It's no laughing matter

It’s getting so bad on our estate that the other day when the dustbin men came round the neighbour asked them to leave three bins.

A Liberal Democrat came round the other day and the neighbour told him to get lost saying he would vote Labour, just like his dad and his granddad before him. But said the Liberal Democrat, “what would you vote if your father was a fool and his father before him was a fool too?” “In that case i’d vote Liberal Democrat or Tory.” 

Vince Cable” “What can we get Danny Alexander for his birthday?”

Paddy Ashdown” “A book perhaps?’

Vince Cable” “No, he’s got one of those already.”

What’s the difference between an accident and a misfortune.

The first is when Osborne falls into a river, and the second is when someone pulls him out. 

I’ve got some good and bad news. 

What’s the good news?

Thatcher is dead.

What’s the bad news?

It’s not true. 

Thatcher dies and goes to heaven. St Peter refuses her entry and sends her down to hell.

The next day, St Peter is woken early by a great clamour outside his window. Looking out, he see a huge crowd of devils, all demanding political asylum. 

Why are there no toilets in the Stock Exchange.

Because everyone shits on everyone else. 

Union support for disabled farm worker maintains vital benefits

Farmworker Mark Giles decision to stick with Unite after he was forced to stop working due to chemical poisoning has paid off after the union helped him gain his Employment and Support Allowance. (ESA) 

Mark had been entitled to Incapacity Benefit since Christmas Day 2000. Eleven medical boards since then had confirmed he was not well enough to work. The 51 year-old from Bicester, Oxfordshire had found his immune system destroyed by the pesticides he worked with for more than 25 years. Inadequate safety equipment failed to protect him. 

Mark, a married man with four children, enjoyed “being a farm worker as I loved being outdoors working with animals in the peace and quiet.” Although his wages were never great Mark had no regrets in completing an agricultural engineering apprenticeship and working the land. 

Things changed dramatically in June 2000 when Mark says, “I was hit by what felt like a severe flu and which left me with no energy.” Mark’s doctor was able to offer a ‘pesticide exposure’ diagnosis, but with no known cure he has been unable to work since. Today, Mark needs medication for a range of health problems and continues to suffer from chronic fatigue. Communicating properly, going out, standing, picking up and moving things can all prove difficult.

Yet following a 20 minute medical conducted in October last year by private firm ATOS he was informed that ‘the decision maker decided Mr Giles’s award of Incapacity Benefit did not qualify for conversion to ESA and was to be terminated from 28/12/2011.’ All the other medical experts were wrong, Mark was fit enough for work! 

It is worth pointing out that despite being paid £100 million a year to carry out work capability assessments that ATOS aren’t aways right with their decisions. A special investigation by the Daily Mirror revealed that between January and August 2011 there were 1,100 claimants who actually died after being placed in the ‘work-related activity group’ that pays claimants a lower ESA and carries an expectation that they will go out and find work. 

The decision did not surprise Mark, “as I felt the assessor had made up her mind before I entered the room as she asked very few questions and simply asked me to wobble my arms and legs.” 

When Mark was working he was not a member of a trade union. He joined Unite after he became seriously ill and “they gave me good advice.” He has been a member ever since and he approached the union for support in appealing against a decision that could have ultimately wiped out his £350 a month income. This would have left him and his wife entirely dependent upon the latter’s wages from her job as a civilian worker with Thames Valley Police.

With more than 300,000 people in the appeal queue before him, Mark was given an appeal hearing date of October 1st this year. As he waited his benefits were cut by almost £130 a month. Fortunately a late cancellation saw his appeal moved forward to 15 June 2012. 

Mark was accompanied to this by David Weeks, a Unite regional officer based in Maidstone, Kent who has experience of supporting rural workers and members across all occupations who have been refused disability benefits. David spent a day preparing for the case and knows how important professional advice can be to appellants rarely familiar with the appeal process or the sorts of questions they may be asked. 

“More than anything, Unite is all about our collective support to those who are a little bit weaker. Our recently launched community membership scheme demonstrates this. It was a disgrace that Mark was threatened with losing part or even all of his income if he had been put into a working group that he would have been unable to attend because of his illness,” says David.  

Statistics show that people are twice as likely to win their appeal if they appear in person rather than having a paper hearing. Yet when the Ministry of Justice produced a video informing people of this they were pressurised by employment minister Chris Grayling to remove it from Youtube. Grayling is now the Justice Minister. 

The two Tribunal appeal judges didn’t take long to decide ATOS had got their decision wrong. There proved no need for David to make a concluding statement and it was agreed that ‘Mr Giles is entitled to ESA with Limited Capability for work related activity component.’ 

Success though was tinged with the knowledge that it had cost the taxpayer an estimated £12,000 for Mark’s medical, written and full appeal hearing. Times that by the 300,000 other appellants and that’s a lot of money, especially as 40% are winning their appeals.  

As it is abundantly clear that Mark Giles is not going to become fit for work, Tribunal Judge Ms GM Manning said in her summing up that it would be another 4-5 years before he could expect to again be called for a medical. After such a worrying ordeal lasting many months this was welcome news.

  

Mark Giles “delight” has though proved premature. Five weeks was all it took for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to write and inform him that he must re-appear before the ATOS assessor. Money that should be used to pay his benefits is being squandered on another futile exercise. Weeks re-affirms that “Unite will continue providing support” and he and Giles have written to the DWP asking them to take into account the tribunal judge’s statement. 

Pesticides 

It’s not just workers who are affected by pesticides. A 2008 World Bank report estimated that 355,000 people worldwide die each year from unintentional pesticide poisoning. In December last year the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, which examines and provides judgements relative to violations of human rights and rights of peoples, indicted the world’s six largest agrochemical companies for human rights violations.

In the United Kingdom, the campaigning work of Sussex resident Georgina Downs has highlighted the adverse health impacts on residents living near pesticide sprayed fields. Many of those affected subsequently find it difficult to keep working.

Yet according to Downs, “There is a serious lack of training for GP’s and specialists in relation to the adverse health impacts of pesticides. This results in many of the symptoms being misdiagnosed as something else.”  

Downs is now concerned that victims are under increasing pressure by ATOS to ‘justify’ their illnesses in order to obtain benefits and says, “Those with chemical injury need support, understanding and assistance, not doubt, disbelief and ignorance.” 

For further information on Georgina Downs’ UK Pesticides Campaign see www.pesticidescampaign.co.uk

Great new book on Captain Swing lifts lid on biggest ever rural uprising

Due to appear in Landworker magazine of Unite shortly. 

The RURAL WAR 

Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest

Carl J Griffin 

Manchester University Press 

This meticulously researched book demonstrates that England’s biggest ever rural uprising was more organised, widespread and politically motivated than previously thought. 

Starting in August 1830 in Kent, riots swept across the country as the rural poor smashed 390 threshing machines, torched farm buildings, assembled in large numbers and sent threatening letters from the mythical Captain Swing.

Protestors demanded higher wages and regular, productive work. They didn’t get it and in the bloody repression that followed hundreds were transported with nineteen executed.   RURAL WAR focuses on the south-eastern heartland of Swing, where it started and lasted the longest. 

Unique 

In the early nineteenth-century England was virtually unique among major nations by having no landed smallholding peasantry. Millions of acres of common land had meanwhile been enclosed, thus ensuring the landless were dependent on a wage.

The introduction of horse-drawn threshing machines then slashed the numbers needed to tend the crops. As unemployment soared and wage levels plummeted, farm labourers and their families starved. Parish relief to the ill and out of work was minimal and dropped further as more became dependent upon it. Work schemes rarely provided productive work. To make matters worse the harvest in 1828, 1829 and 1830 was disastrous.

Attacks on threshing machines had first taken place in 1815 and 1816 and had steadily increased since.  However it seems unlikely that when a threshing machine was destroyed on 24 August 1830 at Wingmore, a small hamlet in the Elham Valley of East Kent, that those involved could have imagined it would start a Rural War. Yet by the end of September another 18 had been destroyed in Kent as large numbers assembled to demand a ‘moral right’ of employment from farmers and landowners. 

Griffin’s fine book shows how the Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire landless swiftly joined the protests.  These intensified to include threatening letters and the burning down of numerous farm buildings  belonging to  those employers unwilling to concede to a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. 

Having only sentenced the Elham ring-leaders to four days imprisonment the authorities now cracked down ruthlessly. With few across the region willing to become Special Constables, the Military was sent for. Hundreds of people were arrested. For trying to protect their families and communities from starvation, 160 were transported from Kent, Surrey, Hampshire and Sussex, some permanently. Hampshire suffered most with 115 torn from their loved ones.

Executions

The greatest revenge by the ruling class was reserved for arsonists. Although none had killed anybody, over the Christmas and New Year period of 1830/31 seven men were executed. A year later, five more went to the gallows and in December 1832 George Wren was executed for a firing a Uckfield barn six months earlier.

By then the conflict had largely ended with both sides in the war now having a mutual fear of one another. Yet with many labourers have shown a willingness to dispute their wages and openly question the nature of authority the way was open for the development of a rural workers trade union.  Enter the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834. 

Columbian killings continue

The callous execution of a Columbian peasant trade unionist in early August re-affirms that the South American state is the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade unionist. Over 2,500 unionists have been murdered in the past 20 years. This is more than the rest of the world combined and yet there is now the prospect of things getting even worse. 

Aldemar Pinto Barrios of the Association of Peasant Workers of Caloto was killed instantly on Sunday 5 August when two men riding a motorbike shot him in the head, neck and chest. Two colleagues narrowly escaped with their lives.

Just days later Juan Carlos Pinzon, the Columbian Defence Minister, accused the Patriotic March social movement, whose membership includes Columbian trade unions and peasant organisations, of being funded by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) guerrillas. 

The last organisation to be similarly accused was the Patriotic Union in 1980s and following which paramilitary death squads assassinated over 3,000 people. An April 1988 report by Amnesty International accused the Columbian government and military of being involved in a ‘deliberate policy of political murder.’ Despite providing no proof to substantiate his allegations the fear now is that Pinzon’s statement will see the destruction of a movement that is campaigning peacefully to resolve the conflict in Columbia. 

Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey noted that five of the sixteen trade unionists murdered in 2012 were from the FENSUAGRO agricultural workers’ union. Promises of government protection had proved worthless and fuel to protection units has even been cut. 

Justice for Columbia (JFC) is the TUC-backed coalition of 40 national trade unions (including Unite) providing support to the Colombian people and trade union movement.

In an attempt to end anti-trade union violence in Columbia the JFC is asking union  members to send protest messages to the Colombian Ambassador in London. Help is also needed to stop UK military aid to Columbia and for persuading MPs to back an early day motion calling on the British Government to encourage the Columbian government and FARC into seeking a negotiated settlement.

www.justiceforcolumbia.org 

020 7324 2490 

Palestinian agricultural workers also attacked 


Palestinian agricultural workers and organisers appear to have been targeted for an intensified arrest campaign in the occupied West Bank of Palestine. New Israeli settlements have made it increasingly difficult for Palestinians to defend their land and produce the farm products so urgently needed throughout the Palestinian territories.

The Union of Agricultural Works Committees (UAWC) had its offices in Jericho ransacked by Israeli forces only hours after local coordinator Dr Moayad Ahmad Bisharart was taken from his home at dawn on 31 July 2012. Days earlier the UAWC’s Director of Development and Operations, engineer Fuad Abu Saif, along with activist Mohammad Nujoom were also abducted. The UAWC, formed in 1987, also remains has concerned that Board member Ahmad Soufan has been ordered into a third term of six months imprisonment without charge. 

Opposing child labour in agriculture

Child labour in agriculture opposed

60% of all child labour takes place in agriculture, with more than 129 million girls and boys aged five to seventeen often working in hazardous conditions. Few of the youngsters have access to trade union protection and to date limited progress has been made in addressing child labour in rural communities. 

Global March (GM) Against Child Labour aims to eliminate child labour and the International Union of Food workers. At the end of July GM organised a well-attended conference in Washington against agricultural child labour. 

Want to help trade unionists overseas?

www.labourstart.org.uk - where trade unionists start their day on the net – provides global labour news from every part of the planet. The site – which is in 21 languages - has a campaigns page where you can support trade unionists struggling for their rights. Take a look. 

Coalition set to kill kids

The death of any child is a tragedy. So when you realise the Government is proposing to scrap an effective tool in preventing children from suffering serious injuries and deaths from agriculture then you have to question whether the coalition has a heart.

The Approved Code of Practice (ACOP) on Preventing Accidents to children in agriculture has legal status and was first published in 1988. It was clearly needed as a year earlier Stephen Vallance aged six was crushed to death under the wheels of his father’s tractor.  

Stephen had fallen from the tractor trailer and his grieving father, Graham, was not consoled by “everyone telling me I am not to blame as I have to live with this for the rest of my life.” 

Graham Vallance, a farmer in Bere Alston, near Tavistock, Devon: “Hoped other farmers will see the dangers so that the same kind of accident doesn’t happen again.”  Sadly it is not possible to report that to be the case, but research by Unite’s Health and Safety Section reveals a significant drop in injuries and deaths over the years.

Between 1986 and 1997/8 there were 66 children killed in agricultural accidents. 300 were seriously injured. In the years since then the figures have totalled 29 and 153. Instead of 6 deaths annually there are now 2. 

Unite has worked closely with the HSE in promoting the ACOP within rural communities, helping produce two jointly badged guidance leaflets on child safety aimed at farmers and which were widely distributed to schools and other organisations. Industry seminars were organised and a seconded HSE agriculture inspector, Mike Walters, worked successfully with Unite to cut the number of tragic incidents. The partnership clearly worked because whilst the overall number of agricultural deaths has remained at a (sadly too high a) steady level, that involving children has fallen. 

All this is now under threat. Professor Ragnar Loftstedt was commissioned last year by the Government to review Britain’s health and safety laws. 

Loftstedt’s recommendations included withdrawing the ACOP guidance on child safety on agriculture, substituting instead what the HSE describes as ‘more practical guidance available in other HSE publications more suited to the target audience.’ According to the HSE guidance from the agricultural industry is also on its way. Asked however to clarify what this might consist of, the HSE was unable to say. 

This concerns Cath Speight who says, “Industry guidance won’t have the legislative powers of an approved ACOP, which is enforceable and can impose measures against employers found not to be compliant. This is another attempt by the government to trivialise workplace health and safety in extremely dangerous workplaces.”

A consultation period on Loftstedt’s recommendations has just ended. Unite responded seeking to retain ACOP and National Health and Safety Adviser Susan Murray argues “It would be far more sensible, and safer, to update the ACOP to take account of legislative changes and relaunch it as part of a new farm safety campaign coupled with a programme or proactive enforcement by the HSE.”  Kids lives now depend on this Government listening to reason.  

Derby Books will shortly publish my digital book on:- 

TOM THUMB – Ernie Taylor 

Ernie Taylor, the little midfield genius that helped Manchester United reach Wembley after the Munich tragedy in 1958. 

Introduction

At 5’ 4” and barely ten stones Sunderland born Ernie Taylor is one of the smallest professional footballers ever. Wearing only size 4 boots, Taylor, known as ‘Tom Thumb’, had great skill on the ball, exemplary dribbling abilities, marvellous vision and an eye for a goal. Playing in midfield he performed with distinction for four giants of the post-war football world in Newcastle United (1942-1951), Blackpool (1951-1958), Manchester United (Feb – December 1958) and Sunderland (Dec 58– 1961).

Taylor played at Wembley on four occasions – winning with Newcastle United at the 1951 FA Cup Final and Blackpool two years later, and then losing 6-3 with England against Hungary in 1953 and losing 2-0 with Manchester United in the 1958 FA Cup Final.

However, the very fact that the latter made it to Wembley was a remarkable feat as it was only months after the Munich air tragedy. This book examines the critical role Ernie Taylor played in making this possible.