So, as we hit the last month of the year, there is still plenty of interesting
and important things happening in Glasgow. This week sees the ‘Week of Action
Against Workfare and Sanctions’ kick off; there are be online blockades/
actions all week – continuing today (see below) – that you can participant in
no matter where you are (see the Boycott Workfare site linked to below for
more details, including addresses, twitter accounts, and background details).
there are protests planned in Glasgow and Edinburgh – (see
below for the former, and on the Boycott Workfare site for the latter).
Elsewhere in Glasgow, the Campaign for Isa Muaza and other hunger-strikers
detained by the Home Office continues this week, and there’s also the launch a
food and social support network.
As ever, if there’s anything happening that you know about and that we should
be featuring here – send in to the email address below.
And as a last point – solidarity with all those on strike in FE today!
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Tuesday 3rd December
– Week of Action Against Workfare and Sanctions: Day Two (Online)
Wednesday 4th December
– Justice for all the Hunger Strikers! (Unity)
Wednesday 4th December
– Winter Warmers Film Screening: ‘Dirt! The Movie’ (Urban Roots)
Thursday 5th December
– Local Food Social Support Hubs Launch Event (Woodlands Community Garden)
Saturday 7th December
– Stop Workfare! End Benefit Sanctions! (Scottish Unemployed Workers Network)
Monday 9th December
– Moral Judgement & Moral Emotion: What we’ve learned about Mass Atrocity
(Glasgow Skeptics)
Tuesday 10th December
– Clydeside IWW Meeting
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Tuesday 3rd December
– Week of Action Against Workfare and Sanctions: Day Two
Online: Everywhere
Organised by Boycott Workfare – Day Two: online targeting of the companies
that are profiting from making young people work without pay on Traineeships.
Traineeships are about providing cheap labour, driving down wages, massaging
unemployment figures and conditioning our young people for a life of poverty
and jumping through endless hoops in search of a job.
They’re a fairly new scheme that targets 16-24 year olds with more unpaid
work. Traineeships involve a work placement of up to six months for which the
employer is not even required to pay travel expenses. The promise at the end
of six months’ unpaid work? You may then be eligible to work for £2.67 an hour
as an apprentice.
Used together, traineeships and apprenticeships have the potential to
massively undercut the minimum wage on the high street and elsewhere. The
government is of course rolling out compulsory education for 17-18 year-olds
and unpaid work looks set to make up an increasingly large component of that
education. Benefits cuts for 18-25 year-olds are also threatened.
There are many companies happy to take advantage of young people and profit
from their lack of opportunity and today let’s take action against them.
Contact them by phone, email or on social media.
Kwikfit
(http://feweek.co.uk/2013/09/19/kwik-fits-unpaid-traineeship-branded-unacceptable/)
Kwikfit’s hit the headlines for expecting 39 hours of unpaid work a week from
its traineeships and advertising them across the UK. It’s already faced huge
public criticism on social media. Let’s make sure it knows the pressure hasn’t
gone away and it needs to pay the people who work for it.
You could comment by phone or email, on its Facebook page or Youtube channel.
Tweet to @Kwik_Fit
Subway
This multi-national brand with $18.1 billion in sales in a year, is recruiting
multiple traineeships in Blackpool to “prepare food and serve customers” for
21 hours’ work a week each. currently advertising for at least three
placements, this shop is saving itself £3180 on the wages bill in the next two
months. Let’s hope the young people weren’t planning on buying any Christmas
presents.
Share your thoughts on Subway’s Facebook page or take a look at their contact
details.
Tweet to @SUBWAYUKIreland
Toywatch
Here is a luxury watch shop offering unpaid work for six months in its store
in Westfield to young people when clearly it should and could offer them paid
work and on the job training. You can contact Toywatch and let them know what
you think on shop@toy-watch.com, comment on their Facebook page, give them a
call on 020 3301 8744, or pay them a visit.
Tweet to @ToyWatchWorld
Novotel
Novotel’s 4* hotel in Southampton is also profiting from 42 hours of unpaid
work in its kitchens each week. Its contact details can be found here.
Got a few more minutes?
Have a dig here and pick the companies you’d like to contact about their
exploitation of young people to replace paid work.
Want more info on traineeships? Hear it from the horse’s mouth here and here.
– For the rest of the week: There’s online action every day this week – please
keep an eye on the website and get involved!
There’s demos across the UK this week. Check out the growing list here.
On Feb 15th – Take part in a day of sharing skills and information to
challenge workfare and sanctions.
Thanks for helping make the week of action huge!
For Further Info: http://www.boycottworkfare.org/?p=3123
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Wednesday 4th December
– Justice for all the Hunger Strikers! (Unity)
Festival Court, 200 Brand Street, Glasgow G51 1DH
3pm
Isa Muazu has been returned to the UK after a failed attempt at deportation by
Theresa May and the Home Office. Isa is critically ill, and it’s essential
that he is released from detention immediately.
It will be great if everyone could unite once again and show their support for
every person who is on hunger strike while waiting for a decision from UKBA.
We all need to remember, people are seeking asylum for HOPE and better FUTURE.
We cannot destroy dreams. We need to show our support for ISA and for many
others on hunger strike.
Please join us WEDNESDAY 4TH DECEMBER at 3PM outside the HOME OFFICE in BRAND
STREET.
For Further Info – http://unitycentreglasgow.org/?page_id=895
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Wednesday 4th December
– Winter Warmers Film Screening: ‘Dirt! The Movie’ (Urban Roots)
The Glad Cafe, 1006a Pollokshaws Road, Glasgow, G41 2HG
6.30 – 9pm
Film Screening hosted by Urban Roots, the second documentary film from their 5
elements series; all about our precious soil.
Directed and produced by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow, the film takes you
inside the wonders of the soil. It tells the story of Earth’s most valuable
and underappreciated source of fertility–from its miraculous beginning to its
crippling degradation.
The opening scenes of the film dive into the wonderment of the soil. Made from
the same elements as the stars, plants and animals, and us, “dirt is very much
alive.” Though, in modern industrial pursuits and clamor for both profit and
natural resources, our human connection to and respect for soil has been
disrupted. “Drought, climate change, even war are all directly related to the
way we are treating dirt.”
DIRT! the Movie–narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis–brings to life the environmental,
economic, social and political impact that the soil has. It shares the stories
of experts from all over the world who study and are able to harness the
beauty and power of a respectful and mutually beneficial relationship with
soil.
DIRT! the Movie is simply a movie about dirt. The real change lies in our
notion of what dirt is. The movie teaches us: “When humans arrived 2 million
years ago, everything changed for dirt. And from that moment on, the fate of
dirt and humans has been intimately linked.” But more than the film and the
lessons that it teaches, DIRT the Movie is a call to action.
“The only remedy for disconnecting people from the natural world is connecting
them to it again.” What we’ve destroyed, we can heal.
Dirt! The Movie was an official nominee for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival
and won several other awards, including the best documentary award at the 2009
Visions/Voices Environmental Film Festival and the “Best film for our future”
award at the 2009 Mendocino Film Festival.
Film Info (and Trailer) – http://www.thedirtmovie.org/
For Further Info – http://www.urbanroots.org.uk/workshops/
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Thursday 5th December
– Local Food Social Support Hubs Launch Event (Woodlands Community Garden)
The Albany Centre, 44 Ashley Street, Glasgow, G3 6DS
4pm – 6pm
Hosted by Woodlands Community Garden. Woodlands Community Garden are launching
a new project to tackle food poverty by establishing local food social support
hubs. These hubs will:
– provide free and healthy food in a supportive environment….
– host free cookery classes enabling people in learning about cooking
healthily on limited budgets.
– use food as a tool to bringing people and support organisations together.
– encourage peer to peer support through the making of social links and
volunteer opportunities.
– take place at a range of venues across the community.
We shall be working in partnership with a range of organisations including
GCVS Albany Centre, Flourish House and West End ACTS (Action of Churches
Together in Scotland).
Join us at our launch event to find out more
ADVANCE BOOKING REQUIRED – BOOK YOUR PLACE ONLINE AT
http://woodlandscommunitygarden.eventbrite.com/
For Further Info – https://www.facebook.com/events/753842307962828/
or email – woodlandscommunityinfo@gmail.com
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Saturday 7th December
– Stop Workfare! End Benefit Sanctions! (Scottish Unemployed Workers Network)
70-74 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow
2.30 – 4.30pm
Called by Scottish Unemployed Workers’ Network, as part of the Week of Action
Against Workfare and Sanctions.
Protest/stall against the continued use of workfare/forced labour schemes.
They put the blame for unemployment on the shoulders of the unemployed instead
of blaming the only economic system in history that actually benefits from
unemployment, they allow companies to enrich themselves by using unpaid labour
and they undermine the position of those in paid employment.
Benefit sanctions are legalised robbery. We all pay into the benefit system
and we have a right to use it when we need to. Benefit sanctions rules are
often so arbitrary and ambiguous that people often don’t know they’re breaking
the rules until they’ve had their benefits stopped. Then they’re expected to
live on nothing for up to 3 years.
Let’s tell them to shove their workfare and their benefits sanctions where the
sun doesn’t shine!
For Further Info – http://www.scottishunemployedworkers.net/
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Monday 9th December
– Moral Judgement & Moral Emotion: What we’ve learned about Mass Atrocity
(Glasgow Skeptics)
The Admiral Bar, 72a Waterloo Street, Glasgow, G2 7DA
7pm
Talk hosted by Glasgow Skeptics. The Last Glasgow Skeptics talk of the year.
While philosophers, theologians, and legal theorists have spent millennia
concerned with how we ought to make moral judgements, psychologists have spent
the last century studying how we do make them.
What we have learned is surprising; contrary to most philosophical systems,
religious traditions, and to most legal theory, moral judgement is a complex
interweaving of emotion and reason. Depending on how these two sources of
information are combined in our minds, our moral judgements can demonstrate
both profound, and bizzare, features that fly in the face of our moral self-
image.
Across many studies, psychologists have mapped the forces that shape our moral
judgements, from social pressures, to automatic perceptual factors,
fundamental emotional facets of our minds, and how we process causality and
time.
Adam will review several of the leading psychological models of moral
judgement, and the evidence for them, before then outlining what we know about
how people judge instances of mass atrocity and genocide, and how these models
are converging on providing answers to why we seem unable to prevent these
tragedies.
For Further Info – http://glasgow.skepticsinthepub.org/
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Tuesday 10th December
– Clydeside IWW Meeting
Electron Club, 1st Floor of CCA, Sauchiehall Street/Scott Street, Glasgow, G2
3JD
7pm – 9pm
Branch meeting of the Clydeside General Membership Branch of the Industrial
Workers of the World.
Founded in 1905, the IWW is open to all workers. Don’t let the “industrial”
part fool you. Our members include teachers, cleaners, social workers, retail
workers, construction workers, bartenders, and computer programmers. Only
bosses are not allowed to join. If you are currently unemployed or are a
retired, you can still join. You have a legal right to join a union and your
membership is confidential. We are a volunteer-driven union, and this means
we, not union bosses or bureaucrats, run the union. The IWW is not controlled
by or affiliated with any political party or political movement. No money goes
to politicians. Membership dues are used to maintain the union and assist
organising campaigns. As a result, monthly dues are low.
Clydeside GMB is a general membership branch, which means it includes members
from a range of jobs. Recently, we’ve taken part in a range of actions,
including pickets against companies which use Workfare labour. So come along
and meet us, and find out what the One Big Union is all about. It has a great
history, and a great future – in an increasingly globalised economy, workers,
too, need to organise globally.
For Further Info – http://iwwscotland.wordpress.com/about/
Facebook Page – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Clydeside-IWW/216550781713688
Glasgow Anarchist Federation 