crisis of the capitalist system. This crisis is deep and embraces all areas of the system: the economy, politics, society, culture, environment, even the personal relationships of the people. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is (...)
read more, comments... Honduras: A selective and low-intensity human hunt
By : Rel-UITA - Friday February 26, 2010 Another murder in broad daylight A little after noon on Wednesday, Feb. 24, in the city of San Pedro Sula, there was a knock on the door at Claudia Larissa Brizuela’s house, where she was celebrating her 36th birthday. As soon as she opened the door she was gunned down, with three shots to the head that killed instantly. Claudia was an active member of the trade union of employees of the Mayor’s Office, where she worked. She was also the daughter of Pedro Brizuela, a (...)
read more, comments... New Caledonian union leader set free from ‘inhumane’ jail
By : New Caledonia - Monday January 18, 2010 New Caledonia’s pro-independence USTKE (Union of Kanak and Exploited Workers) union leader Gérard Jodar has been granted release from a nine-month jail sentence he was serving for disrupting air traffic during violent clashes on the tarmac of the Magenta domestic airport late May 2009. The ruling was handed down by an Appeals Court in New Caledonia’s capital Nouméa, local media reported. Mid-September 2009, a former appeal ruling reduced Jodar’s initial sentence of 12 to (...)
read more, comments... Venezuela: El Libertario warns of possible sentence to the 14 Sidor workers
By : Periódico El Libertario - Saturday July 25, 2009 In 05 September 2006 a group of workers and union leaders staged a protest against the carrier Camila, a contractor to SIDOR (Siderúrgic of the Orinoco), the principal steel core business located in Puerto Ordaz, Bolivar state, in Venezuela. The workers were protesting the failure to pay wages, and maintain health and safety, as well as the lack of tools to accomplish their work. The protest was endorsed by Readers of the “Sindicato Único de Trabajadores Siderúrgicos y Similares (...)
read more, comments... Record numbers join anti-Sarkozy protests
By : Paris - Friday March 20, 2009 Record numbers took to the streets of France yesterday in the biggest demonstrations since Nicolas Sarkozy’s election, to protest about his handling of the economic crisis. Unions estimated that more than three million people took part in demonstrations across the country, in the second general strike over the economic crisis in two months. Police put figures at about 1.2 million. With one in three people supporting the protest, it had the highest public backing for a strike in a (...)
read more, comments... PETITION - "We will not pay for your crisis !". For a European social movement
By : Sud étudiant - Tuesday December 16, 2008 PETITION - "We will not pay for your crisis !". For a European social movement « We will not pay for your crisis !! « We will not pay for your crisis » is the slogan that has been echoing in all Italy for more than a month now. The wave of protests is spreading and more than 300 000 demonstrators on November 14th have taken up the slogan that across the borders shout at our political leaders. They are thousands of students, teachers and parents, who are thinking and acting for another (...)
read more, comments... The Bologna Declaration : Critical notes - Part 2
By : COBAS UK - Sunday December 7, 2008 Employability Employability is a point around which the Bologna Declaration has based its rhetoric of the positive forces of the free market. The Bologna Declaration sustains rhetoric of employability that is central to the redefinition of HE as an economic system. It promotes tools like the Diploma Supplement (a document giving more information about the contents of a qualification earned) aimed at increasing the depth and comparability of degrees across Europe. This is supposed to make (...)
read more, comments... The lot of witnesses that "La Repubblica" is missing
By : COBAS UK - Thursday November 27, 2008 There are many people who have been forced out of their jobs and academic careers, from postgraduate researchers to professors, because of bullying in universities in Britain. We know that these same problems exist elsewhere around the world and seems to worsen the more neoliberal policies and ideologies are forced upon Higher Education systems. Sometime the problem of bullying and mobbing in the universities around the world is obscured and difficult to translate as behaviours and (...)
read more, comments... An education system not to trust
By : COBAS UK - Sunday October 26, 2008 The THE has published a survey in which 77% of lecturers denounce that they are pressurised to award higher grades to students than deserved. There are some important perversions of interest underlying the publication of such data by the THE. If the THE, the universities, the QAA, the government, the pseudo-unions, or anyone else in the elite caste architecting the direction of British HE, wanted to really ensure meritocracy and student-centred learning in academia, they would first (...)
read more, comments... Stop elite research now!
By : COBAS UK - Saturday October 11, 2008 Research in universities across the globe is becoming more and more privatised. This must be stopped because it will centre power in the hands of a few who will inevitably ask for the payment of very high university fees and will not give access to research which does not support their speculative interests. Berlusconi in Italy is trying to privatise most of the public university research. This should be stopped! Italian students and universtity professors are united in a "line of fight" (...)
read more, comments... A case of disciplinary action against a university academic
By : COBAS UK - Friday September 5, 2008 A case of disciplinary action against a university academic is presented on COBAS UK. In the analysis a case for managerial discrection and union passivity is presented highlighting how disciplinary procedures are internalised within the system in order to extend managerial control. http://www.cobas.org.uk COBAS UK
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