The Conservative government’s Trade Union Act 2016—in particular the strike balloting threshold provisions—represents the most radical tightening of the rules on industrial action and trade union organisation since the Margaret Thatcher era of the 1980s.1 Notwithstanding the series of significant… Continue Reading
John Newsinger, Them and Us: Fighting the Class War 1910-1939 (Bookmarks, 2015), £7.99 John Newsinger opens this timely account of working class struggle in the first half of the 20th century with what at first seems an incongruous statement: “We… Continue Reading
Simon Joyce has helped galvanise a long overdue discussion in International Socialism on the state of workplace class struggle in the UK.1 Though I partially disagree both with his claim that shop stewards have lost control of the strike weapon… Continue Reading
Significant discussion has taken place in recent issues of International Socialism, echoing wider debates in the movement, around the persistently low level of industrial struggle in Britain.1 This is part of a wider phenomenon internationally, but the debate in this… Continue Reading
Mark O’Brien’s article in 2014, “The problem of the one-day strike”,1 was an attempt to understand “the dominance of very short (usually one-day) national, public sector strikes that have typified industrial action in the UK for at least a decade”.2… Continue Reading
The debate around orientations for revolutionaries in the unions today is the result of an uncomfortable but inescapable fact: the level of trade union struggle has remained historically low for 20 years.1 This is true whether we are considering working… Continue Reading
This article addresses a key issue for socialists: the current low level of strikes.1 As Alex Callinicos recently put it: The absence of any generalised upturn in workers’ struggle isn’t just a negative factor: it actively shapes the situation. Mass… Continue Reading
The beginning of the 1990s saw Hosni Mubarak start to implement World Bank and IMF policies, including a “structural adjustment programme”, privatisation and attacks on workers’ rights.1 The old centres of the working class, such as Mahalla, Kafr al-Dawwar and… Continue Reading
Egyptian workers’ dramatic revival of strikes is a direct challenge to those who argue that the working class in the Middle East—or in the Third World more generally—has been economically and politically marginalised. The strikes have often been very successful… Continue Reading