Lead story

Vote leave!

by Daphne Liddle

THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) referendum is now barely two weeks away and the outlandish claims and fear-mongering by the right-wing on both sides are becoming a bad joke that the electorate is tiring of.

The campaign leaders are focussing mainly on one issue — immigration — and appealing to the lowest possible xenophobia and racism.

The bigger issue is the underlying irreconcilable conflict between the interests of capital and that of the workers of Europe, and the EU is a cage built by the capitalist ruling classes of all the EU states including Britain.

It is a cage designed to trap the workers into an irreversible race to privatise every aspect of our lives. To them we are not humans but entities that can be squeezed to make endless profit from, both as workers and consumers.

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Vote leave!

Nurses march to defend bursaries

by New Worker correspondent

MORE than 1,000 nurses, NHS campaigners and trade unionists marched through London last Saturday from St Thomas’s Hospital, along the Thames South Bank to Waterloo Bridge, across the river and through the Strand to Whitehall and the headquarters of the Department of Health, to protest at Tory plans to do away with student nurse bursaries.

Student nurses, unlike other students, work on hospital wards doing strenuous and difficult work looking after patients whilst they are learning. And for this they are paid a bursary by the Government to cover their living costs and their education.

When they graduate they get a wage but it still does not put them in the top flight of earners that other students aspire to.

Now the Government wants to treat student nurses like other students and do away with the bursaries, forcing student nurses to take out huge student loans to cover the costs of their education. Effectively the student nurses will be paying in order to be able to work — instead of wages they will be given a mountain of debt at the start of their career. This plan is due to be implemented by August 2017.

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Nurses march to defend bursaries

Editorial

The balance of power

TWO STORIES in this week’s paper highlight extreme opposites in the balance of power in the major contradiction in human society in our era — the battle between capital and labour, between bosses and workers.

The first is the parliamentary inquiry into affairs at Sports Direct, which has thrown up a list of horrors in terms of pay and conditions at the company’s Derbyshire warehouse where workers who were seriously ill were forcing themselves into work for fear of losing their jobs.

The scandals only came to light when the local ambulance service complained that there had been 110 ambulance call-outs to this warehouse in just over three years. Workers suffered chest pains, stroke, injury, and five births or miscarriages — including one woman delivering her baby in the toilet. This led to an investigation by the Guardian and then by the union Unite.

But this was the first involvement of any union in a situation where workers were utterly at the mercy of their boss. And it would have been incredibly difficult for a union to organise there. The vast majority of workers are from agencies — and different agencies. So although the distribution depot had one boss there were umpteen petty sub-employers to deal with.

The workers were mostly on zero-hours contracts and desperate to ensure they got in enough hours every week to ensure a living wage. They faced a regime that automatically sacked workers guilty of six misdemeanours — which included taking too long in the toilets, talking, being late and not working fast enough.

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The balance of power