The WTO's privatisation agenda comes home to roost in one of
London's poorest boroughs, but local voices can be heard
calling...
Community activists in Hackney are fighting vested interests and
a deafening press silence in an attempt to stop the debt-ridden and
notoriously corrupt council from destroying the fabric of the
borough. The council is selling off hundreds of properties in
response to government demands to sort out its finances. They range
from houses and flats to community centres, playgrounds and green
spaces, nurseries and shops. A school was also originally included
on the list, but was withdrawn after the council discovered they had
no right to sell it. The properties on sale are expected to be
snapped up by developers keen to cash in on Hackney's ongoing
gentrification, while the local community will lose vital
services. Cuts are also being made in other areas attacks
on council workers' pay and conditions have been intense, with pay
cuts of up to £1500 per year and reductions in overtime, shift
allowances and flexibility payments.
So how do we get out of this mess? Hackney serves as an
experimental laboratory for the New Labour agenda of privatising
local government services. Central government argues that
privatisation is the only solution to notorious corruption and
mismanagement. But privatisation has not served the people of
Hackney any better than bureaucratic rule. We all remember the
disastrous privatisation of Housing Benefits Services under ITNET,
which cost the council taxpayer over £25 million and many private
sector residents their homes. We have no nostalgia for the bad
old days of bureaucratic state control. What we need, as workers and
as local people, is direct control over how resources are allocated
and how services are provided in our community. It is not about
electing Socialists or other representatives to put pressure on the
government to assign more funds. We need to develop new ways to
relate to each other, in order to challenge a capitalist system that
puts the greed of a few above the well-being of our communities and
planet. We need to take direct action on the ground to stop the
powerful enrich themselves at our expense.
Grassroots action against the cuts The campaign against
the cuts and sell-offs is gathering pace. Activists began by
squatting an empty shop and setting up a spoof estate agent with
information on the properties being sold off. This was followed, on
12th October, by an occupation of the offices of Nelson Bakewell,
the real estate agent dealing with the sales, calling for them to
withdraw all Hackney Council properties from the auction on the
15th. The auction went ahead, but with paranoid-level security
and a lively demo outside. Inside, the auction was disrupted by
local residents. The disruption focused on the sale of Atherden Road
Nursery, which was closed earlier this year, occupied and re-opened
first by protesting parents (Hackney is currently short of around
1,000 nursery places) and then by other locals who turnied it into a
community centre. When the bidding finally started, the price
was pushed up wildly by two campaigners bidding against each other.
However, once the auctioneers twigged they nevertheless accepted the
highest genuine bid (considerably higher than the site had been
expected to fetch).
Morale down the tube Meanwhile, council gardeners and
estate cleaners objected to the cuts in wages and jobs by staging a
one-day wildcat strike on October 12th, coinciding with the
occupation of Nelson Bakewell estate agents. One worker said,
'People don't know how much they're earning or how long they're
going to have a job,' hardly surprising that morale's down the
tube, then. The same worker said there was a feeling that Hackney
want to run an experiment in having a council with no in-house
services. In the coming months there will be strikes and actions
by Hackney workers and there will be occupations and protests by
Hackney Community Groups. We need to act together to support each
other. The struggle here in Hackney is one part of a struggle of
people and communities around the world against the privatisation
and enclosure of communal resources.
Contact: Hackney not for Sale! Email: hackneynot4sale@yahoo.com Tel:
07950 539 254 Hackney Indymedia subsection: http://uk.indymedia.org/
- 9 November: Day of local actions against Privatisation whilst
the WTO meets in Qatar.
Join us at the Town Hall Square
12.30pm.
- 13 December: Action at next Nelson Bakewell auction where more
Hackney community buildings will be sold off.
Contact hackneynot4sale@yahoo.com
A Hackney Community Conference is planned for the new year
contact Unison on 020 8985 7134.
Taken in part from http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/
Refusing collection Brighton bin workers show the way
in the fight against privatised services. In the week between the
11th and the 15th of June a workers' struggle of a kind not
experienced in the UK for a long time took place in the refuse
collection depot in Brighton. The bin workers took collective action
and occupied the depot after being sacked for refusing newly imposed
work routines brought in by the private firm taking over the refuse
collection contract in Brighton and Hove. After 4 days in occupation
of the depot, the workers managed to win their struggle and to force
the Council to terminate the private contract, while re-instating
all the workers who had been sacked. The response of the bin
workers shows how it is possible to fight privatisation and the new
'flexible' low-wage temp work economy that we are always being told
is 'inevitable'. By forming alliances with local anti-capitalist
activists, using direct action, sabotage and not being afraid to
break the law, the bin workers won all their major demands in a mere
4 days. And they got paid for the time they spent occupying their
own depot!
This piece is based on an article in the forthcoming issue of
Undercurrent magazine. Email: undercurrent00@yahoo.co.uk
pranksters impersonate wto rep Since November 1999 a
pseudo-official World Trade Organisation web site - http://www.gatt.org/ - created by
the anonymous masters of the political prank and parody (r)TMark -
has been extraordinarily successful in duping conference organisers
and mainstream media, into inviting fake WTO spokespeople to address
them. Last year a group of slow-thinking Austrian lawyers stumbled
on the gatt.org site and wanted Mike Moore head of the WTO to come
pep up their meeting in Salzburg. "Mike Moore" declined, but sent
two substitutes later revealed to be the "Yes Men" the
impostors' umbrella group. (theyesmen.org) who stood before
the unwitting lawyers to explain a vast but rather shocking program
for the extension of free trade. Earlier this year the Anti-WTO
impostors struck again, delivering a lecture about the wonders of
slavery, the stupidity of Gandhi, and the supremacy of free trade to
an enthusiastic crowd of scientists, engineers, and marketing
professionals--all of whom thought they were watching a slick
official WTO representative, at the "Textiles of the Future"
conference in Tampere, Finland. The 150 experts heard one Hank
Hardy Unruh explain that Gandhi's "self-sufficiency" movement was
entirely misguided, because it centred around protectionism, and
that Lincoln, by outlawing slavery, had criminally interfered with
the trade freedom of the South, as well as with slavery's own
freedom to develop naturally. Had slavery never been abolished,
Unruh said, today's much cheaper system of sweatshops would have
eventually replaced it anyhow; following this free-market logic to
the end, Unruh declared the Civil War just a big waste of
money. Finally, to applause from the highly educated audience,
Unruh's business suit was ripped off to reveal a golden leotard with
a three-foot-long phallus. The purpose of the "Management Leisure
Suit", he explained, was to allow managers, no matter where they
were, to monitor their distant, impoverished workforces and to
administer shocks to encourage productivity--assuring that no
"Gandhi-type situation" develop again. "If a group of Ph.D.s
cheers at such crudely crazy things, just because it's the WTO
saying them, what else can the WTO get away with?" said Andy
Bichlbaum of the Yes Men, During the protests in Genoa this July , a
"yes man" popped up again, this time on a major TV network show
about protest's effect on the market. Passing as a representative of
the WTO, this time speaking live from Paris, he spoke about how
protesters ideas are based too much in reality and that the WTO knew
Free Trade was working because they had read the theory, some of
which he proudly stated was written in the 18th Century, he then
went on to praise the privatisation of education which "will
naturally eliminate "unproductive" thinkers from the high-school
classroom, a long-term solution to the problem of protest."
Reeling from the pranksters successes the WTO has now published
a warning on the front page of its official web site "Warning: Fake
WTO web site - http://www.gatt.org - deceitful and a nuisance to
serious users", meanwhile the yes men are laughing all the way to
the bank. |