Liverpool

At Easter, Liverpool-SolFed made a call out to protest against working conditions at Sandemans, a company who offers “Free Tours” in Liverpool and across Europe. “Free Tour” does not mean that guides are volunteers. In Sandeman’s case they are ‘self-employed workers’ and their incomes are based on the tips that are given at the end of the tour and out of those tips workers have to pay a variable amount of money per tourist to the company. This is, according to Sandemans, a “marketing fee”.

Last Monday we reached an agreement with Alpha Care which satisfies the economic demands made by a former worker.

After a few years’ absence, SolFed is back in Liverpool. During recent months, we have been meeting with comrades in Manchester, supporting their activities and trying to find out how to restart things here. Now a few of us have decided to take the step to start the process of becoming a SolFed Local.

Report from one of our member's blog.


Today (Saturday 16th March) in Liverpool finally saw the knights in shining armour from the local Labour Party riding into town to rescue the city’s working class from the clutches of the evil Tories. Or at least that’s how the Labour left would like to portray the situation. The reality, as they surely know, is very different.

Following the Labour snub to the local campaigns in Liverpool, feelings were running high among tenants who have been involved in campaigns in the city for many months and following the mass bans of angry tenants from the Labour event page on Facebook it was clear the platform wasn’t going to tolerate any deviation from the Labour line.

In September 2012, TUC Congress overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for co-ordinated national action, up to and including a general strike.

As the first step towards putting this motion into effect, a conference took place in Liverpool on 26th January organised by Merseyside Association of Trades Union Councils. Tellingly, the conference received no funding at all from the North-West TUC.

Members of our SolFed local attended, with the aim of engaging with rank-and-file trade unionists and arguing in favour of working-class self-organisation and direct action against austerity. We distributed a leaflet which read:

A member of the Belfast local (in-formation) comrade has written this article to be read in conjunction with this piece we published last week.

On December 3rd Belfast City Council decided, by 29 votes to 21, to reduce the number of days the Union flag was flown above the city hall from 365 to 17 days a year.

Within minutes of the vote a protest of over 1000 loyalists broke through the rear gates and into the grounds of the city hall. One security guard and a number of police were injured.

A member of the Belfast local (in-formation) writes...

On 16th December 2012 about 1000 people gathered at Belfast City Hall in the wake of 2 weeks of demonstrations, some of them violent, by Loyalist protesters angered by the City Councils' decision to fly the Union Flag only on 'designated days' rather than the full 365 days a year as it has done up until now. The gathering at City Hall was billed as being 'about peace' and 'to show that Northern Ireland has moved on'. Leaving aside the facts that the approximately 1000 attendees were 1000 out of about 3500 who had proclaimed to be 'attending' on facebook, and the fact that a Loyalist demonstration the previous day at the same location was able to attract roughly similar numbers, we have to ask, 'moved on' to what?, and for whom?