International Socialist Alternative would like to extend May Day greetings to all socialists, trade unionists and fighters against oppression and capitalism around the world. After over a year of devastating global crisis in which the activity of the labour movement was restricted in many countries by the Covid-19 pandemic, 1 […]
The new terms affect all the 20,000-strong workforce. But the 7,000+ field service engineers are the most impacted. It will mean them working more hours for no extra pay and that they will not be paid a higher rate to work weekends and public holidays.
On the anniversary of the first lockdown in the UK, Boris Johnson proclaimed to Tory backbenchers, “The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed, my friends.” The real result of the Tories’ callous, pro-capitalist policies during the Covid pandemic has been almost 130,000 lost lives, one of the highest per-capita death rates in the world. They were reluctant to lock down and rushed to re-open the economy, all because they wanted to minimise disruption to profit.
On a number of occasions, as various milestones were passed, the Debenhams shop stewards have said that they did not set out to break records. However, to sustain a struggle for a year in the freakish circumstances of a pandemic and a lockdown is remarkable and further seals the place of the Debenhams workers in Irish labour history.
