Strikes and trade union history

Workers' Liberty dayschool: New Unionism: how workers can fight back

Submitted on

Date: 
18 February, 2012 - 11:30 - 17:30
Location: 

Highgate Newtown Community Centre, 25 Bertram Street, London N19 5DQ (Archway tube)

Description: 

Click here to download leaflet.

Registration: £15 waged, £8 low-waged/ student, £4 unwaged. To register online, click here, and enter the details of the amount you're paying and the registration you require when paying online.

In the late 1880s, workers (often unskilled or semi-skilled, often migrants and often working in casualised and precarious environments) organised militant industrial unions to fight back against their bosses. Socialist activists like Eleanor Marx, Tom Mann and Will Thorne were crucial to the struggles.

Faced with increasingly similar conditions today, can we build a New Unionism for the 21st century that transforms and revolutionises the modern labour movement?

Agenda

11:30-11:45 – Registration

11:45-1:15 – Workshops

* How the socialists organised: the life and times of Tom Mann (Cathy Nugent and Charlie MacDonald)
* The movement for working-class self-education (Colin Waugh, further education activist, author of Plebs, the Lost Legacy of Independent Working-Class Education)
* Finding a political voice: from New Unionism to Labour representation (Martin Thomas and Sam Greenwood)
* Organising the unorganised: (Mick Duncan, Unite p.c; Ruth Cashman, Lambeth Unison p.c.)

1:15-2:00 – Lunch

2:00-4:00 – Workshops

* From the Matchworkers to the Chainmakers – how women organised (Jill Mountford and Louise Raw, author of Striking a Light, The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History)
* What came next – The Great Unrest 1911-1914 (Edd Mustill)
* Organising at work today: using the ‘Troublemakers’ Handbook’ (Kim Moody, founder of Labor Notes magazine, academic, author — most recently US Labor in Trouble and Transition — and activist)

4:00-4:15 – Break

4:15-5:30 – Closing plenary: New Unionism 2012? How can we reinvigorate the labour movement? Speakers include Eamonn Lynch (Bakerloo Line driver tube driver victimised for his union activity and reinstated following an RMT campaign), speaker from IWW London Cleaners' branch and Jean Lane (Workers' Liberty and Tower Hamlets Unison)

Tickets: £15 (waged), £8 (low-waged), £4 (unwaged)

Creche, cheap food and bookstalls

Grunwick strike commemoration

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Date: 
17 September, 2006 - 13:00 - 19:00
Location: 

Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn, north-west London

Description: 

on Sunday September 17, from 11am to 5pm

description:

on Sunday September 17, from 11am to 5pm

Location:
Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn, north-west London

Pre-Mayday event with IWW

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Date: 
29 April, 2006 - 18:00
Location: 

The Square Occupied Social Centre, 21 Russell Sq, London WC1

Description: 

PRE-MAYDAY EVENT with the
Industrial Workers of the World

SATURDAY APRIL 29
THE SQUARE OCCUPIED SOCIAL CENTRE - 21 Russell Square

4 pm - WORKPLACE ORGANISING TRAINING
with Adam Lincoln, IWW dual carder and
experienced trade unionist

6pm - 80th anniversary commemoration of the 1926 GENERAL STRIKE
Presentation: The bitter lock-out, Days of hope in the General Strike, and the betrayal by the TUC - Dave Douglass, NUM & Wobbly veteran

with cookies and Zapatista coffee:-)

Organised by the LONDON IWW
www.iww.org
www.iww.org.uk

PRE-MAYDAY EVENT with the
Industrial Workers of the World

SATURDAY APRIL 29
THE SQUARE OCCUPIED SOCIAL CENTRE - 21 Russell Square

4 pm - WORKPLACE ORGANISING TRAINING
with Adam Lincoln, IWW dual carder and

Julia Scurr: a fighter for every poor woman

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Author: 
Jill Mountford

Poverty and all its associated miseries can crush and starve the human spirit, but it can also be the kindle that starts raging fires in individuals and movements. Julia Scurr (née O’Sullivan) was born into, grew up with, and lived with poverty and all the miseries it lavishly spreads so freely; but crush and starve her it did not.

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