FE Lecturers Strike

Workers' Daily Internet Edition : Article Index :

FE Lecturers Strike

Local Government Workers’ National Ballot

French Protests against Bush’s Visit

Israeli Army Raids into Bethlehem

Launch of African Union to Go Ahead

FARC Offers Peace Talks with New Government

University and college lecturers’ union NATFHE is to go ahead with two days of strikes today and tomorrow in protest at the 1.5 per cent pay offer made to lecturers in the further education sector. NATFHE is campaigning for pay parity between colleges and schools staff.

Chris Wilson, chair of the further education committee at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: "We wish our NATFHE colleagues well in their two days of industrial action. Both the Association of Colleges and the government need to take notice of the growing anger amongst practitioners within the sector. ATL sincerely hopes that NATFHE's action will encourage the AoC to make a realistic pay offer. However, if they don't then the prospect of further action involving a wider number of FE unions becomes a real possibility."

WDIE voices its support for the lecturers’ actions in support of their pay claim. The difficulties faced by the lecturers are immense and need urgently addressing, as part of safeguarding the whole future of further education.

Public service union UNISON on Monday wrote to local government employers giving notice of its intention to ballot members over industrial action in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The union represents more than 850,000 local government workers and is seeking a pay rise of six per cent. Employers have made an offer of three per cent, which UNISON members overwhelmingly rejected. A ballot will go ahead on June 10 and last for four weeks, ending on July 5. If there is a "yes" vote, industrial action will commence on July 17.

Heather Wakefield, national secretary for local government at UNISON, said: "This is the last chance for the employers to improve their offer and prevent national industrial action. Local government workers have been offered less than any other group within the public sector this year, yet they provide the services that hold local communities together. Unison can't help but notice that while the employers are resisting our claim for a pay rise, Notts County Council is planning to give its senior managers an immediate five per cent pay increase."

Local government workers in London have been taking militant action in support of their claim for an increased London weighting and are increasingly discussing how to oppose the anti-social offensive and the necessity to take a stand in defence of their rights and interests.

Thousands of placard-carrying demonstrators marched through Paris on Sunday to protest against a visit by US President George W. Bush and to demand an end to his "war on terrorism".

France was the third stop in Bush's week-long trip to Europe. Sunday's protest march drew thousands of people into Paris. Many carried banners accusing the US of targeting civilians in the war. Others burned the US flag as they shouted, "Bush, you are the terrorist." The US president encountered similar protests during an earlier stop in Germany over his threat to expand the war on terrorism to Iraq, Iran and North Korea, countries he once called the "axis of evil".

Palestinian news agency Wafa reported on May 27 that since Saturday night the cities of Bethlehem, Qalqilya, and Tulkarem on the West Bank again came under Israeli incursions involving mainly tanks and infantry deployment. Tanks, jeeps and armoured personnel carriers on Saturday night poured into and spread throughout Bethlehem for the first time since the Israeli thirty-nine day siege of the Church of Nativity ended two weeks ago. Troops declared the area a "closed military zone" and ordered residents off the streets to implement a new curfew. Gunfire from artillery and Apache gun-ships was fired amid two explosions, according to reports.

President Yasser Arafat said that there is no doubt that the Israeli operation "Defensive Shield" is still ongoing as Israeli high ranked military officers and ministers said, and as the actual conduct on the ground, like in Qalqilya, Bethlehem, and other places in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, indicates.

An official Palestinian spokesman stated that the Israeli occupation forces are still imposing a tight and brutal siege on the Palestinian populated places, cruelly isolating the cities, towns, villages and refugee camps, preventing the citizens’ mobility between these places and paralysing economic, social and educational activities. They are also blocking the entrances of the populated places using huge concrete blocks, and proceeding with their criminal acts of demolishing many houses.

South African President Thabo Mbeki has said that the launch of the African Union (AU) will go ahead as planned, it was reported on Monday. "The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) will hold its last Summit meeting in Durban (South Africa) in July this year. It will be replaced by the African Union," he said.

Earlier this month, reports suggested the OAU would postpone the launch by a year. The AU is scheduled to replace the 39-year old OAU in July. Thabo Mbeki's statement praised the OAU's stance in opposing apartheid, saying that "during the nearly four decades of its existence, the critics of the OAU regularly predicted its collapse". Now, he said, it is time to hand over the reins to a new generation.

"They (the OAU) laid the strong foundations that make it possible for the present generations of Africans to take the next critical steps towards the political and economic integration of Africa," Thabo Mbeki said.

Although the African Union will be launched in Durban in July, the technical transition will take another year. "There is no postponement of the launching of the transformation," OAU secretary-general Amara Essey said in a meeting with the UN new service, IRIN. "There is a difference between the launching of the Union and the transitional period that will make operational the African Union," he added.

A point of contention is how far the AU should become a global bloc after the fashion of the EU, or whether it should champion national sovereignty and non-interference in the affairs of nations. In this respect, it mirrors the contention over the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), which Tony Blair and the G8 countries see as a "Marshall Plan for Africa", but which has the potential to end the African continent’s marginalisation from world affairs, and build an alternative to the western powers notions of "good governance" which they are seeking to impose on Africa.

Prior to the election of Alvaro Uribe as president of Colombia in the first round of the elections on Sunday, May 26, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) expressed its willingness to return to the negotiating table with the new government.

Alvaro Uribe Velez, who ran as an independent candidate, received 53 percent of the vote, far ahead of his nearest challenger, the Liberal Party's Horacio Serpa, who polled 32 percent. By passing the 50 percent mark, he averted the need for in a second round of voting. He will be inaugurated as president on August 7.

Alvaro Uribe, who was supported by the paramilitary AUC, told local media that the new peace proposal "is not up for discussion". Uribe, who was the favourite choice of Colombia’s generals, is the son of a prominent Mafia boss and his campaign manager Pedro Moreno Villa was reported to be Colombia's leading importer of the chemicals necessary for the manufacture of cocaine. In a congratulatory message late on Sunday, the AUC hailed Uribe’s victory as "a slap in the face of leftist guerrillas".

In his victory speech he said of the insurgents: "They lost many opportunities for peace. They will always have them," he said, adding that he would seek international mediation. The violent groups must know that we are democrats ratifying an offer: let us build democratic security so that they can consider the idea of giving up their rifles, of doing politics without weapons and without being killed."

But he said that negotiations would only be held if the insurgents committed themselves to a cease-fire and ended so-called acts of terrorism – a condition rejected in the past by FARC.

Shortly before Uribe was officially declared the winner, US Ambassador Anne Patterson effectively congratulated him. "I believe Colombians wanted to express their rejection of violence in this election," she told him at his campaign headquarters. "We will have very strong ties as we have had with the current government of President Andres Pastrana," Anne Patterson told Uribe. "We have a very strong common agenda," the ambassador said.

A communiqué from FARC that was received by news agency ANNCOL on May 23 had said: "The FARC reiterates to the Colombian people and to the new president, whoever he is, its profound convictions in the urgent necessity to reach a political solution to the armed social conflict from which the family of Colombians suffers."

FARC also proposed the "demilitarisation of the provinces of Putumayo and Caqueta" in the southern part of the country, said the communiqué that was signed by the FARC central command.

The FARC have also called on the future government to annul the official labels of "terrorist" and "narco-terrorist" that the Pastrana administration gave the organisation after the government unilaterally abandoned peace talks on February 22.

Furthermore the FARC asked the government "for a clear policy to eliminate the paramilitaries who are and financed fundamentally by drug sales and trafficking, the CIA and some industrialists, as their own leader has admitted."

"There must be punishment and removal of military, police and other government officials implicated in this criminal activity as well as punishment for the promoters, supporters and financiers" of the paramilitaries, FARC said.