National News
Outsourcing battles
by New Worker correspondent
OUTSOURCING has helpfully been described by the website Investopedia as: “The business practice of hiring a party outside a company to perform services or create goods that were traditionally performed in-house by the company’s own employees and staff. Outsourcing is a practice usually undertaken by companies as a cost-cutting measure.”
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On other fronts
by New Worker correspondent
LAST MONTH Sir Keir Starmer, who imagines he is Prime Minister in waiting, announced that he has abandoned yet again one of the many promises he made when campaigning for the Labour Party leadership.
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Security
by New Worker correspondent
Outsourcing was one of the issues exercising the security guards employed by Bidvest Noonan belonging to the small street union the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) at University College London (UCL), who joined in the massive day of strike action on Wednesday 1st February.
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Merseyside
by New Worker correspondent
It is to be hoped that the guards soon follow in the same footsteps of the 670 caterers, cleaners, porters, caterers and other domestic services at the Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust who will be brought back in-house on 1st April this year, when existing contracts end.
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And in London…
by New Worker correspondent
UNISON also claims victory in one of the north London borough of Barnet, which for two decades was held up as model of economical outsourcing by the Tory controlled council, who outsourced just about anything that was not nailed down.
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Scottish Political News
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
ON MONDAY First Minister Nicola Sturgeon published her tax returns since 2015 on the SNP’s website. The contents are remarkably unrevealing, and as expected they demonstrate that she has only her Holyrood salaries as MSP and First Minister to scrape by on, and that she has saved a great deal of that in a pension fund. Despite being First Minister for nearly nine years, she was in such a hurry to get the information publicised that her bank account details were briefly visible before being taken down and replaced with redacted versions.
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International News
Balloon hysteria: the product of a broken system
by James Smiths
OVER THE last few days US politicians and the media have been foaming at the mouth at what they called a “Chinese spy balloon”. The balloon, used for scientific metrological purposes, had passed over US airspace and was ultimately shot down on President Biden’s orders off the coast of South Carolina, despite the administration having previously stressed there was no need to do so.
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American dream or American nightmare?
by Xin Ping
IT IS NOT a good time, perhaps, for scientists not born American to be famous in the country they now call home. Those of Chinese origin have learned it the hard way.
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A sign of capitalist decline: tech workers hit hard
by Otis Grotewohl
IN A VULGAR display of capitalist greed, indicative of the system’s state of decay, high-tech companies have laid off more than 58,000 workers since the start of the new year. These figures include the latest announcements from Google parent company Alphabet to slash 12,000 jobs and Microsoft’s recent 10,000-strong reduction.
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Dublin protesters say No to War!
by Theo Russell
IRISH campaigners stood by the people of the Donbas last Saturday in a demonstration outside the British embassy in Dublin to protest Britain’s role in Ukraine.
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Cash no longer king in Vietnam
by Seán Nolan
AS DIGITAL payment methods surge in popularity, expats in Việtnam are not alone in embracing the change to cashless transactions.
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A double war crime
Workers World (USA)
PENTAGON strategists face a challenge delivering US state-of-the-art weapons to the Kiev puppet army in time for them to prolong the proxy US/NATO war with Russia. One top general announced an alternate source of killing machines.
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Cuba’s mission at the G77
by Melissa King
AS THE new president of the Group of 77 plus China, for the first time in its history, Cuba’s objective is unity and co-operation among the nations of the South.
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The calm of Blinken
by Roberto Morejón
FLAUNTING his supposed conciliatory role in the Middle East, the US foreign minister, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, visited the occupied West Bank and Israel last week to call for calm, without the slightest accusation to Washington’s main gendarme in the region for the terror unleashed.
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Features
France and the dilemma of electoral politics
by Greg Godels
FRENCH WORKERS currently live nearly two years longer than their counterparts in member states in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), composed of roughly the world’s most advanced capitalist countries. Furthermore, they retire with full benefits, on average, nearly three years earlier than their counterparts in the OECD.
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Imperialism today the real objective of the sanctions regime against Russia
by Michael Rotenshtern - Union of Political Refugees and Political Prisoners of Ukraine
SANCTIONS against the Russian Federation have already had a rather long history of their development.
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