84 + Women On Hunger Strike Behind The Wire At Yarl’s Wood IRC
Posted on February 8, 2010
Detention results from political decisions that represent a “hardening attitude towards irregular migrants and asylum seekers (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe)
End the Detention of Foreign Nationals Now!
Since the 5th of February 2010, we the residents at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre are on hunger strike which involves over 84 + women, who are protesting against the period of time spent in detention and the treatment that they receive while being detained.
The strike was sparked to protest and demand that the frustration and humiliation of all foreign nationals ends now.
We are demanding the following actions
- End the frustrations, physical and mental torture at the centre
- Allow enough time and make resources available to residents who need to fully present their cases.
- To end all false allegations and misrepresentations by the UKBA regarding detainees in order to refuse bail or temporary admissions.
- Access to appropriate medical treatment and care as in the community, access to edible and well cooked food, phones with good mobile connections, with camera and recording facilities to back up cases.
- To stop the forceful removal and degrading system of deportation of detainees
- To put law into practise, European rules governing standard of conditions of detention for migrants and asylum seekers and the length of time in detention.
- The abolition of detention for asylum seeker and torture victims
- Detention should be by a standard procedure prescribed by law, authorised by judicial authority and be subjected to periodic judicial reviews.
- To end the detention of children and their mothers, rape survivors and other torture victims, to end the detention of physically, mentally sick people and pregnant women for long period of time.
- To end the separation of children from their mothers being detained whether in detention or destitution.
- To end the detention of women detention after serving time in prison.
- To abolish the fast track system, in order to give asylum seekers a fair chance with their application, while understanding the particular needs of victims of torture, and access to reliable legal representation which the fast track system denies.
- To end the repeat detention of women granted temporary admission while reporting or signing after a short period out of detention.
- To a set period of time allowed to detain women, which should be no longer than 1 month, while waiting decision either from UKBA or court proceedings.
Finally instead of detention of foreign nationals, there are alternatives to detention stated by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). ‘The detention of asylum seekers and irregular migrants in Europe ‘, Adopted on the 28th January 2010, extracts below.
9.1.1. detention of asylum seekers and irregular migrants shall be exceptional and only used after first reviewing all other alternatives and finding that there is no effective alternative;
9.3.4.1. placement in special establishments (open or semi-open);
9.3.4.2. registration and reporting;
9.3.4.3. release on bail/surety;
9.3.4.4. controlled release to individuals, family members, NGOs, religious organisations, or others;
9.3.4.5. handover of travel and other documents, release combined with appointment of a special worker;
Full Text: Council of Europe - Parliamentary Assembly Resolution 1707 (2010) The detention of asylum seekers and irregular migrants in Europe
Please support our concerns, lobby your MPs, Councilors, MEPs, demanding our immediate release and an end to arbitrary detention.
With Thanks,
Women behind the Wire @ Yarl’s Wood IRC
Messages of support/solidarity to: WomenBehindTheWire@ncadc.org.uk
Defend Alberto Durango
Posted on February 8, 2010
In an act of vindictive union busting Alberto Durango, a leading activist in the campaign to achieve justice for cleaners in London, is facing the sack. Alberto, a leader of the Latin American Workers Association and member of UNITE, has been in the forefront of a series of campaigns to organise mainly migrant workers to challenge the exploitation and dire working conditions amongst cleaners.
Following a campaign at Schroeders bank the company Lancaster (part of Rentokil Initial) singled out Alberto for victimisation. He worked for Lancaster for over a decade: only when he became a union activist did they target him. A series of allegations were thrown at Alberto, they orchestrated his arrest by the Home Office based on misleading and false claims. He was released without charge. Having failed in their efforts Lancaster sacked Alberto regardless claiming he never worked for them under his true identity. After his dismissal the company then admitted following a union appeal that he had in fact worked for them in his true identity after all.
Alberto found new employment with the company MITIE at the Swiss bank UBS, he helped organise these workplaces and he is the elected shop-steward. However the contract has been transferred to Lancaster (Rentokil). Immediately on taking over the contract Lancaster have ignored the protections afforded by TUPE and set out to attack the terms and conditions of the workforce. They have now sacked the UNITE rep Alberto. Despite an ongoing Tribunal they have based this suspension on the reasons given when Alberto previously worked for this company. This is blatant persecution of a union activist. Just as in the building industry we are seeing these employers are operating a blacklist against trade unionists.
The City banks and the cleaning companies they hire to service their buildings’ are out to create a climate of fear that will deter workers from becoming reps and organising into unions. This is not an issue only for the migrant workers it is an attack on every member of the labour movement, it is the cutting edge of the agenda for cuts in pay and jobs. The workers at UBS deserve our solidarity – we must not let then succeed in victimising Alberto. It is time to stop these companies from engaging in discrimination, bullying and victimisation.
Chris Ford, UNITE Clerkenwell & St. Pancras 0694M branch organiser
DEMONSTRATION
Reinstate Alberto – Hands off Our Union
Friday 12 February 1:00 PM,
Outside UBS Capital, 100 Liverpool Street, London EC2M 2RH (note: changed from original venue)Sponsoring organisations:
Latin American Workers Association; The Commune; La Comuna; Colombia Solidarity Campaign; Permanent Revolution; National Shop Stewards’ Network; Labour Representation Committee, Brent Trades Union Council, Rifondazione Comunista, Workers’ Liberty, International Federation of Iraqi Refugees, Coalition to Stop Deportations to Iraq, Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!; Green LeftIndividual sponsors:
John McDonnell MP; Jeremy Dear, NUJ General Secretary, Steve Hedley RMT (LUL) Regional Organiser; Professor Gregor Gall, Research Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Hertfordshire; Pete Firmin, LRC Co-National Secretary; George Binette, Camden UNISON Branch Secretary (pc); Derek Wall, General Election Candidate for Windsor/former Green Party principal Speaker, Jerry Hicks, UNITE General Secretary Candidate, Vaughan Thomas, RMT (LUL) Regional President, Paul Haste, Morning Star industrial reporterPlease add your name and organisation to the sponsors:
write to latin_americanworkers@hotmail.com
New Migrant And Activist Space In Calais Raided By Police
Posted on February 7, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
This afternoon, Sunday 7th February, police raided the Kronstadt Hangar in Calais, smashing glass doors and arresting those inside.
The hangar, a new space for migrants and activists in Calais rented by the No Borders network and the French organisation SoS Sans Papier¹, opened yesterday afternoon to immediate repression from the authorities.
After the opening police blockaded the streets around the hangar and tried to prevent migrants from entering. In spite of this 150 migrants went in to have tea and coffee.
When people tried to leave this lunchtime they were beated by police batons and several of them sustained injuries, including one who was hospitalised. Soon afterwards, police forced their way into the hangar, causing damage to the building and arresting those inside.
London No Borders condemns this repression of migrants and supporters in the strongest terms. Its spokesperson Thomas Hausberg said that “if providing even basic support to homeless and destitute migrants is considered a criminal offence, the state has lost all semblance of humanity.”
It seems that this police repression and violence has been officially sanctioned. French Immigration Eric Besson has branded the Kronstadt Hangar “unacceptable” and in recent days Calais mayor Natasha Bouchart said she was prepared to use all means to prevent the space from opening. “Bouchart”, commented Rosie Young, another No Borders activist, “seems to have a personal vendetta against the migrants”.
This Tuesday London No Borders and No Borders Brighton are calling for a protest at 12.30pm outside the French Consulate in London.
For further comments please call 07535 319119 or e-mail noborderslondon@riseup.net
¹ At a press conference hosted by London No Borders last Thursday, it was explained that the aim of the Kronstadt Hangar is to provide a safe space for migrants and supporters to meet, to make the migrants visible and give them a voice of their own. For more details on the press
conference see: http://london.indymedia.org/articles/4265See also Guardian article from Thursday.
Finding Against The Four
Posted on February 5, 2010
The four Socialist Party members subjected to a Unison witch hunt have lost their case.
Courts show what side they’re on
Once again the courts have shown their class prejudice in the recently-published employment tribunal ruling against the four Socialist Party members fighting the witch hunt in Unison.
Not satisfied with blocking the BA workers’ right to strike, a court has now effectively ruled that socialists and Marxists do not have the right to be protected in law from discrimination and harassment in the workplace or in a trade union.
Incredibly the judgement went on to say that the four’s beliefs in the right for housing for all and the right of workers to take unofficial strike action were views that were “repugnant in a democratic society” as they were seeking to deprive other individuals of their rights and freedoms by imposition!
Emboldened by the backing of the employment tribunal, the following day the union sent a letter to the four telling them that they have lost their internal appeal against the ban from office that was previously imposed and will now face a mitigation hearing on 24 February.
Former UKBA Employee Blows Whistle
Posted on February 3, 2010
There are no ‘fair’ or ‘just’ or ‘humane’ immigration controls. Immigration controls are implicitly racist, unjust and cruel.
The notion that a human being is or can be ‘illegal’ is absurd. The concept was invented as a divide and rule distraction to protect the power and privilege of the lords of the capitalist elite, to set workers against one another.
It is no surprise that racist laws attract racists to administer those laws.
asylum seekers are mistreated, tricked and humiliated by staff working for the UK Border Agency, who express[ed] fiercely anti-immigration views and take pride in refusing applications [...] One method used to determine the authenticity of an asylum seeker claiming to be from North Korea was to ask whether the person ate chop suey. [...] interviews were conducted without lawyers, independent witnesses or tape recorders [...] Only cases raised by MPs appeared to be dealt with properly [...] one manager said of the asylum-seeker clients: “If it was up to me I’d take them all outside and shoot them.” Another told her this was to be expected, adding: “No one in this office is very PC. In fact everyone is the exact opposite.” [...] “I witnessed general hostility, rudeness and indifference towards clients. It was completely horrific. I highlighted my concerns to senior managers but I was just laughed at.” [...] One of her cases involved a Congolese woman who had the right to remain in the UK. Perrett says a superior nevertheless decided the woman and her children should be removed, and asked officials whether there were any grounds to remove them. Frustrated, she approached a member of the legal department. His reply, according to Perrett, was: “Umbongo, umbongo, they kill them in the Congo.”
Home Affairs select committee chairman Keith Vaz has called for an investigation into the claims, but New Labour is as much a part of the problem as other parties, running as it does to the dog whistle of the BNP-Daily Mail consensus on supposedly uncontrolled ‘mass immigration’, vying with the Tories to be seen as the most anti-foreigner, ‘but not racist’ party. New Labour is fully committed to Fortress Europe and its network of dehumanising concentration camps, where people declared ‘illegal’ by bureaucratic fiat await deportation to persecution, torture and murder for having the wrong skin colour, wrong gender, loving the wrong person or worshipping their god in the wrong way — all justified on the pretext that there are ‘not enough’ jobs and services to go around.
Are there enough houses being built, or being repaired? Is everybody healthy? Is there plenty of care for elderly and disabled people? The answer to all of these questions and more is an emphatic no. There is a crisis in the public housing and the provision of healthcare. Why is there ‘not enough’ to go around? Is it because there are a finite number of jobs and services? No, it is because the capitalist system is irrational. The needs of people are sacrificed in the interest of profit. The only things that matter in capitalism are the things that turn a profit. Human beings are needed only insofar as they are appendages of machines. The machines do not serve workers — it is the workers who serve the machine.
The working class is an international class. It is divided by nationalism, racism, sexism and imperialism into very unequal groups. We must fight for real equality and in doing so unite our class.
No One Is Illegal
Equal Pay, Equal Conditions, Equal Rights
Posted on February 3, 2010
GMB has organised a demonstration in London today.
GMB London Demonstrations On Feb 3rd At Underpayment Of Overseas Workers On Staythorphe And Engineering Construction Sites Being Used To Undercut UK Workers
Unemployed workers to demonstrate and deliver proof uncovered at Staythorpe at offices of Alstom, ECIA and Lord Mandelson and Rally to demand end to employers lies about underpayment and exploitation in Engineering Construction
The full press release contains more information.
It appears that the GMB has called the demonstration against employers’ lies about underpayment and exploitation, but the Daily Star has a different version of events, claiming the demonstration is continuation of the British Jobs For British Workers nationalist campaign, a
dispute over migrants which the Daily Star helped win for Brit workers [...] Protesters claim [...] their livelihoods [...] destroyed by mass immigration. [...] GMB union is also backing the march, which is the brainchild of the Bearfacts campaign group
While GMB officials have stated privately that they are opposed to the anti-migrant sentiments put forward in the Daily Star, there has as yet been no public statement from GMB restating the aims of the demonstration and making explicit its opposition.
Last year, Unite General Secretary Derek Simpson, an odious simpleton who has his tongue firmly wedged up the arses of the bosses, was photographed by the Daily Star with two chesty lasses holding British Jobs For British Workers banners complete with Union Flags.
‘Identity’ politics, a bourgeois fiction which pretends that workers and their exploiters have the same interests, has been substituted for class politics in the British Jobs For British Workers campaign. ‘Identity’ is used by the bosses to destroy class solidarity and weaken the proletariat. While workers remain divided and fight one another we are not fighting our real enemy — the bosses who profit from and grow fat on our labour. We must fight for equality, fight for the same pay and conditions for workers of all nationalities here and between workers in different countries.
Workers of the World Unite! Equal Pay, Equal Conditions, Equal Rights
The Active Participation Of Workers Is Necessary For Final Victory
Posted on January 12, 2010
The Iranian Revolutionary Marxists’ Tendency (IRMT) is the Iranian section of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT). Last year, IRMT spokesperson Maziar Razi published an open letter to the workers of Venezuela, admonishing the IMT’s Bolivarian hunk-of-the-moment President Hugo Chávez, for his support of Iranian President Ahmadinejad.
Chávez has made a mistake. With his support for Ahmadinejad he has ignored the solidarity of the workers and students of Iran with your revolution, and in a word, made it look worthless. [...] These rash and baseless remarks from your President are a great and direct insult to the millions of youth who in recent days rose up against tyranny. Some of them even lost their lives. [...] In addition, the remarks of your President are an insult to millions of workers in Iran. Workers whose leaders are today being tortured in the prisons of the Ahmadinejad government[.]
His words are in sharp contrast to the cretinous support of lumpen pseudo-radicals for the repressive bourgeois regime in Tehran and the lies and calumnies of these frauds against the Iranian revolutionary movement, slandering workers and students as ‘gilded youth’ and so on.
Maziar Razi has now published an open letter to Iranian workers exhorting them to stand firm against the onslaught of the forces of state repression.
keep looking »Honourable workers of Iran
Today we have entered a new stage of mass activities against the threats and intimidation of the capitalist government. You have experienced the threats and suppression of the past three decades more than any other social layer. There is no social force in Iran today that has experienced the economic, psychological and moral attacks meted out by the despotic capitalist government as such as you have.
You have been the only social force in Iran that, despite paying a high price (like unemployment and unpaid wages, arrests, torture and the murder of your brothers and sisters), has persistently continued its struggles against the capitalist government (both during the reformist and fundamentalist periods) for three decades. Your participation in the May Day 2009 commemoration despite the suppression and repression, your strikes in various factories against the pressures of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state like the factory security units, the Labour House, the Islamic Labour Councils and so on, have been applauded by millions of workers all over the world. Your continuing struggles have kept open the window of hope in the hearts of millions among the various oppressed layers in Iran.
You are the only social force in Iran that has undoubtedly the richest historical experience than any other social layer. Three decades ago, based on your own organisation and strength, you overthrew one of the biggest allies of US imperialism - the Shah’s regime. The strikes of workers in the big industries and factories like oil, gas, petrochemicals, steel, copper and so on, had a decisive role in overthrowing the Shah. The whole world knows full well that it was neither the mass street demonstrations, nor the poetry reciting on ‘poetry nights’, nor the actions of intellectuals of the political organisations, that broke the back of the Shah’s regime. It was, however, the workers’ general strike that broke it. In view of this, your international allies acknowledge that perhaps after the October revolution of 1917 in Russia, the biggest achievement of the working class on a world scale was made by you, the workers of Iran, and you have passed this on to others. Within a few weeks you organised the biggest workers’ councils and battered down the whole apparatus of the Shah’s repressive state. The capitalist government and state in Iran therefore know well that by arresting labour activists, flogging them, and intimidation and economic pressure on you, they cannot easily bring you to heel. Greetings to you!
You boycotted the presidential election 12 June 2009. For example, Bus workers before the election had this position: “Today, the workers and their families are encouraged to participate in the election. This has no meaning, because the workers have participated and experienced all elections and presidents even the reformist one (Khatami) for three decades, “(elections and labour organizations - the Union of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company).
Also, Iran Khodro (car assembly) with 30,000 workers wrote: “We the Iran Khodro workers do not participate in the coming election. We only participate in a democratic election which preserves the interest of workers. This election is not democratic…”. Your recognition of nature of election and the need to boycott the presidential election was correct. But you know well that the events after the elections took another turn. For example, Ashura demonstration last week (27 December 2009) was not called by reformist leaders, it was organised spontaneously by the youth. The youth forced the leaders to follow them into streets. You know full well that Mousavi cancelled the street rally on Monday 15 June 2009 and the youth, going against his view, came to the streets and forced him to come to the rally. These so-called leaders of the reformists are in the process of doing a deal at the top to maintain their own position. They have no intention of involving the broad masses in a real and democratic transformation. In other words, the spontaneous activities of millions of people, in spite of their conservative and colluding leaders, have begun. And these activities will not continue for a long time. In the absence of an experienced workers’ leadership, and the absence of specific slogans and proper organisation, the reformist leaders will ultimately extinguish these activities.
The workers therefore must have an active presence on the scene. You must grasp the leadership of the mass movement. The million strong masses need you. Your presence, participation and leadership can only be shown by organising widespread strikes in the factories. You are now in a position that, by co-ordinating with and in support of the recent mass movements, and by criticism of all the reformist representatives, you could resist Ahmadinejad’s government. Now is the time for you to come on the scene for achieving your own demands.
It is necessary to form clandestine strike committees for general co-ordination. By co-ordinating together these committees can organise the day and time of factory strikes, and stop work together in various parts of Iran and put forward workers’ demands. You have had very significant experiences. These experiences must be used. A few years ago there were the experiences of the Baresh factory in Esfahan and Kashmir factory, and last year the protests of the workers of the Haft Tapeh factory, Kurdistan textiles and Iran Khodro factories, and so on, all of these can be put to use.
The right to strike is your absolute right. This slogan can be put into effect until all your demands have been achieved. Trade union demands like: payment of backpay, pensions and so on. Democratic demands like: the release of all political prisoners, freedom of speech, assembly, press and the right to strike and to form independent labour organisations and so on. These demands can be combined with transitional demands like workers’ control, the sliding scale of wages in line with inflation and so on. If the government blocks these basic demands, you can occupy the factories and bring them under the control of the workers themselves and throw out the useless managers. Control over production and distribution can be implemented by the powerful hand of the workers themselves. The experience of the revolution against the royal despotism proved to the workers that within a few weeks, without any previous experience, they can form workers’ councils and bring about workers’ control. In the present crisis, when the capitalist government is split and a huge mass of people that is independent of the ruling establishment is in the streets every day, the honourable workers of Iran can quickly achieve their demands.
Your actions will show the ways and means of anti-government struggles to the youth. In the presence of a workers’ leadership, the youth will quickly break with the reformists and move towards more radical demands. Action by you, the workers, can today bring about a different future to the present movement. Your active presence in the organisation of a general strike with the aim of defending yourself and supporting the democratic rights of millions of Iranian people is the most important action that is on the Iranian workers’ agenda today.
Victory and strength to you!
1 January 2010
