The Magna Corporation is the largest supplier of parts to the auto industry in Canada. It employs more workers than GM Canada, all non-union and all working below union rates putting downward pressure on wages in the industry. (It will come as no surprise that CEO Stronach takes home higher than union wages – $100 million over the last three years!). The company represents a significant challenge to the Canadian Auto Workers’ Union (CAW) and a potentially large source of dues revenue. But the deal that was struck between CAW president Hargrove and Stronach has provoked strong reaction. Here’s...
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Burma (or Myanmar as the present rulers want it to be called) is, and has been since 1962, a military dictatorship, one which even has had the cheek to claim to be socialist. Now, once again, sections of the population are demonstrating for there to be more elbow room for people to organise politically and to express critical political views. Naturally as socialists we would welcome this as freedom of movement and expression, the freedom to organise in trade unions, to organise politically and to participate in elections are of great importance to all workers and are vital to...
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“Irish workers are second most productive in the world” headlined the business section of the Irish Times (4 September) reporting on an International Labour Organisation (ILO) study on productivity in various different countries. Productivity as measured by the ILO is a pretty nebulous concept. They take a country’s total GNP and divide it by some measure of the amount of work done, either the total number of hours worked by workers in that country or this divided by the total number of workers (work per hour). It was on this second measure that Irish workers came second (to US...
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The latest issue of Socialist Worker (25 August) of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) carries an article on the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International which took place a hundred years ago. According to the author, John Riddell, the Congress “took a bold stand in the struggle against capitalist war”. No, it didn’t. The big set piece debate was on militarism and anti-militarism. Some of the French delegates wanted the Congress, in the words of a motion proposed by Gustave Hervé, “to answer any declaration of war, from whatever side it may come, by military strike and insurrection” (an...
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We have been going for over a hundred years and over that period have come across all sorts of theories as to the cause of and solution to the problems facing society and wage and salary workers in particular. One set are those who say that the answer lies in some reform of the monetary system and who are known, perhaps ungenerously, as “currency cranks”. They go back a long ago way, and were even found amongst the Chartists in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s. They argue that banks are the problem: that they can create credit (money,...
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The government, the churches, the charities are all trying to make us feel guilty by saying that we as individuals are to blame for global warming. Some say that, by our chosen lifestyle, we personally emit too much CO², directly, when we drive a car or, indirectly, when we leave the lights on or heat our homes without them being properly insulated, or when we fly to our holiday destinations. Others take the total amount of CO² emitted from all sources in the country where we live and simply divide it by the total population, attributing the result to...
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Herbert Spencer’s concept of Survival of the fittest…Pseudo Scientists, in Economics, Anthropology, History, etc., have have probably erected more obstacles to the clear understanding of reality than any other group, for their misconceptions are tinted with the gild of scholarship. Herbert Spencer, with his Social Statics, was perhaps the most outstanding of those scholars whose opinions and conclusions were accepted on a large scale by peoples on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain he developed quite a following, but nowhere so avid and devoted desciples as among the burgeoning tycoons in the U.S.A. Following the American Civil War,...
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War, Plots and Civil Liberties
Was there really a plot to blow up transatlantic airliners or were the police just using a pretext to fish for information by rounding up and questioning people they suspected were up to something without knowing precisely what? Will ministers eventually say, as they did after the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes and after the raid on that house in Forest Gate when another innocent man was shot, that it’s better to err on the side of safety? Better a few innocents are shot than a terrorist act in which hundreds die? Whatever the truth, the “security alert”...
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