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Newsletter Issue 1 Jan - Feb 2001 |
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CAMPAIGNS Global Women's Strike 2001 8 March 2001- International Women’s Day - Women are invited to Stop the World and Change it! by joining the second Global Women's Strike and stopping for the day, or for an hour - at home, at waged jobs, in your community, college and school - with your mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, partners . . . The Global Women’s Strike - against no pay, low pay and overwork - is women’s answer to the global market, where the production of things is prioritised over caring for people. The campaign wants to see a total change of social and economic priorities for women and therefore for men, and an end to the gross discrepancy between the $800bn a year spent on military budgets world-wide and the $80bn a year which would provide the essentials of life for all. Strike 2001 demands include: payment for all caring work; pay equity globally; paid maternity leave and breastfeeding breaks; abolition of ‘Third World’ debt; and protection and asylum from all violence and persecution. Men – don’t feel excluded – contact Payday, the men’s network organising support for the Strike. http://womenstrike8m@server101.com, email womenstrike8m@server101.com; Tel: 020 7482 2496; Fax 020 7209 4761. International Wages for Housework Campaign, Crossroads Women's Centre, 230A Kentish Town Road, London NW5 2AB DETR Occupied In an effort to remind the government of why the last roads program got dropped, and protesting against the new one, 25 activists shut down DETR headquarters on 1st December, occupying the offices of Environment Minister Michael Meacher, and Transport Minister Gus MacDonald. Once inside they telephoned Blair, Prescott, the Whips office and many others on internal phone lists, saying, ‘Hello, we're occupying the DETR. Several years ago the SACTRA report, which was endorsed by Government, stated, more roads, more congestion, hence more CO2! The Government is planning 139 new roads, we just thought we'd say, we've noticed, and we haven't gone away!’ Outside, others raised banners and locked on to gates, while the building was evacuated. The proposed road schemes include the controversial Hastings bypass, set to cut through wetlands to the north of the town and, according to one estimate, actually likely to damage employment in this already depressed area. Other schemes include bypasses, ‘relief roads’ (who’s relieved?) widening and extensions across the country. Rising Tide for Climate Justice  Following the high-profile actions during the COP 6 climate conference in The Hague last November (check out http://climate.indymedia.org/ or send an SAE to PO Box 9656 London N4 4JY for a round-up of what happened) campaigners are determined to take on the issues in the UK. A meeting in Manchester in January sowed the seeds for future actions aimed at targetting specific climate-damaging activities such as the oil industry and air travel as well as raising public awareness of the issues. A group may also be going to COP 61/2 in Bonn in May, where the ministerial negotiations are likely to continue, no doubt hampered by arch-climate-sceptic George Bush’s new US administration. Demonstrations against the US head-in-the-sand approach to climate chaos are continuing outside the US embassy (Grovesnor Square, London) every Saturday.Contact: info@risingtide.org.uk, PO Box 9656 London N4 4JY. There will shortly be a network point for UK climate campaigners - provisional email: weathersave@netscapeonline.co.uk 16b Cherwell St, Oxford OX4 1BG Construction Safety Campaign With deaths on sites up dramatically in 2000, construction workers are fighting back against lax enforcement and an industry culture which puts profits and deadlines ahead of workers’ life and health. February 27th will see a day of action by the campaign aimed at halting the rise in site accidents. The campaign is calling for moves to put control of safety in the hands of the workers, with worker- and union-appointed safety reps having full access to sites and the right for workers to stop the job until an unsafe site is made secure. They are also calling for fairer employment practices and better support for accident victims and their families. The Health and Safety Executive admits that 70% of all accidents at work could have been prevented if employers had carried out their responsibilities, yet it brings prosecutions in only a tiny minority of cases. Only 20% of serious accidents are even investigated. The HSE’s own figures published a few years ago showed that, statistically, a person working in the construction industry for the majority of their working life would suffer a major accident from work. Construction Safety Campaign PO Box 23844 London SE15 3WR Tel. 07747795954 Ilisu Dam Campaign Update ‘... it does not take much intelligence to see Ilisu does not meet the guidelines for new dams.’ - Kader Asmal, Chair of the World Commission on Dams Let’s just hope Stephen Byers is listening… The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry is due to decide in the next couple of months whether or not to provide $200 million support to Balfour Beatty to build the Ilisu Dam in Southeast Turkey. If he gives the go-ahead, his decision will fly in the face of international standards on human rights, social and environmental impacts – including the new guidelines published in November 2000 by the World Commission on Dams (WCD). The WCD, comprising industrialists, activists, governments and financial institutions, spent the last two years producing the most comprehensive global assessment ever on the impacts of large dams. The report ends by recommending new guidelines for future dam-building – and the Ilisu Dam project would break each and every one of them. Campaigners point out that the dam would affect up to 78,000 people – the majority of them Kurds – in an area where human rights abuses are widespread; ruin the rich archaeological heritage of the area; and threaten relations between Turkey and its downstream neighbours, Syria and Iraq, raising the spectre of ‘water wars’. The Ilisu Dam Campaign is urging people to write to Stephen Byers, drawing his attention to the WCD guidelines and demanding he withdraw support for this disastrous project. The Right Hon. Stephen Byers, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Department of Trade and Industry, 1 Victoria Street, London SW1H 0ET The Campaign will be planning actions and events in the run-up to the elections, to ensure that Ilisu remains New Labour’s number one foreign policy nightmare. To find out more please contact: Ilisu Dam Campaign, Box 210, 266 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 7DL; email: ilisu@gn.apc.org; web: www.ilisu.org.uk; tel: 01865 200550. People’s Caravan for Land and Food Without Poisons Across India, Bangladesh and the Philippines, the growing peasants movement took to the roads in November to call for a return to sustainable agriculture, local food security and an end to pesticide- and GM-peddling multinationals’ control of agriculture. Organised by Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP); the Tamil Nadu Women's Forum (TNWF) Kilusang Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (KMP) (Peasant Movement of the Philippines); and other groups from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan and Korea, the People’s Caravan for Land and Food Without Poisons made a seventeen-day trek across India, Bangladesh and the Philippines. They held teach-ins, seed- and food-sharing events, public meetings and mass rallies at which farmers from across the region compared their experiences of globalised agribusiness and their experiments in creating sustainable, equitable systems without excessive chemical use. One such was Mr Namalvar, a farmer from Tamil Nadu in India ‘We have already done what has been said to be impossible, to grow food without poisons. We have moved away from hazardous pesticides and fertilisers and made use of available resources to grow our food. I am confident that the whole of Tamil Nadu can produce crops sustainably and profitably. Our aim is to make the villages pesticide free by the end of 2001.’ Other events included picketing of Monsanto’s offices in Manila and Mindanao. The caravan was organised in response to the WTO’s program of trade and investment liberalisation which has opened the weak national economies of the South to global pressures and in the process deprived them of land, water and even threatened the survival of self-sufficient national agriculture. The so-called ‘green revolution’ duped farmers into abandoning traditional agriculture systems and indebting themselves in order to buy ‘high yield’ seeds and the accompanying agrochemicals. Yields rose for a time, but the chemicals are poisoning the land and the people who work on it, and the ‘modern’ systems favour large farms over small, leading to concentration of ownership and reducing many small farmers to landless labourers. Add to this the new threat posed by GM crops, and it is clear that the farmers of the South are fighting for their very survival. However, Sarojeni Rengam, Executive Director of PAN AP - coordinators of the People's Caravan - says the People's Caravan is also about hope. ‘Farmers, landless peasants and farm workers from different countries along with consumers and anti-pesticide and genetic engineering advocates will come together in solidarity to challenge the effects of globalisation on their lives,’ commented Rengam. ‘We will celebrate our local initiatives towards more sustainable healthy agriculture that embrace our local/ traditional knowledge and practices that can really feed our people and free them from dependence on hazardous pesticides and other dangerous agricultural inputs and technologies.’ www.poptel.org.uk/panap/ caravan/htm Update… Cremate Monsanto is taking off again in India – watch this space… Victory for Simon Jones! On 19th December 2000 The Director of Public Prosecutions announced that Euromin and its general manager Richard Martell are to be prosecuted for the manslaughter of Simon Jones. In April 1998, on his first day at work for Euromin, Simon was sent to work inside the hold of a ship, without training or protective clothing, and was dead within two hours, his headcrushed by a crane grab. A two year direct action campaign by Simon’s friends and family, involving shutting down Euromin's dock, occupying the employment agency that sent Simon to work there, occupying the Department of Trade and Industry, shutting down Southwark Bridge outside the Health and Safety Executive, winning a judicial review challenging the Crown Prosecution Service's decision not to prosecute and, this September, picketing the CPS's headquarters in London over its failure to prosecute, was needed to bring this case to court. People like Simon die at work all the time – without the commitment of his friends, would his death have ever been punished? www.simonjones.org.uk Who benefits? Three Unison shop stewards working in the Housing Benefit department at Newham, who were suspended for whistleblowing in September last year have now been sacked. The three were suspended after contacting the press with suspicions that the private company running the department, Deloitte Touche subsidiary CSL, had ‘closed’ , i.e. discarded, around 6,000 unread benefit claims and appeals in order to improve its performance figures. They had also complained of ‘draconian’ working conditions, staff cuts severely damaging the speed of claim processing and unreasonable target-setting. There can be no doubt that CSl’s performance is atrocious. For example, DSS regulations state that HB claims should be processed in 14 days; in the year to April 2000, Newham’s next-door council Camden, which runs its HB in-house, managed an average of 20 days; CSL in Newham’s average was a massive 169 days, or five-and-a-half months. Meanwhile, the cost of processing a claim rose by 22.5% in the first year of CSL’s reign. CSL, obviously, want to cover this up, especially as they are expected to pursue privatisation contracts with other councils. This may explain why, despite a supportive walkout by 20 of their colleagues on 20th October, the three stewards were sacked in November and are now awaiting an industrial tribunal. They can be contacted at HBSupport PO Box1681, London, N8 7LE. Email: housingbenefit@hotmail.com CSL and their parent company Deloitte Touche have offices around the country and CSL currently has HB contracts in Southwark, Croydon and Sheffield as well as Newham – contact the above address for further details and support action ideas. Fourth Battle? Anyone who was involved in the campaign against the Newbury bypass will remember the revolting spectacle of local MP David Rendel smugly assuring protesters that the swathe of open countryside between the town and the new road would be preserved from infill development. Empty promises, it seems. Vodafone’s new head office is already going up on greenfield land inside the bypass, and developers Sutton Estates are now pushing for planning permission for 750 houses on part of the Civil War battlefield. According to their glossy brochure, this will be a sustainable housing development which reduces reliance on the car. However, according to the very small print on the bottom of the plan in the same brochure, well over half the houses will have double garages…you work it out. WEST PAPUA CAMPAIGN Tension is rising in Indonesian-controlled West Papua (Irian Jaya) as the Indonesian military strengthens the crackdown against the independence movement. Five leaders of the independence movement have been in jail since November on treason charges, and there have been shootings and mass arrests at independence demonstrations in various parts of the country. Papuan campaigners in the Netherlands have got hold of a list of 319 Indonesian government officials’ email addresses, now available on [insert URL] Cut and paste the list into your email, then let them know what you think about what’s going on in West Papua. Please keep mails polite – the recipients may not actually know what is happening in Papua, given the Indonesian media’s general willingness to toe the government line. More info: Foundation for the Papuan Peoples – pavo@planet.nl – research and campaign group that came up with the list. www.westpapua.com – general information and news list www.eco-action.org/opm – UK-based support group Paper info etc: TAPOL, The Indonesia Human Rights Campaign, 111 Northwood Road, Thornton Heath, Surrey CR7 8HW, UK, tel: +44 020 8771 2904, fax: +44 020 8653 0322. New from Corporate Watch – ‘Control Freaks’ – a shocking expose on Cargill and ADM, two little-known companies which hold a virtual monopoly on the global grain trade and which are providing a major obstruction to a GM-free world by manipulating the supply of non-GM grain. £1 inc. p&p * Back issues of Corporate Watch Magazine are still available: Issue 12 (Water, Oct 2000) £3, Issue 11 (Climate Change, July 2000) £2.50, Issue 10 (Planning and development, April 2000) £2.50, earlier issues £2, Issues 2 and 4 are now out of print. |
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