Support the Rawmarsh Drivers!

Below is an article from the Socialist Party website by Alistair Tice covering the latest in the Stagecoach bus driver pay dispute. The drivers will be on strike again on Friday 10th February so if at all possible please don't use Stagecoach buses on Friday as they will be driven by strike-breakers! 

Stagecoach - "Driving Standards Higher" and "Attractive Pay Rates"!

Stagecoach South Yorkshire – Strike Day 11 – management getting desperate!

It was -15C overnight. Pickets arrive at Rawmarsh (Rotherham) depot at 4-30am. Water has been poured over the footpath where the strikers assemble making it into a skating ring. How vindictive and dangerous is that? Just shows how desperate Stagecoach bosses are getting.

Over 300 busdrivers in Barnsley and Rotherham, members of Unite, are now on their 11^th day of strike action for decent pay. Their £9/hour claim has been met but they are sticking out for back-pay from last year and will not accept a pay freeze for the next year.

Stagecoach are doing everything to try to break this strike. Since November, they have bussed in management and scabs from around the country. Now they are advertising for scabs in the Barnsley JobCentre: £500/week, free accommodation, free bar and bonus! We’ve contacted the DWP union the PCS to try to get this withdrawn.

Stagecoach have cut their fares to only £1 and can run no services after 6pm. They are losing £millions to try to break the union. But boosted by a big solidarity march in Barnsley last Saturday, the strikers are determined to win. They are on strike again on Friday and have named another 4 strike days in March.

Messages of support should be emailed to Barnsley Unite branch secretary Tony Rushforth at:

a-rushforth@sky.com

Cheques should be made payable to TGWU 9/9 Barnsley and sent to A. Rushforth, 45 Tune Street, Wombwell, BarnsleyS73 8PX

What’s the Alternative to Capitalism?

An article by Iain Dalton - from Leeds branch of the Socialist Party - discussing the "ever greater questioning of the current way society is organised".

As the Occupy movements signify, there is an ever greater questioning of the current way society is organised, with many questions the capitalist economic system itself. For socialists, it is incredibly encouraging to see wide layers of people criticising the current economic system, but one feature of the present questioning of capitalism, is confusion and a lack of any definitive alternative. Therefore all sorts of ideas are being thrown up and seized upon by people eager to find a way out of the current economic impasse. Yesterday the Yorkshire Evening Post (YEP) published an article ‘Is the golden age of capitalism over?’, which discuss this and raises some alternative views, in particular steady-state economics.

The main thrust of steady-state economics is that rather than aiming for growth within an economy in terms of production of resources, people should be content with maintaining what already exists, or as the article puts it “instead of continually accumulating more things, we would have to be content with what we have – we would be encouraged to fix things instead of buying new, to grow our own vegetables or buy locally produced ones”.

This questioning of the need for growth, is something that is common to many of the people taking part in the occupy movement. For many it is synonimous with environmental destruction, wastage and greed and as one of the interviewees in the article explains “the economy simply cannot grow forever on a planet which has finite resources and we can see that happening right now with the price of oil”.

For socialists, the question of growth has to be related to the needs of people, the very essence of socialism relies upon the democratic planning of the economy to ensure the production and distribution of the resources that are required by people to live a full life. But to take a glance at the consumption levels for most people even in the advanced capitalist countries such as the UK, reveals the high levels of poverty currently existing, let alone the neo-colonial world. For the majority of people “most of us changing to a more modest lifestyle” (ie a majority, not simply the super-rich 1%), would simply not be viable and is an attempt to turn back the clock of development.

Critics of socialism often accuse socialists of wanting to level down everyone’s income in such a manner, but as is pointed out “The idea with the steady state economy is to accept we have this low level of growth and that we are happy with it and to figure out how we live within that. It sounds like socialism but it’s not.” Or as another interviewee comments “A steady state economy is simply another version of capitalism".

But is such a steady-state even possible under capitalism?

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Please click here for the full article.