Tube cleaners challenge Boris Johnson
RMT Cleaners Grade Secretary leads chants of
On Wednesday, tube cleaners and supporters, including Feminist Fightback, Campaign Against Immigration Controls and John McDonnell MP and Jeremy Corbyn MP demonstrated outside City Hall to demand that Boris keeps his promise of a living wage for all tube cleaners.
Boris has been in the press this week with the publishing of the study he commissioned into an amnesty. Yet his real approach to migrant labour can be found in how he has dealt with the tube cleaners’ campaign: promise a living wage, fail to deliver and preside over cleaning contractors who targeted union reps with immigration checks to break the RMT’s organisation. His idea of an amnesty would deny even those who met its hurdles access to the public services their taxes pay for, and would further delegitimise the thousands who wouldn’t meet its strict criteria.
Feminist Fightback is proud to stand by tube cleaners as they demand a living wage for all. It’s time Boris coughs up, brings the cleaners in house and starts talking about regularisation for all migrant workers.
Mass hunger strike continues at Yarl’s Wood
19 JUNE 2009. - After being unable to speak to an Immigration Officer, Juliette Umoru, Lorraine and more than 40 women detained in the Families Section in Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre have decided to maintain the hunger strike until their demands are met.
Today is the 5th day of the hunger strike but the prisoners have not heard any news from the Immigration Officers.
According to Juliette Umoru and Lorraine they only want to sort out their demands. The prisoners urge:
1) Relocate a 30 year old woman with epilepsy. She is not receiving medical attention and suffers from convulsions constantly. She is lying on the floor most of the time. The other inmates don’t help her as they do not want to make a fatal mistake.
2) Resolve the situation of a 5 months pregnant woman, who was arrested two months ago and who is extremely sick. She stays in bed all day and does not receive medical attention.
3) Resolve the situation of almost 20 children (between 5 months and 2 years old). They are with their mothers and able to play with other kids, but they are showing clear signs of tension, pressure, distress and anxiety. Some women have been detained for more than two months and the children can’t understand the situation.
4) Talk to the Immigration Officer, Sarah (no surname supplied), who must listen these requests. (Sarah’s name was suggested by the Serco’s manager).
5) Adequate access to health care, quality food and real privacy.
6) Restore the communications between Juliette Umoru and her husband Steve, who is not allowed to talk to her.
Mr Umoru took part in the demonstration last Wednesday in Yarls Wood. Guards took away all the protesters and pulled the men away from the women. Juliette’s husband Steve was injured and bleeding.
According to Juliette and Lorraine during the protests about 40 guards confronted the men involved. One of them was Juliette’s husband, who was injured in the struggle. Also, Juliette’s child fell from her back and an officer stepped on the child. “I was screaming and ask him to see what he was doing, but he did not listened and looked the other way.”
Although the hunger strike now reaches five days, the staff of Yarls Wood and the Home Office have shown total indifference to the demands. “They do not care at all what happen to us. It doesn’t bother them if our children are suffering or having problems, they don’t mind if a women are sick and convulsing,” says Lorraine.
There are between 20 and 40 women waiting in this section (Families Section); every day some of them are deported usually without even knowing the Home Office answer to their appeals.
Fast-track asylum decisions are against their rights. “The Home Office – they say – has the last word and doesn’t respect the law or basic procedures”.
The Dove Section
<!– @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>Something similar is happening at Dove Section in Yarls Wood. For two days, Tuesday and Wednesday, more than 100 women detained staged a hunger strike to protest the way they are being deported to their countries of residence. Some of them are deported the day following their arrest, without even being allowed to get a lawyer, inform their family and friends of their status or even just keep their belongings.
Women arrested are from China, Pakistan, India, Latin America, India, China and other countries. Every day a minimum of six women are deported, wearing the same clothes they arrived in because they were not allowed to get their own clothes. In addition, many of them did not have time to hear the answer to their appeal. Many of them don’t speak English and are unable to implement their rights.
It is reported that a woman tried to commit suicide. She cut her veins of both hands but a guard stopped her and took her to the hospital. This is something that is happening on a daily basis. Depression, anxiety, fear, anxiety, uncertainty … “It is a psychological torture. We are conscious we have nothing to lose. They bring the TV to show all the comforts we have, but they do not mind that we have no rights, even to know how our cases are developing.”
According to them, their appeals are not being studied in a reasonable length of time and many are deported without having a response from the Home Office. Inmates also complain that the food they receive is inadequate.
Obviously Home Office and Yarl’s Wood are violating the basic rights of the prisoners.
Mónica del Pilar Uribe M.
Take action to support Yarl’s Wood detainees
- Picket SERCO today - Fri 19 June - 12pm-1pm - at their head office, Hand Court, Holborn
- Contact SERCO (who run Yarl’s Wood) and demand that the strikers’ demands are met - (0)1344 386300 - homeaffairs@serco.com
- Contact Yarl’s Wood and ask that communications between Juliette Omuru and her partner Steve are restored and the strikers demands are met - 01234 821000
- Contact Alaister Burt MP for Yarls Wood - burta@parliament.uk
- Forward this news to any email lists you are on or press contacts you have
- If you can donate towards credit for detainees’ mobiles or travel costs for solidarity visits, email feminist.fightback@gmail.com and a few of us will bring it up when we visit on Sunday
Support hunger strikers at Yarl’s Wood!
From No Borders Brighton:
Yarl’s Wood Hunger Strikers Attacked
Little has been in the press about this, apart bizarrely enough the Daily Mail http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1193495/Immigration-centre-detainees-stage-hunger-strike.html.
Today whilst on the phone to the wife of one of the people named in the Daily Mail article, Solomon Ojehonmon, a migrant support worker was witness to the brutal attack by SERCO staff on Solomom and a number of others who were taking part in a peaceful sit in as part of their protests.
We ask people to phone the main switch board at Yarl’s Wood on 01234 821000 and ask about the status of Solomom and his family (Room C145).
Detainee Solidarity are also organising a picket outside the SERCO office at 22 Hand Court, Holborn, WC1V 6JF this Friday 19th June from 12 noon to 1 pm in support of the hunger strikers.
National call for action - defend SOAS cleaners
Students and allies at the University of London’s School of School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) have occupied the university to protest against managers’ attacks on migrant workers, when nine cleaners from the university were taken into detention after a dawn raid by immigration police on Friday. Five have already been deported and the two remaining are in Yarl’s Wood detention centre.
We see this raid as indicative of a current political climate, which sees not only corporatisation of universities but the extension of surveillance and border processing to its institutions, affecting both staff and students. We need to form a national strategy uniting workers, staff, students and the wider community against racist immigration controls and erosion of workers rights.
***SUs contact your UNISON branch and speak to your cleaners. Find out which company they are contracted to, and identify individuals at risk. Contact us to receive translated booklets to help your cleaners prepare, and give them emergency contacts.
***As a long term more sustainable measure, campaign to unionise workers and bring them in house for equal protection of university staff.
***Take action against ISS (the company our cleaners are contracted to) and the Home Office.
***Follow us on http://freesoascleaners.blogspot.com. Join our occupation, send messages of support, sign our online petition and keep watch for upcoming demonstrations.
BACKGROUND
The cleaners won the London Living Wage and trade union representation after a successful “Justice for Cleaners” campaign. Activists believe the raid is managers’ “revenge” for the campaign.
John McDonnell MP said: “As living wage campaigns are building in strength, we are increasingly seeing the use of immigration statuses to attack workers fighting against poverty wages and break trade union
organising.
Immigration officers were called in by cleaning contractor ISS, even though it has employed many of the cleaners for years. Cleaning staff were told to attend an ‘emergency staff meeting’ at 6.30am on Friday
(June 12); a false pretext to lure the cleaners into a closed space from which the immigration officers in full riot gear were hiding to interrogate and arrest them, before escorting them to the detention
centre. They were allowed no legal or trade union representation, or even a translator (many are native Spanish speakers).
Five of the SOAS cleaners have already been deported, and the others could face deportation within days. One has had a suspected heart attack and was denied access to medical assistance and even water. One
was over 6 months pregnant. Many have families who have no idea of their whereabouts.
The management of SOAS, a university that prides itself on its global outlooks and left wing politics were complicit in the immigration raid by enabling the officers to hide in the meeting room beforehand and
giving no warning to them. Cleaning contractor ISS used the same tactics against tube cleaners that went on strike with the result that key activists were deported.
Ken Loach says “Recent action by Unison to secure better wages and conditions at SOAS was good news. Now we wonder if the SOAS cleaners are being targeted because they dared to organise as trade unionists.”
Watch this space for news of demonstrations and other actions!