Fight the cuts! Unions must call major demo

A massive 20,000 public sector jobs in Northern Ireland face the axe as a result of the cuts contained in the Tory/Lib Dem “emergency” Budget announced in May, according to economists.

The impact of these cuts will be devastating for the North, given the dependence of the economy on the public sector. The public sector accounts for 60% of the economy. Hundreds of thousands of private sector jobs rely on the public sector via contracts and the spending power of public sector workers.

South Africa: 5,000 sacked miners on strike

On Saturday 26 June I travelled with two comrades from South Africa's Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM, the Socialist Party's counterpart in South Africa) to a mass meeting they had called in Rustenburg, about two hours north west of Johannesburg.

The city of Rustenburg is home to 400,000 people and is best known to Australians as the host of several World Cup games at the Royal Bafokeng Stadium.

China: Young workers lead the fightback

The host of strikes across many regions of China in recent weeks and months have served to once again highlight the brutal working conditions in the country. The “Sweatshop of the World” has seen a litany of strikes take place within the last months in many multinational corporation factories, many of which have been instigated by young migrant workers.

Build united action to stop the cuts

Across Europe governments are pursuing the same policy of savage cuts

Government departments to prepare for cuts of 40%... civil servants’ redundancy terms to be ripped up…housing benefit to be cut… plans to build new schools and hospitals to be scrapped… and so the list goes on. Every day this millionaires’ government announces another way it is going to heap misery on the population as it sets out to destroy our public services. Cuts on this scale have not been seen since the 1920s.

Workers & poor hit hardest by blitzkreig Budget

The new Conservative-Liberal Democrat government in Britain has launched the most savage programme of cuts of any government in decades.

In his emergency budget speech on 22 June Chancellor George Osborne described the cuts he was delivering as "ensuring everyone, across the income scale makes a contribution to helping our country reduce its debts". This claim is a lie. The cuts fall hardest on the poorest and the young, and deliberately so. The ideology of this government dictates that the working class should pay for the crisis of the system.

From stimulus to austerity at dizzying speed

The G20 meeting in Toronto of the leaders of the main capitalist governments of the world demonstrated a complete incapacity to solve the huge problems that confront us, particularly those hardest-hit - the poor and the working class - by the economic crisis.

This was supposed to be the economic summit that would 'celebrate' the so-called economic stimulus packages introduced by capitalist governments throughout the world, which 'saved' capitalism from a 'depression'.

Thousands of jobcentre workers threatened with dole

Jobcentre workers are reeling this week. Having been told how valuable they have been in getting the country out of recession, this week they were told that 4,000 of them are to be sacked within the next few months. This is even though unemployment has started to rise again and, with over 2.5 million unemployed, the recovery is still a long way off.

The previous Chancellor, Alistair Darling was forced to acknowledge in his budget in March that jobcentre workers had helped to reduce the budget deficit by a whopping additional £4 billion by getting people back into work quicker than anticipated. Since then the new Con-Dem government has announced these savage job cuts aiming to save £30 million.