Harry's Place

Back in 2006, I joined a demonstration in front of the Iranian Interests Section in Washington to call for justice for striking bus workers in Tehran and the release of imprisoned union leaders.
Those union leaders included Mansour Osanloo, head of the Tehran bus workers’ union, whose cause has garnered support from trade unionists and human [...]

This is a cross-post from Howie’s Corner
The local elections saw the rise of the UK Independence Party who gained 139 seats taking their total of County Councillors to 149. UKIP also did reasonably well in the South Shields by-election coming second with 5,988 votes, well ahead of the Conservative Party with the Liberal Democrats pushed [...]

May Day’s approaching, and here is a round up of some recent news of relevance to workers’ rights around the world and in the UK.
Beginning with the catastrophe in Dhaka, Norman Geras has written an excellent post which takes issue with those who invoke market forces in order to assert that it is natural and [...]

This is a cross-post from Howie’s Corner
The annual elections for the National Executive Committee of the PCS union have begun and members should be receiving their ballot papers over the next few days. It is important that every member takes the opportunity to have their say in this election, especially since so few actually do [...]

Another reminder that there’s something rotten in Ireland when it comes to Israel:
The Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) has become the first teaching union in Europe to endorse the call for an academic boycott of Israel as part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
A motion backing a boycott was unanimously passed at the [...]

This is a cross-post from Howie’s Corner
Following the recent one and a half days strikes in the civil service my PCS Branch Executive Committee met and discussed the general situation. Turnout had been low and enthusiasm virtually non-existent. There was a general feeling that this dispute was going nowhere and it was certainly clear that [...]

This is a cross-post from Howie’s Corner
The BBC reported that Len McCluskey, General Secretary of the largest union Unite has called for a “general strike” against “austerity measures”. The Unite union has submitted a document to the TUC General Council meeting due to be held later this month. They claim that:
“would be a landmark in our movement’s recovery [...]

On the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Labour MP Dave Anderson writes:
Ten years ago, I was utterly opposed to the invasion of Iraq. At the time I was President of Unison and sat on the TUC general council, so like a lot of others in the labour movement I did my bit to [...]

Steve Hedley’s antics have been brought to the attention of Harry’s Place readers in the past.  So warped are Hedley’s views that he appears to think the Jews sans Frontieres website is ‘Zionist’. Back in 2011 he clashed with Richard Millett at a SOAS BDS event. Following a tirade against Israel, Richard asked Hedley if he ‘felt better’. He [...]

The report that Amazon in Germany hired a security firm with possible neo-Nazi connections is less troubling than what the firm did.
After the story broke on German television, Amazon fired the security firm, Hensel European Security Services (HESS), which was hired to police the 5,000 temporary foreign workers at Amazon’s German warehouses. (Amazon calls its [...]