By Brendan Burchell, Alex Wood
Zero-hour contracts are just the tip of the iceberg of a bigger problem of insecure work scheduling. A year of shopfloor observation and interviews revealed how the insecurity it creates often leads to anxiety, stress and depression.
Continue reading “Beyond zero-hours: reducing the misery of insecure hours”The British economy is unbalanced regionally and by sector, but at core, it must fix a deeper problem: work doesn’t work for workers.
Continue reading “It’s not just a balancing act: work must work for workers”I’m 28, 60 years younger than Tony Benn. Yet Tony Benn played a formative role in my own political development. I first became aware of him in 2003. I was seventeen and had taken the train to London for my first ever protest. Tony was the headline anti-war speaker at the rally in Hyde Park. I was packed in the park with millions of others when he spoke.
Continue reading “Tony Benn: he encouraged me”‘If there are to be [weapons] inspections in Iraq I would like to see inspections in Israel, inspections in Britain, inspectors in America. I want to see the United Nations take sanctions against the arms manufacturers who supply weapons all over the world.’
Walmart has been extremely hostile to the concept of worker collective voice, and this hostility, in time, led to it becoming a major innovator in anti-union tactics. But labour is organising differently and fighting back.
Continue reading “Walmart’s Black Friday strikes: a new dawn for organised labour?”The world’s largest private-sector employer and biggest US corporation faces renewed workplace unrest. Workers who founded OUR Walmart two years ago are promising protests to coincide with Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the busiest shopping day of the year. They will demand a living wage, affordable healthcare, stable work schedules and an end to retaliation against their members.
Continue reading “Challenge to Walmart”As has happened time and time again, trade unions are being repressed and sidelined, the future of workers’ rights is put into question. How can the unions, and the people they represent, respond?
Continue reading “History is on McCluskey’s side: Unite must go beyond the law”The OUR Walmart campaign has been shaking up labour organising in the US. As they prepared for their current strike, Alex Wood spent a month with the people behind a new kind of fightback.
Continue reading “Winning at Walmart”Alex Wood writes that the success of the IWW’s campaign shows that even small numbers of workers, when acting collectively, can win.
Continue reading “John Lewis cleaners celebrate victory”Alex Wood argues this morning’s picket lines could mark a new era of labour organising.
Continue reading “A New Dawn? John Lewis cleaners’ strike”As our current economic model continues to drive us relentlessly towards the precipice of cataclysmic environmental destruction. While simultaneously forcing us to contemplate a ‘lost decade’ of stagnate high unemployment, reduction in the social wage and mass poverty. People are increasingly questioning the logic of a system based upon growth and the boom and bust cycle. For many in the environmental movement and the left generally ‘zero growth economics‘ or ‘steady state economics‘ seems to provide the solutions.
Continue reading “Anti anti-growth and the fallacy of economics”