Equalities

This article was published in RMT News, September 2020.

By Janine Booth, Chair of RMT National Disabled Members’ Advisory Committee

One hundred years ago, two hundred and fifty blind people from across the UK marched from Newport, Manchester and Leeds to London in protest at poverty and poor working conditions.

Thank you to Colette Marquess, a PCS union representative in Belfast, for writing this report after attending the Neurodiversity in the Workplace course run by Janine.

To book a course with Janine, click here.

I have contributed this short article to Black History Month activities where I work.

Poems of the Harlem Renaissance
- recommended by Janine Booth

Janine addresses the protest in support of Osime Brown outside the Home Office on Friday 4 September - includes the poems Free Osime Brown and Bearing Down.

Please sign Osime's petition here.

• published in Solidarity 564

British courts’ application of ‘joint enterprise’ is unjust, and criminalises black and working-class youth.

‘Joint enterprise’ is a common-law doctrine that allows courts to convict not only the person who carried out a crime, but others who helped them to do it. In principle, that sounds reasonable. But since 1984, British courts have used it to convict people who they think knew the crime was going to happen, even if they did not help carry it out.

Published in Solidarity 562:

Published in Solidarity 562:

A TUC report, Dying on the job: racism and risk at work, has revealed the deep-seated racism that underlies the higher impact of Covid-19 on black and minority ethnic (BME) people, but its proposals fall well short of what is needed.

In the early days of the pandemic, it became clear that BME people were dying at a significantly greater rate. Compared with white people, black people are more than four times as likely to die from Covid-19, Bangladeshi and Pakistani people more than one-and-a-half times as likely.

Please pipe down in the gallery,
desist from this distraction
We're formultaing policies,
endorsing plans of action
A Green Paper on climate change,
a White Paper on race
A ream of runic regulations
codify your place
We have a full agenda
that we're working our way through
Don't interrupt proceedings when
we're talking about you

This is the full text of the interview. A shortened version was published in Solidarity 555.

Watch the video of this interview here.

*****

I am Rhoda Dakar. I've been a professional musician for 40 years.

Janine Booth interviews musician Rhoda Dakar, who talks about Two-Tone, policing, the centrality of class and much much more! Read the full text of the interview here.

Rhoda was in The Bodysnatchers and The Special AKA, and performed in "Free Nelson Mandela"

Rhoda Dakar's latest single is Stand Together.