British workers resisting

From British daily The Morning Star:

A storm of resistance

Thursday 22 October 2009

It’s taken longer than expected for new Labour‘s class-collaborationist chickens to come home to roost, but it’s happening with a vengeance now.

As this editorial is being written, over 40,000 postal workers are out on strike and, as you read it, tens of thousands more will be out on the cobbles.

And that’s not the end of it by any means.

Low-paid Sheffield council workers are balloting on strike action over a pay “review” which could cost them between £4,000 and £8,000 a year, a fight that their colleagues in Leeds have had to undertake as well, and their strike is just entering its seventh week.

Around 1,400 civil servants at the Land Registry have just found out that they are to be made redundant, many of them compulsorily, out of a total workforce of 6,500, a workforce which was only last year reduced by 1,700 as part of a government offensive against the Civil Service threatening 100,000-plus jobs.

Meanwhile, over 1,300 bus drivers at First South Yorkshire garages in Sheffield, Doncaster and Rotherham are striking against a zero per cent pay offer, and they are only the tip of the iceberg, with a number of garages across Britain organising action against the First Group’s pay freeze.

One shouldn’t leave out the journalists at the Birmingham Post and Mail, who are facing job losses because their jobs have been reorganised out of existence, or the RMT cleaners working on the Eurostar contract at St Pancras International for the notorious Carlisle Group and their fight for pay and justice.

That’s by no means the end of the list. We just don’t have the space to include them all.

But even the abbreviated list here illustrates the point that the capitalist offensive against working people and every advance that they have achieved over the last 60 years – or more – is well under way and the resistance from the working class is firming up, as well it should.