From Labour Behind The Label

As part of the Playfair 2012 campaign we've been lobbying the London Games organisers (LOCOG) to ensure workers making garments and merchandise for the Olympics have their rights respected. And on paper we've had reasonable success. But problems arise when we dig deeper.

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
Frederick Douglas, Speech on the 24th anniversary of emancipation, Washington , DC, 1886

A local resident is interviewed by a foreign correspondent while rioting is taking place around the Pembury Estate in Hackney, East London.




At present Sheldon Thomas runs his own organization The Helping Hand Trust which works directly with gang members especially around extreme teenage violence giving intensive support, mentoring and gangs mediation...

It's hard to imagine there won't be a new edition, but meanwhile a trip down memory lane. (Advisory: This was a specialist publication written in 1986 and not intended for distribution on the streets)

A while ago the LDA was telling us to treat its own predictions that the London Olympics would result in 50,000 new jobs 'with caution'. Now Newham's Mayor Sirrobin has come up with the even more outrageous total of 100,000 new jobs.

Frank Morris speaks out: The demonstration outside the Olympic site on 1st March called in solidarity with the courageous whistleblower (centre) sacked for standing up for an illegally blacklisted workmate.

Remember that compact between TELCO and the London Olympic Committee in November 2004 when the Olympic Committee promised to pay the living wage? The one that was abandoned by the ODA in September 2006? And which the ODA said it 'would ask' its contractors to keep in March 2007? Which one in five workers then said in October 2010 they were not being paid?

So this is the Olympic future, working for nothing! Volunteering seems to be BoJo's vision of a great Olympic Legacy, a solution to the demolition of the public sector in the name of cutting the deficit.

The demand for new staff at the ODA to fuel the insatiable requirements for distortion, obfuscation and misrepresention of information on an Olympian scale shows no sign of abating, despite the promises of public sector cuts. Some things are just too important.