Union organising

How to organise young workers

One of the most visible impacts of capitalist globalisation has been the massive expansion of low-paid (and often semi-casual) jobs in the service sector. This “precarious” employment — in bars, restaurants, nightclubs, hotels, fast-food chains, supermarkets, high-street retailers, call centres and elsewhere — means long hours, barely-legal wages and unsafe working conditions. Young people fill these jobs. According to a recent TUC survey, workers between the ages of 16-24 make up nearly a third of the total workforce in hotels and restaurants in the UK (migrant workers and women of all ages...

Workers' Liberty 3/3: Factory bulletins in the 1920s and today

Workers' Liberty 3/3 (March 2006) reproduces many communist factory bulletins from the 1920s, and discussion from that era about how they should be produced. "Workers cannot write newspapers? Really? Just tell us some news about your factory". It also includes information on workplace bulletins produced by the AWL. Click here to download pdf .

Suburbs, sprawl, and organising

In his latest Substack newsletter , US socialist and labour-movement writer and activist Eric Blanc writes about the challenges posed for workplace organisation by the fact that many more workers live over wider areas than in the past. He notes that the average American today commutes 20.5 miles to work each way — a 27 per cent commute time increase since 1980 (the first year the US Census began tracking the figure). Britain gives the same picture for average work-commute distances. 1890-99: 2.23 miles; 1930-39: 4.34 miles; 1999-98: 9.07 miles; 2019: 11.5 miles. This means that union...

Suburbs, sprawl, and organising

In his latest Substack newsletter, US socialist and labour-movement writer and activist Eric Blanc writes about the challenges posed for workplace organisation by the fact that many more workers live over wider areas than in the past.

Amazon strikes resume

Amazon workers at the BHX4 facility in Coventry resume strikes on 7 November, walking out for three days, with a further strike planned on 24 November, the so-called “Black Friday” which is a major trading day for Amazon and other retailers. 24 November will also see strikes and other protests against Amazon in over 30 other countries. Speaking to a recent conference of the “Make Amazon Pay” campaign coalition, US senator Bernie Sanders said: “No company is a better poster child for the corporate greed and arrogance that we are seeing in the US, the UK and throughout the world than Amazon.”...

Amazon workers strike on Black Friday

Workers at Amazon’s BHX4 facility in Coventry will strike on 7-9 and 24 November as their fight for better pay and conditions goes on. The strikes will take the number of walkouts at BHX4 since the dispute began to nearly 30. Amazon has recently announced an intention to increase hourly pay by just £1, a move dismissed by the GMB union as coming nowhere near meeting workers’ needs. The strike is timed to cover Black Friday (24 November), a major trading day for Amazon globally. GMB organiser Rachel Fagan said: “This is an unprecedented and historic moment with low-paid workers taking on one of...

Do we need a TUC?

In a not-very-well-thought-through attempt to appear controversial and edgy, The World Transformed, at its Labour Party conference fringe event (71-0 October 2023) put on a debate about whether the TUC should be abolished. The chair of the debate set out the context of the Trade Union Congress’s history, described as from starting as a device to lobby parliament for the trade unions to becoming a huge organisation with a 51-member general council integrated into the Labour Party and the state, as an emergency organiser of production during times of crisis. The chair set out the debate as one...

Notes from Berlin: what we can learn from the hospital movement

In September 2021 thousands of healthworkers launched an indefinite strike at Charité and Vivantes, two of Berlin’s large municipal hospitals. So began the Krankenhausbewegung - Berlin’s Hospital Movement. After a month, they won. A year later, nurses in the UK underwent their own industrial awakening, as the Royal College of Nursing balloted for nationwide strike action over pay. The differences between the disputes could not have been more stark, as a series of obstacles — some erected by anti-union laws, others by their own union — combined to defeat the UK nurses, despite overwhelming...

Strikes multiplied tenfold

Official figures for June 2022 to May 2023 show 3.9 million striker-days, about ten times the average in the 2010s

How can the union activist layer revive?

On 29 July between 150 and 200 trade unionists met in Manchester at the Troublemakers at Work conference. Called by a number of labour movement organising projects (Workers Can Win, Strike Map, Organise Now!), the conference gained an impressive breadth of backers and was marked by a refreshing lack of political sectarianism. Different left groups were free to distribute their literature. Sessions were participatory and genuinely worker-led. The surface-level attempt at radical rhetoric from general secretaries and officials, that unfortunate feature of too many left-trade union events, was...

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