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TODAY’S traditional May Day rally will bring together trade unionists, activists, students and anti-austerity campaigners in a display of solidarity in the capital.
Demonstrators in London will convene on Clerkenwell Green at 1pm before marching through Theobalds Road, Red Lion Square and the Strand to a rally beginning at 2.30pm in Trafalgar Square.
Speakers will include PCS national vice-president Zita Holbourne, RMT general secretary Mick Cash and Bectu’s Kelly Rogers, a sacked union rep at the Ritzy Picturehouse cinema in Brixton.
Mr Cash will tell marchers that the tide has turned “irreversibly” in favour of public ownership of the railways and pay tribute to guards who have been taking industrial action over the past two years in bitter disputes over staffing on trains.
He will say: “Public opinion has now shifted irreversibly in favour of the core objectives mapped out by the trade unions.”
Mr Cash will add that “with this rotten, dysfunctional Tory government lurching from crisis to crisis, it is no longer a matter of ‘if’ our railways are brought back into public ownership, it is a matter of ‘when.’
“We will not rest until the discredited transport, workplace and economic policies that have caused so much damage to this country are consigned to the dustbin of history.”
Ms Rogers told the Morning Star: “The links we are building between precarious workers - migrant workers, sex workers, workers on zero hours facing victimisation for union activity – could be the next stage of a desperately needed new movement against exploitation.
“On May Day we will send a message to our bosses: that we are standing together, and that we are going to fight until we win.”
March organiser Roger Sutton said: “The march is both a celebration and the day to put forward workers’ interests.
“We welcome all who want to celebrate what workers have won in the past, such as the NHS and universal education: all now under threat from the austerity agenda.”
The International Workers Union of Great Britain and others have also organised a precarious workers’ bloc, which will convene on the steps of the National Gallery at 3pm before holding its own rally outside McDonald’s in Leicester Square at 5.30pm.
