Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Spanish and South African strikers show the way to fight Fight back now for jobs and public services!

Socialist Resistance no46  |  page 24

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

socialist www.socialistresistance.net

A JER

DELPHI TENS of thousands of South African public sector workers have been on strike for over two weeks as this issue of Socialist Resistance goes to press.

They have defied police violence and held solid in their fight for a 12% pay increase, having rejected an insulting 6% offer from a government that is paying its ministers a thumping 57% extra (see page 13). NO

In SPAIN, thousands of car workers in Cadiz have also taken swift and solid action to defend their threatened plant, with strikes and demonstrations that have drawn solidarity from workers in many other industries (see page 12).

What a contrast with our feeble unions! Faced with a brutal wage cut for 1.3 million NHS staff, who have been offered a below-inflation 2.5% pay rise,

ARE SE CIERRA

and forget.

No. 46 Summer 2007 and then seen even that cut further in value by Gordon Brown's insistence it be paid in stages, UNISON the largest public sector union voted unanimously to ... endorse Brown for Labour leader, and has spent months vaguely threatening to ballot for some form of industrial action, hoping the membership will get bored

Meanwhile some health campaigners, defenders of council housing and the courageous school meals campaign in Waltham Forest (see page 9) have shown that broad suppost can be built, and attacks can be beaten back.

The basic lesson that has to be learned is that without a fight, there can be no victory, and without some victories the unions become weaker and more prone to fresh attack. Fight back now!