Union organising

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

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...

The working-class movement is on an uphill journey. The latest official (Certification Officer) statistics on union membership, published 6 July, are thankfully out of date, but sobering. Between December 2019 and December 2020, union membership rose a bit. Between December 2020 and December 2021, it fell a bit, despite lockdowns and work-from-home beginning to fade. The figures depend on unions compiling returns at their year-ends (mostly December 2021, a few as late as September 2022) and sending them in. Even now, the result is incomplete because Unite the Union has done no report since...

On International Workers’ Day, 150 workers, whose labour underpins the AI content moderation systems for some of tech’s biggest players, met in Nairobi to form Africa’s first content moderators’ union. The decision by the workers, employed by third parties variously for Meta, Tiktok, Bytedance and OpenAi, is the culmination of a struggle beginning in 2019 after Daniel Motaung, then working for Sama and contracted to Facebook, was fired for his attempts at unionising the workforce. Motaung, who travelled from South Africa, said: “I never thought, when I started the Alliance in 2019, we would be...

Our re-ballot to renew our industrial action mandate in the national civil service dispute closes on 9 May. We’ll know the result on 10 May. I know there’ll be a huge majority for continuing action, but I think it’ll be close in terms of meeting the turnout threshold. If we do miss thresholds, I think we’ll be duty bound to re-ballot as soon as possible. There’s no question of bailing out of the dispute. If we renew the mandate, we have to intensify our action. We need to learn the lessons of the first six months of the dispute, where solid selective action was punctuated with very sporadic...

Amazon workers at Coventry’s BHX4 warehouse are striking again on 16-18 and 21-23 April, following strikes on 13-17 March, 2 March, and 27 February. The workers, currently paid £10.50, are demanding a £15/hour minimum wage. Since 31 March, the GMB union has been conducting consultative ballots for industrial action at warehouses in Mansfield, Coalville, Kegworth, Rugeley, and Rugby, and hopes to move to formal ballots in due course. Amazon worker and GMB union rep Darren Westwood spoke to us. We’re feeling very optimistic. People are looking forward to striking, we feel like we’re pushing...

Daily protests in front of the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts are supporting workers sacked by Saramago, which runs the café-bar on the CCA premises. Three workers, members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), were sacked on Friday 17 March. No disciplinary hearings, no right to union representation – just sacked in the café in front of customers. Another three IWW members were sacked by e-mail during the protests – again without a disciplinary hearing or right of appeal. More dismissals are probably in the pipeline. In the course of organising in the café IWW members had won a...

A strike wave started in June 2022 as workers strove to match wages to prices, especially of food and energy, rising much faster than at any time since the early 1990s. With unemployment low as bosses hired anew for post-lockdown expansion, workers also sought to reverse the decline in real median weekly wages from economic crash and then austerity since 2008. Public-service wages had declined particularly, being only 1% higher than private-sector wages (for comparable qualifications, age, etc.) in 2022 where they were 7% higher in 2011. On the rail, on the Tube, and in Royal Mail especially...

After describing the rise of trade unions and workers’ wages-and-conditions battles in the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote: “Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers”. Not literally ever -expanding, without setbacks. Marx followed up: “This organisation of the proletarians... is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier”. He didn’t mean that every setback will...

It’s a good step that we’re moving to all-out action on 1 February, especially as we should be striking alongside other unions on that day, especially the National Education Union. Strikes in schools have a wider impact, as parents often have to stay home from work to look after children, so we’re expecting 1 February to be very impactful. Our National Executive Committee will debate the next steps. It’s vital 1 February isn’t a one-off set piece, but a launchpad for further national action. Various proposals are under discussion, including some for further all-out strikes in March. My own...