Direct action gets thousands of euros.

The La Senza dispute has become an inspiring example of how effective direct action can be: a few days into the occupation, KMPG caved in and agreed to pay all the money owed to the workers. We should be spreading this news as widely as possible: radicals are often very good on imagining how a future society could theoretically work, or the details of uprisings in the distant past, but a bit shaky on practical proposals for fighting back here and now. The economy still hasn’t picked up, so there’s going to be a lot of people facing redundancy this year, and we need a response that’s more effective than just telling people to join a union. Now, instead of making abstract proposals about what we think might work, we can point to the fact that, by occupying, the La Senza staff were able to win the money they were owed very quickly, and this didn’t happen fifty years ago, or on the other side of the world, but this year, and just over the Irish Sea.
Things do seem to be really kicking off over in Ireland: Cork is now seeing three occupations at once, and north of the border, Occupy Belfast have taken over a disused bank in the heart of the city. The Vita Cortex occupation is entering negotiations with management today, hopefully they’ll be as successful as the La Senza staff were.
Back in the UK, Nottingham’s seen a small victory in the fight against legal repression with the dropping of charges against the “Atos Two”. And further abroad, the general strike in Nigeria has been called off after the government made some concessions, but some protesters have complained that they weren’t consulted before the unions decided to end the action, and some elements in Occupy Nigeria are committed to further protests, so the situation could still go either way. Finally, the Canadian platformist group Common Cause have produced an account of their activity around last year’s postal lock-out in southern Ontario that’s worth reading as an example of really good practical solidarity. Among other questions, it grapples with the topic of how we avoid the twin dangers of Trot-style self-promotion on one hand, and dishonestly hiding our anarchist perspectives behind fluffy front groups on the other.