A review of Nothing to Lose But Our Chains: Work and Resistance in Twenty-First-Century Britain, Jane Hardy (Pluto, 2021), £19.99 A typical protocol for a book review is to begin with an outline of its purposes and structure, to proceed… Continue Reading
The union organising model associated with Jane McAlevey has a growing influence among union activists in Britain and internationally.1 As a former union organiser in the United States, and now an advisor to unions and author of several books, her… Continue Reading
Avtar Singh Jouhl is the national president of the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA GB) and was a leading workplace militant and anti-racist activist in the Smethwick area and in the foundries of the West Midlands from the late 1950s through… Continue Reading
Along with Mark O’Brien and several other authors in this journal, I am anxious to understand what lay behind the dramatic drop in UK strike activity from the late 1970s to the early 1990s and the extremely low level ever… Continue Reading
Roger Cox was among the earliest members of the Socialist Review Group (SRG), founded by Tony Cliff in the 1950s, a group that would later evolve into the International Socialists (IS) and then the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). As one… Continue Reading
Mark O’Brien’s article in issue 157 of International Socialism, “What has Happened to the British Labour Movement and What Does it Mean for the Left in the Unions?”, adds to the debates in this journal over the last number of… Continue Reading
In February to March 2018, tens of thousands of university workers in the University and College Union (UCU) at 65 institutions in higher education took 14 days of strike action, in what was the biggest universities strike ever. The strike… Continue Reading
Making sense of the continuing low level of strike activity in the UK takes on greater urgency with the publication of provisional figures for 2017. These show record lows—by some margin—for two of the three main indicators: number of strikes… Continue Reading
From the early summer to the early winter of 2017 several industrial action campaigns were making the news, both nationally and at more regional and local levels. Rail workers employed by Mersey Rail, Northern Rail and Southern Rail were mounting… Continue Reading
The question of organising the unorganised is an incredibly broad one, engulfing lessons from historical experience in the trade union movement, as well as deeply ideological arguments on the nature of the working class today. But it’s important to note… Continue Reading