Kenya’s public hospitals face a potentially devastating health worker shortage after the government fired 25,000 striking nurses. Luke K’Odambo, chairman of the National Nurses Association of Kenya, said that the sacking did ”not make sense in any way”, and that it was not possible to dismiss such a large part of the workforce. “We are ignoring the sacking threat.” Alex Orina, spokesman of the 40,000-strong Kenya Health Professionals Society, said. ”These are cat-and-mouse games, you cannot sack an entire workforce. It is a ploy to get us to rush back to work, but our strike continues until our demands are met,” ....
Read more »
The World Socialist Party is frequently lambasted for its opposition to reformism. The workers clamor for something concrete now, it is claimed , not abstract socialist principles. They demand immediate improvements that can be obtained by campaigns for legislation it is argued. The World Socialist Party case that although some reforms may be of material benefit to the working class, advocating party policy to struggle for particular reforms hinders the struggle for socialism and diverts our energies into what often results in dead-ends. We found this article by Stephanie Luce on the Labor Notes website particularly relevant in that it offers some...
Read more »
It’s exploitation that causes workers’ problems. On an ultra-simplistic level we could say that capitalism in the persona of capitalists uses capital (in its basic form, money) to make a profit. By utilising capital in the form of property, equipment, machinery, investment or speculation the capitalist needs to employ members of the working class in order to increase the original capital for the benefit of the capitalist. This can only be done if the workers agree knowingly or unknowingly to their own exploitation. Why exploitation? In the monetary world society we live in everyone has a need for money...
Read more »
Many are suffering the misery of unemployment while much useful, necessary work remains undone. One of the contradictions of capitalism. We want free time, to reduce the working day so that we can move beyond the tyranny of survival into free and creative mutual activity. Both employment and unemployment are capitalism preventing our human development in this direction. The problems of unemployment are huge – worldwide problems affecting millions in some countries and billions globally if we include the massive numbers of ‘informal’ workers, those recognised as outside of the system, many of them non-persons living on the very...
Read more »
Hans-Jörg Rudloff, the head of the Management Board of investment bank Barclays Capital knows how to solve the debt crisis and bring “competitiveness” back to the European Union. Half of the social benefits have to go. People have to work more, doing longer hours for longer years. He explained that “Europe is carrying a social rucksack, which makes us uncompetitive in this world. We have provided living standards for our populations which are unheard of, which no one ever thought would be possible, for the last 50 years. People do not want to give up these living standards. Populations...
Read more »
“In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as ‘right to work.’ It provides no ‘rights’ and no ‘works.’ Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining.” — Martin Luther King Jr. “What we’re trying to get to is to get Missouri on the map as a place where businesses want to be and where that they would like to locate. National-siting corporations, frankly, they’re taking a look at Missouri and saying, “Are you a right-to-work state or are you a forced-union state?…the other states that...
Read more »
The heroic and inspiring struggles of China’s working class will only lay the ground for new and improved exploitation methods – unless, that is, the struggle turns political – and socialist. “I do the same thing every day,” said one employee at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where more than ten workers have committed suicide. “I have no future.” Many, perhaps most, workers will know exactly how he feels. But to the bourgeois mind, it’s all an impenetrable puzzle. There was something criminally stupid and sickeningly idiotic about the reaction to the suicides of Terry Gou, the billionaire...
Read more »
According to the International Trade Union Confederation, Bangladesh’s 3.5 million garment workers, most of them women, are the ‘world’s most poorly paid workers’. Many work 12 to 14 hour shifts, six days a week, often in hazardous conditions. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organisations stated ‘Bangladesh’s garment workers are among the hardest working women in the world, and the most exploited.’ Sheikh Hasina Wajed, Bangladesh’s prime minister, recently told the parliament: ‘It is not possible for the workers to live on the wages they get now.’ Compensation in the garment industry was ‘not only insufficient...
Read more »
The shoddy economy is leaving many workers feeling overworked, underpaid — and yet relieved to be employed at all. “Fewer workers are doing more and more,” said Brett Good, a district president with staffing firm Robert Half, which has surveyed workers on this topic. “You’ve got a lot of people that are working harder, making less money — and you’re getting to a point of frustration.” Employers have cut millions of jobs since the recession began in December 2007, driven by a drop in business and a desire to shore up costs and boost profits. Although the cost-cutting has...
Read more »
Reflections on Hurricane Sandy
It’s now a week since Hurricane Sandy hit large coastal areas of the northeastern United States. At least a million homes were still without heat and power when a snowstorm followed a few days later. Relief has yet to reach some of the areas affected, such as the Far Rockaways, where survivors are fending for themselves as best they can. Workers held captive True, some manage to fend much better than others. Holed up for the duration in a first-class hotel on the island of Manhattan, the business and cultural centre of New York City, David Rohde in The...
Read more »