Women's Views on News |
| Posted: 04 Dec 2014 04:39 AM PST
The Focus E15 campaign was established to challenge Newham Council's policies of expelling the poor and vulnerable of London to towns and cities hundreds of miles away. The Labour-run [Newham] council claim that there is no housing in Newham. This is a lie. Thousands of properties lie empty and boarded up in this borough of east London. The campaign began in September 2013 after Newham Council withdrew funding from the Focus E15 young people's hostel and its mother and baby unit. East Thames Housing Association initially threatened to evict the young mothers and have since extended this threat to some of the single residents as well. Focus E15 is a hostel in Stratford, east London, run by East Thames Housing Association to accommodate young people under 25. On 20 August 2013, mothers and their babies received eviction notices ordering them to be out of their flats by 20 October. The young mothers were referred to a Newham Council housing office and were registered as officially homeless. They were told to look for private rented accommodation, but soon found that almost none accepted people on benefits or that the flats they did find were already gone by the time the council could intervene to help secure the property. It became clear that the young mothers and babies would be offered properties in Manchester, Birmingham or Hastings and if they said no they would be deemed to be making themselves "intentionally homeless". In the words of Jasmin Stone, one of the mothers who started the campaign: "This meant we would have no support network… our children wouldn't know their families. We decided to fight for what's right. "We began an active campaign gathering signatures for our petition and wrote to the council. We met with Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! who have helped from the beginning, standing side by side with us every week at our Saturday stall." The campaign is vibrant and exciting, making links with individuals and groups, housing activists and anti-austerity campaigners. We have occupied Newham Council's Bridge House housing office, held a party in the East Thames Housing association show flat, taken an open air bus to central London to deliver petitions to Boris Johnson and organised a march through Newham. We have repeatedly challenged Labour Mayor of Newham, Robin Wales; in his surgery, at a public council meeting and at the annual Newham Mayor's show (where he became very abusive at being challenged on his policies). Our message was loud and clear: that Newham's Labour council is operating a policy of social cleansing - which forces young vulnerable homeless people, including mothers and children, out of London, while council properties in the borough remain boarded up. Since September 2013 the Focus E15 campaign has held a weekly Saturday street stall with open mic, petitioning and leafleting. We've collected stories from the hundreds of people who have stopped at the stall who are also facing social cleansing and the insecurity and unaffordability of the private-rented sector. A big victory of the campaign has been that all the mothers and babies have been housed in Newham with not one family being sent out of London. However, these are all short-term tenancies in the private rented sector - insecure and expensive housing, and by February 2015 all the mothers will be faced with the possibility of having to move again. Jasmin Stone says: "The campaign has grown majorly and we have noticed it isn't just mothers being affected. We have decided to widen the campaign for everyone. We are fighting for everybody with housing problems and offer our full support. "We will fight for as long as it takes to stop the privatisation of London and stop social cleansing. We are fighting for social housing for all, a home that everyone can afford, where they feel comfortable and have the support network that we all need!" Last year Robin Wales was in Cannes in the south of France where he attended the world's biggest annual property fair, MIPIM (Marche International des Professionels d'Immobilier – the International Market of Real Estate Professionals). Twenty thousand people attended this jamboree, at the cost of €1,600 each, where government representatives alongside multinational companies and property developers from all over the world come together to further their financial interests and work out how to make the most money out of housing, with no regard for those who actually need somewhere to live. Robin Wales defends his attendance, claiming that "it's not costing the public purse a penny, it's all paid for by our development partners." Companies present included LendLease who bought the Heygate Estate in south London, where 1,000 council homes have been lost and just 71 of the new homes being built will be for council/social housing. This October, MIPIM came to London. Newham has the highest overcrowding rate in the country at 25 per cent, the third highest child poverty rates in London, the second highest unemployment rates and one third of its residents are in low paid work – the highest proportion of any London borough. Newham has been exporting their vulnerable residents for years. Prior to the Olympics in 2012, they attempted to move 500 families claiming housing benefit to Stoke-on-Trent. Meanwhile, housing built for the Olympics remains empty. This lengthy track record of anti-working class practices establishes the importance of Focus E15 continuing to pressure the council and make local Labour leaders accountable. Jasmin Stone says: "Newham is becoming a place for only the rich! We need to stop this happening. Homes should be for living, not for profit. "The council oversees the building of luxury apartments which not even working people on an average wage can afford. East London was originally a place for the poor, now the poor are being shunted out of London. Council homes are being deliberately abandoned and damaged by the council leading to demolition. "Carpenters Estate in Stratford is an example of this happening with decent homes being left empty for years on end." Opened in 1970, Carpenters Estate occupies 23 acres of land in Stratford and constitutes 2000 houses and flats with a shop, a pub and lots of green space. It is a lovely place which has been home to generations of families, young people and elderly people, couples and single residents. Now, it is home to only a couple of hundred people as Newham Council continues its attempt to empty the homes, remove their residents and demolish the estate leaving thousands of empty flats in the tower blocks and boarded up maisonettes and flats in the low rise sections. In May 2013, University College London was forced to withdraw its controversial plans, negotiated with Newham Council, to build a £1 billion campus overlooking the Olympic Park in Stratford on the Carpenters Estate site. The deal was defeated by a militant and dedicated campaign made up of residents from the estate called Carpenters Against Regeneration Plans (CARP), alongside students from UCL. Focus E15 campaigners met Mary Finch, central to CARP, who has lived on the estate since it was built. She told Focus E15 that the future remains uncertain. Carpenters Estate sits on prime land that Newham Council wants for commercial and money-making purposes and doesn't care about working class communities, their homes or their security. People in hostels such as Focus E15, those in B&B accommodation, those falling into rent arrears because of soaring private rents and consequently facing eviction, are being forced out of London into insecure and expensive accommodation while homes lie empty and should be filled with those who need them. What an Olympic legacy after billions of pounds were pumped into the borough. In one of the richest countries in the world, with an increasingly divided society where inequality is growing and the vulnerable and poor are treated with contempt, where apathy flourishes and fear is instilled in most people, the Focus E15 campaign is showing that collective inclusive action with an imaginative and brave agenda, weekly street events and regular public organising meetings can challenge the status quo and achieve results. A version of this article appeared in Occupied Times under the title ‘Social Housing Not Social Cleansing’.  |
| Posted: 04 Dec 2014 01:38 AM PST
The union representing retail workers, the GMB, has presented an ASBO to Next for failing to make work pay for workers and for being an employer that does not face up to its social responsibilities. The ASBO is part of a protest and general sign of disgust with Next after a former Next worker recently revealed that cheap Polish staff are being bussed in to work at the firm's warehouse, getting jobs in an area where local unemployment is high. One Warsaw agency told how Next, run by Conservative peer and donor Lord Wolfson, has already recruited 7,000 staff from Poland. They earn much less in Poland than they can here, but they are nonetheless being poorly paid. An investigation by the Daily Mirror found that Eastern Europeans were being shipped over to fill the minimum wage posts weeks before the posts were even advertised in Britain. The Mirror’s exposé comes amid rising concern that some unscrupulous bosses are looking abroad for cheap labour at the expense of home-grown workers. The pay in question started at £6.50 an hour, 20 per cent less than Next's full-time staff get – but up to four times more than the same job would pay in Poland. And on top of that, Arseniusz Wolinski, who works for an agency recruiting for staff to work at Next in the UK explained that: "If you become a contract worker, which means you get a permanent job after our three months' contract, you can receive a 20 per cent higher salary." But under British law, agency workers are entitled to the same pay and conditions as full-time staff after 12 weeks doing the same job. Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB, said: "This gross abuse of UK and migrant workers by Next is not unique. "All over Europe there are labour agencies exploiting posted workers on a massive scale. "Internal EU wide union estimates show that approximately one million workers are exploited as posted workers annually. "We have to face up to the brutal fact that whatever the European vision was on integration, harmony, economic advancement and political stability, what we currently have isn't it. "The free movement of labour and the single market were to be balanced by the social charter where all the people of Europe would live in freedom and with those in the poorer economies, benefitting from the harmonisation of standards across all member states. "There were to be standards on workers protection, TUPE, excessive hours, health and safety, information and consultation and so many others were meant to keep labour exploitation in check. "That dream has been chipped away at for years. "Right wing governments and employers have engineered massive change in the direction of the EU vision. Judgements in the European Courts like Viking and Laval were the green light to massive assaults on organised labour across Europe, but especially in the UK. "From Lindsey Oil refinery to food production we have seen workers recruited in certain member states by agencies and exploited. "They were shipped in "literally" in order to undermine the terms and conditions of existing workers on those contracts. "Both sets of workers have been let down by UK Government, the EU Commission and the European Court. "On exploitation – don't blame the exploited; damn those who exploit. This has been repeated up and down the country over recent years. "And that is part of the discontent that extreme political parties turn into xenophobic rhetoric to win votes. "Look past the simplistic tag and face the challenge of exploitation. Let's reach out to those migrant workers not attack them, but organise and protect them." "All over Europe there are labour agencies exploiting temporary workers on a massive scale," Kenny continued. “EU estimates show approximately one million are exploited as 'posted' workers and sent to work away from their home country every year." But Next, which employs 50,000 workers at over 500 stores, call centres and warehouses in the UK and Ireland, insisted: "We simply can't recruit enough local people." This although the Yorkshire and Humber region where the warehouse is, has the second-highest unemployment rate in the country, after the north-east, with 7.2 per cent of people out of work compared with the national average of 6.1 per cent. The GMB is currently running a campaign calling on Next to pay wages and give employees enough hours of work for people to live on. In January Next said that it was generating more cash than could be invested in the business so it paid a special £300m dividend to shareholders. And in March Next reported a 12 per cent increase in annual profits to £695m. Next has also said it expected profits in 2014 to rise to £770m. The GMB is seeking £7.85 per hour outside and £9.20 per hour in London as a step towards the £10 per hour set by the GMB Congress. According to the Guardian, Lord Wolfson was paid £4.6m last year. This year, his basic salary rises 2 per cent to £1.1m but his total pay is likely to exceed £6.2m with his long-term incentive plan and annual bonus included – even after excluding a bonus he has chosen to share among staff for the last two years. Wolfson has donated more than £400,000 to the Conservative Party since 2006 and advised the party on economic policy before the last general election. He was made a peer by the government in July 2010. He has had no formal role with the Conservatives since 2010, but is married to Eleanor Shawcross, one of George Osborne's economic advisors.  |
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