Lawyers are getting their hands on a large slice of the £2b of state funds set aside to compensate miners suffering from industrially related disease.

The payout to individual miners is already pitifully low but is seems that lawyers who already receive millions in “handling” payments from the government are still charging miners up to 20% of their settlement for administering the claims.

Not only is it lawyers who are robbing chronically ill workers. Leaders of the scab union, the UDM, have become the best-paid trade union bosses in Britain also by cheating miners out of their full compensation. The UDM have set up a front company called Vendside to handle the miners' claims. As a result many miners do not even realise that their compensation claims have been processed by the despised UDM.

The extent that the UDM is ripping off miners can be gauged from the fact that the UDM's General Secretary Neil Greatrex, receives a massive wage of over £150,000 a year while compensation payments to miners can be as little as £1,800 and out of this measly amount a large cut goes to fund the lifestyle of the lawyers and UDM officials.

Unlike the larger mining unions, the NUM and Nacods, the UDM has been allowed by the DTI to pursue legal claims directly on behalf of former miners, through an exclusive handling agreement with the Government. Under the terms of the agreement, the union receives a lower payment for each claim that it processes than the solicitors of other claimants, but in return is allowed to charge up to £587.50 to successful claimants.

The Labour Government clearly has a soft spot for the scab union and has allowed the UDM to gain massive financial benefit from a compensation scheme meant for the miners. In 2001, Vendside's gross profit was just over £6m. Up to November 2003, the company had received £26.5m from the Government in legal fees as part of the miners' compensation schemes.

The plight of those suffering from asbestos related diseases is going from bad to worse (see previous Catalysts). First, Turner & Newall (T&N), once one of the biggest global asbestos companies, went into voluntary liquidation to avoid paying out compensation to asbestos victims. Then Kroll, the firm administrating T&N, started charging over £460 per hour for their services (so far their bills is £23 million). Meanwhile, the US administrators have been charging $75 million a year.

Whilst this legalised robbery has been going on, the asbestos victims have got nothing. Last November, a protest took place outside the Manchester offices of Kroll, who were asked to make a donation to the victims out of their fat profits. After a long wait the Northern Victims Support Group (NVSG) received a letter saying they were not prepared to make a donation. Currently, 4,000 people per year are dying from asbestos-related diseases and this is set to rise to 10,000 a year. The longer the crooks keep creaming off the cash and delaying compensation, the more innocent victims die never having seen justice – for the living, the fight for compensation is urgent.

The Northern Victims Support Group can be contacted on 0161 953 4027

The government is set to introduce yet more measures aimed at “empowering” women – which actually means in this case, forcing them to take low paid jobs.

From October 2005, lone parents on income support with children over 14 years old will be forced to attend “work-focused” interviews every 3 months. This is a blatant attempt by Labour to intimidate single parents into pointless shitty jobs. Alongside this, the government also announced that lone parents will have to complete a “compulsory action plan”, part of which will include applying for any jobs on offer. These draconian measures are designed in the longer term to force single parents to take on any “suitable job” or lose their benefit.

By forcing lone parents into work, the Government is allowing capitalism to continue to drive down wages to the point where workers would not do the work unless the Government forced them to. The result will be even more inequality within society – one of the most shameful blots on their record since 1997 is the ever-widening wealth gap, which exposes their anti-social credentials. In the case of lone parents, the overwhelming majority of which are women, it can only add to the appalling inequality we already experience. Not to mention that fact that it simply adds to the already enormous pressure placed on women trying to raise a family in difficult conditions on a low income.

The unions apparently don't care much about the growing number of people forced to get by on poverty wages. This speaks volumes about the detachment of the unions from a whole sector of the working class. Contrast this with the CNT (the anarcho-syndicalist union in Spain). Instead of having fancy offices staffed by overpaid union beurocrats on big expense accounts, the CNT locates its offices in working class areas, and they are staffed by union activists on a voluntary basis. Through this means, the CNT is part of the working class community and a focal point for local campaigns against low pay. It also gives people the support and confidence to resist state intimidation aimed at forcing people into low paid jobs in the first place. It is this form of fighting union that we at Catalyst want to see established in Britain, as an alternative to the more dead-head unions we have to suffer at present.

Nothing demonstrates the both the inequity rife in Blair's Britain and the true blight of “asylum” seekers than the death of a 47-year-old man in a basement rubbish room of the Café Royal in London. For two years, while the rich dined in opulent splendour upstairs the man lived in the bowels of the hotel behind the rubbish bins.

When his naked and badly bruised body was discovered, police first though he had been murdered, before it was established that he lived naked due to the heat generated by the basement boilers and a post-mortem found that his injuries were consistent with a fall. The man had been an immigrant worker employed by an agency – one of thousands without papers who are forced to work for a pittance in hotels across London.

A House of Lords recently described such workers as a new “ethnic underclass”. However, its findings will never be acted upon because the Government knows such workers undertake the cheap, menial and dirty jobs without which central London would grind to an expensive halt. Unregulated and hidden from view, these workers are forced to work in appallingly unsafe conditions for poverty pay. The sad lonely death of a man far from his home underlines the reality; market-driven casualisation continues to kill and always will – until we stand together for real change.

The sad lonely death of a man far from his home underlines the reality; market-driven casualisation continues to kill and always will – until we stand together for real change