OPEN PLANNING MEETING 9TH SEPTEMBER HANDS OFF MY WORKMATE

Dear friends

SOAS UNISON, SOAS UCU and SOAS Students’ Union would like to invite you to take part in an open planning meeting to discuss our campaign to bring back our cleaners and how to build the teach-in on migrant workers  that we are organising for Saturday 17 October 2009 following the brutal UKBA raid on our cleaning staff in June.

Details of the meeting—at which we want to plan how to build the conference—are below. Please feel free to forward this invitation.

The conference will take the form of a series of workshops and seminars followed by a general plenary, at which we will formally launch the “Hands off my Workmate” (and “hands off my student,  “hands off my patient”) initiative—a broad based tool kit designed to build opposition to immigration controls in workplaces, colleges, schools, hospitals, etc.

The purpose of the conference is to highlight the precarious working conditions of migrant workers in Britain today and to use it as a campaigning base to bring this to the public’s and trade union’s attention.  The use of immigration raids against migrants who organise trade unions is becoming more frequent and attacks on migrants are gathering pace, with trades unionists in hospitals, colleges, benefit centres and local services increasingly asked to take on the functions of immigration officers. We wish to build the broadest based unity in defence of migrant workers and against racism and are aiming to get wide participation in the conference—and to encourage discussion and participation in the “hands off” initiative.

Below is the planned agenda for the day. Aside from migrant workers, authors on relevant subjects and speakers from universities we have invited representatives from trades unions to speak on the day and we hope that by the 9th we will have an impressive list of speakers to lead off sessions. However, this conference will be mainly workshop based and allow a great deal of room for discussion from the floor so that activists can participate.

We hope that the planning meeting will be a working event so please come armed with ideas of ways to highlight the issues and advertise the event!

We hope you will be able to attend and help ensure the event is as successful and effective as possible.

OPEN PLANNING MEETING for hands off my workmate  Weds 9th Sept 2009 6pm Room 116

Main SOAS building (off Russell Sq)

Sandy Nicoll                                          Graham Dyer                     Ben Sellers

SOAS UNISON Branch Secretary     SOAS UCU President      SOAS Students’ Union Co-President

PROVISIONAL AGENDA

MORNING Plenary: welcome migrant workers as part of the mainstream

WORKSHOPS: (3 groups of four)

* Bread and roses too: how migrant workers have always been central to unions

* Winning the living wage

* Busting the migration myths: challenging the racists

* Globalisation and profits: How do borders fit in

* Poverty, war, neoliberalism, migrant labour in the global economy (why people move)

* Stopping the raids: legal and union strategies to defend migrant workers

* As above in another session

* The border in the workplace: restricting welfare and housing- who benefits

* the citizenship agenda: tests, oaths and amnesties—where should we stand?

* The feminisation of migrant labour

* What will the recession mean for migrant workers? Arguing jobs for all

* We won’t spy on students; education for all.

MAIN Plenary: “hands off our workmates, student, patients and friends”…..

ADDITIONAL CLOSED SESSION FOR MIGRANT WORKERS: LEGAL BRIEFING

Home Office: ‘Support our wars or you’ll be denied a UK passport’

New rules on citizenship could bar immigrants who use the ancient British right to protest

By Jane Merrick, Political Editor

Independent, Sunday, 2 August 2009

Immigrants who take part in protests against British troops could be denied citizenship of this country under controversial new Home Office rules.

The Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, will launch a consultation tomorrow on a new points-based system for would-be migrants according to their behaviour, as well as skills and qualifications.

Mr Johnson, writing in the News of the World, said: “Bad behaviour will be penalised, and only those with enough points will earn the right to a British passport.”

While he did not explicitly point to those who take part in anti-war demonstrations, the newspaper reported that this would be included in examples of “bad behaviour”.

But there was confusion over the policy last night, as the Home Office appeared to backtrack on whether protesters would be penalised.

An aide to Mr Johnson said the Home Office was consulting on what constituted bad behaviour, but refused to comment on the issue of protesters.

Earlier this year, troops on a homecoming march in Luton were jeered by Muslim protesters carrying placards that read “Butchers” and “Animals”. However, there was no suggestion that the protesters were, in fact, immigrants, so the alleged rules would not apply in any case.

While inciting hatred is a crime, the suggestion that taking part in an anti-war protest could be a bar to a British passport would be highly controversial and draw accusations of pandering to the right.

The new rules would also see the period for which foreigners have to work in the UK before becoming eligible for citizenship doubling from five to 10 years. Applicants from outside the EU are already subject to a points-based system that covers skills, but the tougher rules would sever the “link between temporary work and becoming a permanent UK citizen”, Mr Johnson wrote.

“Already we require that people earn the right to become citizens by paying taxes, speaking English and obeying the law,” Mr Johnson added. “Tomorrow I will go even further, unveiling my new citizenship proposals which will require that people earn points for, among other things, their skills, their job and their qualifications.”

As Mr Johnson risked charges of playing tough on immigration, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, stoked the row over the Conservative Party’s new alliance with the far right in Europe. Mr Miliband issued a thinly veiled attack on a Polish politician accused of anti-Semitism.

The Foreign Secretary said David Cameron’s decision to support Michal Kaminski as leader of the Tories’ new Euro-grouping had provoked “real cause for concern” among Britain’s Jewish community. Mr Kaminski, a member of the far-right Polish Law and Justice Party, has denied claims that he opposed an apology by his countrymen in 2001 for the massacre of hundreds of Jews in Jedwabne in July 1941.

The Foreign Secretary, the son of Jewish refugees of the Holocaust, said: “David Cameron has shown little appetite for tough decisions in his career to date. On this rare occasion, he has decided to expend some serious political capital. And on what? On supporting a man like Michal Kaminski for a position of influence in the European Parliament over a moderate and loyal member of his own party.

“It has given key communities in Britain real cause for concern. Against the best advice of foreign leaders and British business, he drove the Tories out of the mainstream and into the right-wing margins of Europe. This reversion to the right-wing extremes of his own party should give people a strong sense of what both he and his party believe in, and it has nothing to do with the best interests of Britain.”

Mr Kaminksi has insisted he is not anti-Semitic, and claims he has spent “a lifetime of work supporting Israel and the Jewish community in Poland”.

Immigration Minister Retaliates Against Protest Over Artists’ Visa Restrictions

MEDIA RELEASE 15/7/2009, 18:50PM

Immigration Minister Retaliates Against Protest Over Artists’ Visa Restrictions

Civil liberties campaigners, Manifesto Club, have been waiting for a response from the Government since February 2009 when it launched a petition against new draconian Home Office restrictions that have caused mayhem across arts organizations throughout the UK.

The new regulations, which replaced the old work permits system, affect non-EU artists and academics invited by arts organisations to appear or perform in the UK. The campaign was launched with a letter to the editor of The Observer:
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2009/feb/22/9>

The response came yesterday in the form of an angry letter to the Guardian newspaper by the Government Minister. On Tuesday 14 July the Rt Hon. Phil Woolas MP, Minister of State for borders and immigration responded furiously to attacks by the writer and political columnist Henry Porter on The Guardian’s Comment is Free.  Porter, who described the Minister’s new immigration system that bars “artists from visiting this country. . .” as being “. . .some of the most contemptible ever devised, even by this narrow-minded apology for a government.”

Until being directly challenged on Monday 13 July by Henry Porter writing in the Guardian, Mr Woolas had been reticent about making public statements concerning the new draconian immigration rules that have led to cancelled concerts, deportation of musicians, heavy-handed and humiliating treatment of artists by border agency officials and UK embassy staff. Mr Porter accused the Minister of creating “some kind of campaign against poets with strange sounding names and of Muslim origin who want to come to this country” Mr Woolas replied:  “Henry Porter’s recent piece on Britain’s visa system was at best naive, and at worst designed to deliberately misinform people about our immigration system.”

The row was sparked by three internationally renowned poets, Dorothea Rosa Herliany from Indonesia and Moroccan poets Hassan Najmi & Widad Benmoussa who were invited to this year’s Ledbury Poetry Festival, Britain’s biggest poetry event, but were denied access to the UK and unable to appear <http://www.poetry-festival.com/> . The festival ran from July 3 and ended on Sunday July 12.

Ledbury Poetry Festival Director Chloe Garner said: “I’m devastated, this is hugely embarrassing for the festival. These new regulations make it almost impossible to for us to programme international poets. I feel ashamed that the UK is effectively becoming a fortress.”

The Ledbury Poetry Festival is the latest casualty of the new ruling on 27 November 2008 by the UK Home Office, (it introduced a new points-based system and harsh visa restrictions), which makes it much harder for international artists and academics outside the EU to come into the country. The measures are having a disastrous effect on the Arts right across the UK.

The Manifesto Club are spearheading a petition against the home office restrictions on invited non-EU artists, which was launched in The Observer on 22 February <http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/22/immigration-arts-gormley>.
The group also launched a report in The Times <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6418997.ece

> on 3 June entitled, UK Arts and Culture: Cancelled by Order of the Home Office.  The report illustrates numerous incidents of how the new visa restrictions have led to the jeopardising of many arts events including concerts, exhibitions and artistic collaborations.  The petition has gained over 6,670 signatures including writers Benjamin Zephaniah, Maureen Duffy, Hari Kunzru, artists Antony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread, Zarina Bhimji, Jeremy Deller and theatre makers Nicholas Hytner and Jatinder Verma.

Manick Govinda, artists’ producer for Artsadmin and a Manifesto Club campaigner, who started the petition says: “it’s outrageous that artists and poets, who are not in the same income bracket as international celebrities, are being discriminated against because of where they come from and how little they earn from their practice.  This is yet further evidence of political bureaucracy dictating our relationships with artists for whom we have the utmost respect and admiration, who wish to share their art to a UK audience.”

Contact:

Manick Govinda
Manifesto Club/Artsadmin
0790 535 7213
020 7247 5102
manick@artsadmin.co.uk

Protest outside the Home Office 5:30-6:30 Tuesday 30 June

Let them stay..

Our cleaners are not criminals!

Staff and students at SOAS are calling for Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for the Home Office, to grant leave to remain with permission to work for Marina Silva and Rosa dePerez, two of the SOAS cleaners picked up in a brutal immigration raid on 12^thJune. Marina, who is 63 and has applied for asylum, following het brutal honour killing of her husband and threats to her own life, and Rosa, who has four children to support in Nicaragua, remain in detention following the raid. Their colleagues, including six months pregnant Luzia, were deported within 48 hours of the raid.

Cleaners at SOAS had demanded and organised for dignity at work with many joining a union. They had succeeded in winning union recognition from the privatised cleaning firm ISS and raising their pay to the London Living Wage—higher than other colleges in the area. It is of grave concern that the raid, organised by ISS, took place shortly after this campaign and on the very day on which UNISON was due to protest in support of an activist who had played a leading role in organising the cleaners at SOAS.

Please support our campaign:

Lobby the Home Office, Tuesday 30^th June, 5.30-6.30pm

2 marsham st, millbank, Sw1

Sign the letter requesting leave to remain is granted to Marina and Rosa

http://freesoascleaners.blogspot.com/2009/06/send-this-letter-to-home-office-now.html

For more information go to: http://freesoascleaners.blogspot.com/

Statement from the 17 June meeting

Dear all,

please check out the statement from the 17 June meeting, and comment on it:

17 June Meeting statement

The goal is to get something we can agree on.

best

Kirsten

SOAS UNISON rally on Friday at 6PM; CAIC meeting on Saturday, 20 June at 2PM

Meet for a rally called by UNISON at SOAS on Friday at 6pm!

Show SOAS management that attention hasn’t been taken off them and stand witness on the site where 9 cleaners were take into detention and others forced to go underground a week previously. After the rally there will be music and food to celebrate solidarity and resistance and carry on discussions about how to build the campaign!
Campaign Against Immigration Controls meeting at SOAS on Saturday, 2PM

On Saturday, join Campaign Against Immigration Controls at SOAS for a meeting to discuss how to build the wider campaign of migrant worker struggle and against immigration controls – 2pm-5pm, G50. Details here: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/06/432527.html

Minutes of the first meeting

Here are the minutes of the first meeting of the group, which took place on the 17th of June at UCL.

Meeting minutes

Meeting statement