THE MORNING STAR

 WORKERS are rebelling today against a decision by the Co-op to sell off part of its insurance business to a firm that refuses to recognise trade unions.

The protest will take place in Rochdale, the birthplace of Britain’s co-operative movement, where in 1844 a co-op was established as an alternative to profiteers who sold poor-quality and adulterated food and provisions to the working class.

Today’s Co-op business is huge, taking in insurance, banking and other services in addition to its well-known retail arm.

The company is to sell part of its insurance business to a company called Markerstudy, which will see 200 workers sacked.

Unite regional secretary Ritchie James said: “The management of Co-operative Insurance needs to wake up to the reality of their actions.

“The workforce won’t be silenced by their pleas of innocence. The planned sale of this insurance business is without question a betrayal of the values of the co-operative movement.

“The decision to sell this heavily unionised organisation to a company which has no regard for the voice of its employees has sent shock waves through our movement.

“The loss of 200 jobs simply adds insult to injury of this proud workforce.”

Rochdale Borough Council leader Allen Brett said: “As council leader for the town that gave birth to co-operation I am appalled at this disgraceful decision which goes against every progressive principle the Co-op has stood for since its foundation.

Rochdale MP Tony Lloyd, who is lodging an early-day motion in Parliament, said: “It’s not just me that expects a level of ethical behaviour by the co-operative movement, and that’s why the decision of Co-operative Insurance to ignore the needs of its own workforce is so unacceptable.”

Peet Seeger's Greatest Legacy

Pete Seeger's greatest legacy after a long life filled with music and activism may have been saving the Hudson river, according to those who worked with him to save the waterway.

“The Hudson was saved by a lot of people,” said Robert Kennedy Jr, who has sued industry for polluting the river as an environmental lawyer for the Waterkeeper Alliance. He said he had known Seeger for 30 years.

“But for a lot of us, Pete was the first guy. He started the train, and we all jumped on the moving train.”

Seeger's environmental activism didn't stop with the river. Last September, he put in a surprise appearance with Willie Nelson and Neil Young at a Farm Aid benefit. He added an extra verse to his anthem “This land was made for you and me” by singing: “This land was made to be frack-free.”

The folk singer also campaigned for the shutdown of the ageing Indian Point nuclear reactor.

But it was the Hudson river – close to where Seeger lived in a log cabin he built himself in the 1940s – that was the main focus of his activism.

The river was a raging sewer when Seeger set out to save it in the 1960s, a liquid dump for industries that grew along its banks, full of PCBs from the electrical industry, sewage discharges, pesticides, and other contaminants. The main traffic was cement and oil barges. The public largely stayed away.

Local lore has it the chemical stew was so potent and so toxic it was seen as a cure for bore worms and other parasites feeding off wooden hulls. Sailors from the Caribbean would reportedly come up to cleanse their boats.

Seeger, with his late wife, Toshi, built his own 19th-century wooden sloop, the Clearwater, and as he sailed the river, he began asking commercial fishermen to work with him to bring the river back.

The boat would later turn into an environmental organisation, which remains active today.

His genius was in recognising that the salvation of the river could come from grassroots activism, Kennedy said.

“He didn't go to Albany and lobby. He didn't go to Washington, and he didn't go to court. He used his guitar and his voice and his joyful manner to summon people,” he said.

The strategy turned on reminding people of the Hudson's history as a major water way, and an important fishery.

Seeger walked the banks of the river, talking to locals and trying to persuade them that it would one day be possible to swim in the Hudson again.

He wrote a song about the river called Sailing Up My Dirty Stream: “Some day, though maybe not this year / My Hudson river will once again run clear.”

And remarkably, the effort to save the Hudson worked. Under public pressure, PCBs were banned in the 1970s. In the early 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency designated a 200-mile stretch of the Hudson as a clean-up site. In 2001, the EPA embarked on another monumental project to dredge the river for sediment contaminated by PCBs. That project is ongoing.

“Pete saw the Hudson as an emblem of some of the failures of our democracy because it was taken over by large corporations who were using it as a conveyor for disposal,” Kennedy said. “But he always pointed out that the constitution of New York state said the Hudson was owned by the people of New York state,” he went on. “He used to say the Hudson river belongs to all of us.”

Roxana Waterson, Trajectories of Memory

During the twentieth century, film and video became increasingly important vehicles of memory, while the digital revolution has made video such a pervasive medium in the new century that it will become more and more vital as a source of historical evidence and reflection. While the evidence presented by visually recorded interviews certainly requires critical evaluation, there is no reason to suppose that recorded interviews are any less reliable than texts; they may in fact offer clues that a text cannot. Some of the most interesting films of memory are the work of independent filmmakers engaged in a courageous personal quest to break officially imposed silences. The article examines the potential of film to preserve memories as trace—that is, as a form of historical evidence; as event— testifying itself being a performative act which generates its own meanings and demands a dialogical engagement with/by an audience; and as trajectory—for individual memories must be transmitted in order to become social. As they are launched into the flow of collective memory, they have a chance to endure over time, multiplying available perspectives on the past. Films of memory are thus part of the struggle against the forgetting of past injustices, and ultimately have the potential to contribute to shifts in our interpretations of history.

Roxana Waterson, Trajectories of Memory: Documentary Film and the Transmission of Testimony, History and Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2007, p. 51

Henson Park Dog and Bone

 

Henson Park Trees and Sky