Workers Solidarity Movement

This is the story of a dog, a dog from the streets that lives in one of the European PIGS. [The basket case economies of Europe have been grouped together neatly into this porcine gang – Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain.]  Our dog, the stray dog lives in Athens and for the last two years or more he has been appearing at every single protest that has been fought there.  As the World slipped into the tail spin spiral of a global recession, one dog was putting in the hours, pounding the pavements in protests, knowing which side he was on in the battles being fought.

In light of the tragic events of 27 April 2010, when a solidarity caravan of observers bound for the Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala (Oaxaca, Mexico) was subjected to a cowardly attack by paramilitaries linked to governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, resulting in the death of comrade Beatriz Alberta Cariño Trujillo and Finnish comrade Jyri Jaakkola, we, the undersigned organizations, declare:

On April 26, 2010, some twenty militants and international observers set off for San Juan Copala, a village of around 700 inhabitants located about 250 kilometers from the city of Oaxaca and belonging to the Triqui ethnic group who live in the Sierra Mixteca region. Arriving in Huajuapan de Leon, where the convoy spent the night, they distributed a text denouncing the paramilitary group UBISORT (Unidad de Bienstar Social de la Región Triqui, Unity of Social Wellbeing of the Triqui Region), which had maintained a state of siege against the village of San Juan Copala, controlling the comings and goings of its residents.

In this audio download from the third of the Rethinking Revolution sessions  Aileen O'Carroll draws on the stories and diaries of those working in IT company’s to talk about the secrets and contradictions of working in a global industry. The myth is that IT workers happily work a 60 hour week but like workplaces of a previous era, there is a struggle over the nature of work and the length of working time within our lives. The left tends to focus on the formal visible struggles conducted through trade unions. What can this other level of often individualised struggle teach us in the fight for a new world?

The Greek working class is angry, and with good reason, with the attempt to load responsibility for the bankruptcy of the Greek State onto their shoulders. We maintain instead that it is the international financial institutions and the European Union who are responsible. The financial institutions have plunged the world, and Greece in particular, into an economic and social crisis of historical proportions, forcing countries into debt, and now these same institutions are complaining that certain States risk not being able to repay their debts. We denounce this hypocrisy and say that even if Greece - and all the other countries - can repay the debt, they should not do so: it is up to those responsible for the crisis - the financial institutions, not the - to pay for the damage caused by this crisis. The Greek workers are right to refuse to pay back their country's debt. We refuse to pay for their crisis!

Friday April 30th Irish activists joined the weekly protests of the Palestinian community of Bil'in against the apartheid wall.  The focus this week was on the investment by the Irish Cement Roadstone Holdings company in an Israeli company that has a large portion of the contracts for building the wall.  As usual the military attacked the protesters with tear gas and one Irish activist filmed the video below of this attack and his subsequent arrest.

 The failure of Obama to live up to expectations can be disempowering to many on the Left, even those who understand the limitations of the current political system and how it truly serves only a wealthy elite. We must fight against this tendency with all of our might. Now more than ever, those who are committed to a just society must put forth a viable alternative to the present system, both through words and deeds.Obama’s charisma and oratory was all too achingly reminiscent of fallen civil rights leaders, playing on people’s longing for a time free of today’s suffocating cynicism, when change seemed not only possible, but tangible.

• In 2009, “11% of employers visited by welfare officials were not compliant with their PRSI commitments”, according to the Department of Social and Family Affairs.  In plain English this means that they never paid PRSI to the government, as they are obliged to do. When workers steal, it’s ‘theft’, when bosses do the same, it’s ‘non-compliance’.


Marcel Szary, an activist of Workers' Initiative Trade Union in Cegielski factory, died . He was  one of the founders of the union. It is a huge loss for the syndicalist and workers' movement in Poland.

On Monday November 9th last year, news of the impending execution of Ehsan Fattahian, a 28-year-old Iranian political activist of Kurdish origins, began reaching the outside world. Human rights groups, caught unaware, began a frantic effort to halt the execution. In less than 24 hours, 15,000 people had signed an online petition addressing UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon, asking him to intervene.