Train drivers affiliate to HOPI
Delegates to the conference of ASLEF, the train driver’s union, voted overwhelmingly this morning to affiliate to Hands Off the People of Iran. This is great news after last week’s affiliation by civil servant’s union PCS, and shows once again that HOPI’s opposition to both war and the Iranian regime is far from ‘too complicated’ for people to understand, as the Socialist Worker’s Party would have us believe. On the contrary, this sort of working class solidarity is part of the ABC’s for most trade unionists, and at the ASLEF conference, in the absence of any SWP delegates, there was no opposition to the motion.
Hopefully we will continue to bring more British unions on board, and deepen our links with the trade unions, women’s, and student’s movements in Iran. This will allow us to provide the most effective solidarity possible; in their daily struggles against the theocracy, and against the threat of sanctions and outright war.
Good stuff, comrades. Will there be denunciations of ASLEF and PCS as Islamophobes and pro-imperialists for voting to support HOPI? Doubt it!
The heading “Train Drivers Affiliate To HOPI” is somewhat misleading.
Actually it’s the train drivers union ASLEF that has decided to affiliate itself….NOT the majority of drivers, who quite frankly could not care less!
Many people, myself included, have left ASLEF because we are sick and tired of having left wing propaganda shoved down our throats on an ever increasing basis.
Well considering it is a union conference with delegates elected from the membership, that represent the membership with the majority of motions coming out of the membership, then it is not that misleading is it.
And it doesn’t say “ALL train drivers…” does it?
You will find that the delegates are elected from a small number of union activists because most train drivers are not interested in the direction ASLEF is heading.
The vast majority of us don’t give a damn about the left wing dogma that ASLEF continually feed us. In fact, ASLEF are losing members in droves at the moment because the ordinary rank and file members are fed up of living on a diet of Castro, Chavez, politically correct nonsense, and other lost causes.
If ASLEF put as much effort into looking after the interests of their members as they do poking their noses into things that don’t concern them, then they would not be in the quagmire they are in at this moment in time.
I suggest you actually take the time and effort to speak to train drivers about what they really think of “democratic” ASLEF.