birmingham worker

Thousands of Birmingham children are taught in classes which are too big

children in class

According to figures released by the Department for Education, 11,503 children in Birmingham are being taught in classes of more than 30 pupils (as of January this year). This means one in nine primary pupils in Birmingham (11%) are now being taught in a large class, up from 10.9% a year before.

Across England, there were 558,658 pupils in primary schools being taught in classes of 31 or more.

The Birmingham Mail reported Angela Rayner MP, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Education, as saying: “Today’s figures expose the consequences of the Tory cuts to our schools, with more and more pupils crammed in to super-sized classes that can only make it harder for them to learn.”

What Angela Rayner and other Labour MPs/councillors etc want to hide from the public is that the commercialisation of schools began under Tony Blair’s Labour party with the Learning and Skills Act 2000. Successive Labour governments, and then the Liberal Democrats and Tory coalition (and in more recent times the Conservative governments of Cameron and May) have consolidated and deepened this process.

The academies, which began to replace LEA-funded schools brought private finance into the running of schools, and are a part and parcel of move towards full-scale privatisation in primary and secondary education. Along with the increase in religious, private and grammar schools, academies paved the way for the re-establishment of the two-tier system in state education, abolishing comprehensive schooling.

What do communists say?

At the 8th Congress of the Communist Party (CPGB-ML) held in Birmingham last year, a motion on education declared:

“This congress notes that today in Britain, rather than education and vocational training being viewed as a social necessity and individual necessity required for the full flourishing of society as a whole as well as the individuals within it, education and training are treated as a commodity, which is sold to the working class as a product that will provide a higher income to them as individuals, irrespective of its social utility or its ability to enhance the individual life.

Congress believes that all education and training from creche and kindergarten through school, university, vocational college and on to adult lifelong learning and retraining should be provided free, along with full maintenance grants to full-time pupils and students, that sufficient teachers should educated, trained and provided, and that vocational training should be awarded equal respect to academic education, since the plumber is as useful and as necessary as the sanitation engineer.

Recognising the above, congress resolves that the party’s demands regarding education are:

1. The expulsion of all private interests in education, including the abolition of academies and their return to the state school system and the end of private provision of goods and services to educational institutions, with all staff brought in-house with realistic wages and full employment rights.

2. The abolition of private, religious and ethnically-divided schools.

3. The abolition of tuition fees in all institutions at all levels of education.

4. The provision of maintenance grants to cover living expenses of working-class students and their families, from creche and kindergarten through nursery, to school, undergraduate and higher-degree level.

5. Changes in the syllabuses and teaching methods should reflect the scientific, historical and artistic needs and interests of working-class people, including the teaching of materialist philosophy, science and working-class history and politics.”

If you’d like to find out more, get in touch:

birmingham worker

Council Tax to go up nearly 5% this April

council tax rise 2019.jpg

Council Tax to go up nearly 5% this April

This April Birmingham resident’s will see Council Tax up by 4.99%. That will mean at least £70 for many households.

The Labour council takes no responsibility for its mismanagement of the city finances. Below is an idea of how much Birmingham’s workers are going to be expected to pay, and a few examples of how the Council has spent our money so far in 2019.

Council Tax 2019-20

  • Band A is £1,062.67
  • Band B is £1,239.77
  • Band C is £1,416.88
  • Band D is £1,594.00
  • Band E is £1,948.23
  • Band F is £2,302.44
  • Band G is £2,656.67
  • Band H is £3,188.00

Money wasted

In the recent dispute with bin men Birmingham city council spent money rewarding those who worked during the 2017 strike, these payments were ‘secret’. When the news broke the Council spent £1.45million on legal advice to defend their position rather than apologising and settling quickly. They even attempted to prevent workers going on strike by taking them to the courts in London, and losing!

Determined to have a war with workers at any cost the Council paid £2.6 million to private contractors to clean up the city whilst they dragged the bin men through legal proceedings. In the end the Council have had to come to the negotiating table at a total cost of £5.85 million!

Birmingham has a council who say they need to make another £46m in savings this year, who have announced another 1,000 job losses by 2023 and have the temerity to take another 5% off hard-pressed residents.

Unless workers get organised they can expect to be well and truly rinsed by Labour party careerists and money grabbing privateers.

 Get in touch with Birmingham Worker and fight for socialism:

 

 

birmingham worker

Support Asda Queslett workers; don’t let machines come before jobs nor profit before people

automation asda_dec 2018.indd

Staff at ASDA in Queslett, Great Barr, are fed up with the imposition of “scan and go” machines, taking the place of the usual checkout tills. Where once there were 31 manned tills, there are now only 20, and workers fear that up to a dozen jobs may go by February next year.

 As well as the threat to jobs in an area of very high unemployment, staff also complain that the “scan and go” machines will disadvantage users who cannot supply an email address, particularly the elderly and children.

The enterprising workers have taken their case onto the streets, plastering “Save Our Jobs” posters on bus stops and lamposts in nearby streets and asking customers to boycott the new machines. As well as trying to cut costs by substituting robots for wage-earners, bosses are also sweating the remaining checkout workers harder, demanding that staff should scan 22 items every 60 seconds!

 Bosses blame a competitive retail market for making these cost-cutting measures necessary, but why should workers pay with their sweat and their jobs to preserve the profits of capitalism?

 So long as the means of production are privately owned, automation is a constant threat to workers’ job security.

Birmingham Worker supports the fight of the Asda workers for jobs and employment. Workers must make it difficult for employers to implement measures which put profits before people.

Under a planned socialist economy there will be full employment, nobody will be denied the right to perform some useful work for society. In such a system of economy automation can lighten the burden of labour and free workers up for other useful and interesting kinds of work. That is why we should fight for socialism and bring an end to the anarchy and chaos of capitalism.

birmingham worker

FT leaks plans by Jaguar Land Rover to axe 5,000 jobs

jlr
FT says company plans to axe thousands of jobs in Birmingham area

At the end of November, following a slump in sales, JLR announced job losses at its Solihull plant, following hard on the heels of its move last April to wipe out 1,000 of the total 9,000 jobs. JLR plans to move production of the Discovery to Slovakia, whilst Solihull is retooled to produce electric cars with a smaller workforce.

Worse was reported yesterday when the FT and Guardian announced that insiders had said more than 5,000 jobs are to be axed:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/16/jaguar-land-rover-to-axe-up-to-5000-jobs 

https://www.ft.com/content/c4f06f8e-ff99-11e8-aebf-99e208d3e521

Over at JLR’s engine-building plant in Wolverhampton, weak demand has forced the company to extend the Christmas shut-down by two weeks.

The global overproduction crisis continues to put the squeeze right across  the automotive industry, sparking the beginnings of a workers’ revolt. Over at Vauxhall’s Ellesmere Port plant, successive waves of redundancies have seen the workforce shrink from 1,900 to 1,100. In November, when a further 241 redundancies were announced, workers responded with a mass walk-out.

Whilst JLR blames variously the “demonisation of diesel” and Brexit for the company’s problems, the fundamental cause is to be found in the anarchy of capitalist production, which creates regular overproduction crises. This means that capitalism produces far too many things than can be consumed – rather than producing the things which are needed, it produces items for maximum profit. This drive for maximum profit also means that many processes are automated to be carried out by robots – a process which also puts many thousands out of work.

Until the means of production – factories, farms, etc – are socialised, and production is planned to meet people’s needs, not to make private profit, workers’ jobs will continue to be a hostage to fortune, prey to all the vagaries of capitalist ‘free market’ forces.

In the short term, workers must demand that their factory should be nationalised and kept going. If there really is no demand for the cars being produced, the factory should be transformed to produce something that people do need, and workers retrained to make it.

If we are still faced with the problem of ‘lack of demand’ (ie, workers not having enough money to pay for the things they need), then it is clear that the whole system needs to be transformed, not merely a single factory. What kind of insanity is it when the workers who produce all of society’s superabundant wealth are unable to share in that abundance – are unable even to feed their families or keep a roof over their heads?

Only by fighting for socialism can we secure a future of secure jobs, full employment and advancing living standards.

If you work at JLR or want to help the workers there, get in touch with the Birmingham Worker:

birmingham worker

Sammi Ibrahem, our candidate in Balsall Heath West

A message to voters in Balsall Heath West

SAMMI IBRAHEM FROM GAZA TO BALSALL HEATH – INTERNATIONAL MAN OF PEACE

Sammi Ibrahem is no stranger to conflict and hardship. Born in a Palestinian refugee camp, Sammi Ibrahem was repeatedly shot by Zionist troops but lived to survive the ordeal and spread his message of uncompromising struggle against imperialism. Sammi who has been cruelly separated from his family for many years by the Israeli occupation of Palestine escaped Israeli detention on a scholarship programme and has, since his youth, been a champion of the oppressed ever since.

Man of peace

Sammi knows that hatred can only be challenged head-on. In his years as a community activist in Balsall Heath, Sammi has looked after the interests of hundreds of local workers and residents, many of whom have faced unfair eviction orders from the Council bailiffs as a result of crushing poverty, or the bullying threats of slum landlords, rapacious bosses or street hoodlums. But Sammi Ibrhaem says that workers and oppressed peoples can stand up to bullies and they can win, not only here in Balsall Heath, but around the world, whether it’s in Gaza or Seoul. As a champion of the oppressed, Sammi has been invited by countless organisations to visit them in the pursuance of peace and socialism.

South Korea and the threats of nuclear war

This April Sammi Ibrahem is a guest of the South Korean workers and peace loving people when he visits Seoul on a two week trip to promote friendship, peace and reunification. At the invitation of the Peace and Democracy Party, and the Korean peace organisations, Sammi will deliver a message from the socialist and peace loving people of Birmingham to our south Korean friends who face the threat of nuclear war as a result of the maniac Donald Trump and the aggressive plans of US imperialism.

As Sammi Ibrahem says,

“Korea was unjustly divided after the second world war as a result of US imperialist occupation of the south. It is high time that injustice was reversed.”

IMG_20180224_133634277
Sammi, recently returned from a peace mission to Columbo given the support of Birmingham’s Sri Lankan community by visiting Sri Lankan Member of Parliament Sunil Handunneththi
IMG_0787
Sammi Ibrahem welcomes comrade Marcos Garcia, from the Venezuelan Embassy, to Birmingham in 2018