At this time of resurgence within the British trade union movement, with union, wildcat and even consumer strikes breaking out across the country, the timing couldn’t be better for this sale of books on trade unionism, work and feminism, as donated to Housmans by Professor Judy Wajcman.
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) — There is one last hope for the United States. It does not lie in the ballot box. It lies in the union organizing and strikes by workers at Amazon, Starbucks, Uber, Lyft, John Deere, Kellogg, the Special Metals plant in Huntington, West Virginia, owned by Berkshire Hathaway, the Northwest Carpenters Union, Kroger, teachers in Chicago, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, fast-food workers, hundreds of nurses in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.
11 May, 2021 — Terry Bell Writes
May Day 2021 has come and gone, without much of a whimper, let alone a bang. And it is the novel coronavirus that is only marginally responsible. Because there would not have been much of a bang even without the pandemic.
16 November, 2020 — ROAR
The workerist environmentalism of Italy’s Porto Marghera group connects the workplace and the community in the struggle against capitalist “noxiousness.”
Amidst the renewed rise of obscene inequalities, a wave of protests is sweeping through Italy, from south to north. On the one hand, the pandemic has engendered an upsurge in workplace disputes to defend health and in mobilizations to protect the income of workers affected by COVID-19-related restrictions. On the other hand, however, we have also witnessed successful interventions coordinated by the right and infused with a bewildering array of conspiracy theories in response to such measures.
24 January 2020 — Counter Currents
The super-indoctrinated, Trump-voting American working class, dulled by the mass media and the “American dream”,has changed very little since the crushing of the great textile strikes that swept The United States in the 1920s. Not an iota of class-consciousness has it absorbed. (Nor has it been explained and offered to all wage earners in sufficient doses.) For also the middle classes, crushed by an ever more desperate, an “end of times” form of capitalism, has not yet grasped that they too are now part of the American proletariat. In that respect it seems that the old, often criticized word proletariatis still quite adequate.
2 June 2019 — Terry Bell Writes
New dawn or false dawn? For the South African labour movement in particular this is very much the question as the country moves toward the second half of a tumultuous year.
26 April 2019 — Great Transition Initiative
Once seen as the vanguard of a new social order, the contemporary labor movement has been written off by many progressive activists and scholars as a relic of the past. They should not be so hasty. Rather than spelling the beginning of the end for organized labor, globalization has brought new opportunities for reinvention, and a sea change in both trade unions and the wider labor movement. Most notably, globalization has forced unions to think and act outside the state to build transnational solidarity across countries and sectors. Emerging transnational unionism, if it perseveres, contains the seeds of a new global movement, a new international that extends beyond labor to embrace all forces working toward a Great Transition.
5 April 2019 — Terry Bell Writes
[South Africa may be thousands of miles away but the debates on the left taking place there, are directly connected to the kinds of debates taking place here within and about the struggle for socialism. WB]
What will workers decide when faced with the confusion of 48 political parties listed for the national and provincial poll on May 8? Many clearly did not register to vote, some have said they will abstain, others remain uncertain about who to support.
14 September 2015 — OurNHS
Tonight we see a party leader in hock to a narrow ideological clique and foreign interests, drastically out of touch with majority public opinion. Not Corbyn – Cameron. Will Tory MPs stop him before he does untold damage?
Tonight, David Cameron attempts to drive through a bill which will make it ‘close to impossible’ for trade unions to take any lawful industrial action.
6 July 2014 — The People’s Assembly
This Thursday, on 10 July, up to 2 million people will be out on strike in a co-ordinated strike action across the trade unions. There will be huge demonstrations and protests up and down the country.
Continue reading
4 July 2014 — rabble.ca
[This is a response By Brad Hornick to Sam Gindin’s Unmaking Global Capitalism. WB]
Sam Gindin’s recent contributions to the The Bullet and Jacobin explore the lost potential of the working class in revolutionary politics. On the economic and ecological fronts, he argues, working-class politics has been incapable of catalyzing widespread and consequential societal mobilization, or becoming vital sites of theoretical and practical struggle.
4 July 2014 — The Jacobin
[Two articles; this, the original essay and a response by By Brad Hornick On the environmental question, Sam Gindin has got it wrong. WB]
When Marx famously declared that while the philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it, he was asserting that it was not enough to dream of another world nor to understand the dynamics of the present. It was critical above all to address the question of agency in carrying out transformative change. For Marx, that agent was the working class. The gap between workers’ needs and their actual lives — between desire and reality — gave workers an interest in radical change, while their place in production gave them the leverage to act.
23 March 2013 — Leftstreamed
The dramatic upsurge of popular grass-roots protest in South Africa’s townships and rural areas in recent years has been well-termed as marking a virtual “rebellion of the poor” in that country. The working-class itself has also been assertive there, prompting the ANC-led state’s orchestration of an horrific massacre of dissident mine-workers at Marikana in 2012. Until recently, however, leading trade unions have themselves been cribbed and confined within the tri-partite governing coalition of the ANC, the South African Communist Party and COSATU, the country’s largest trade union central body. Now NUMSA – the country’s National Union of Metalworkers with over 340,000 members – has begun to break that mould, under the leadership of its General Secretary, Irvin Jim, a longstanding socialist militant in the union. At its Special National Congress in December it heralded a new socialist political direction for South Africa.
Toronto — 6 March 2014.
19 August 2013 — New Left Project
The post-colonial philosopher Gayatri Spivak once famously asked: ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ Colonialism though is not just about race, it is also about that great unmentionable, class. And class colonization is one of the most central features of British social and political life. Continue reading
14 August 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
An outstanding historical account of the “Green Bans” first introduced by the communist-led New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) in the 1970s in response to community demand to preserve inner-city parkland and historic buildings. One of the first women to be accepted as a builders labourer, filmmaker Pat Fiske in 1985 traced the development of a union whose social and political activities challenged the notion of what a union should be. Continue reading
1 July, 2013 — Dissident Voice
Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as the exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. — John Steinbeck
15 February 2013 — The Real News Network
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Worker Owned Businesses Point to New Forms of Ownership Can co-ops come out of the margins of the economy and be part of a larger political project to transform how things are owned? Go to story | Go to homepage |
2 July 2012
Too little, too late?
This from today’s Independent:
Left-wing threat for Labour MPs who fail to fight coalition cuts – the independent 2 july
By Andy McSmith
The Labour Party may be challenged in parliamentary elections by left-wing candidates backed by a major trade union for the first time in its 100 year history.The 292,000-strong Public and Commercial Services Union … voted four to one in favour of using union funds to back anti-austerity candidates.
This means union-backed candidates could stand against sitting Labour MPs who are perceived to have supported the coalition’s cuts. blah-blah…
22 November 2011 — MRZine
 Cory McCray, Founder of the Young Trade Unionists, and George Hendricks, Baltimore Teachers Union (BTU) Rep and Vice President of the Young Trade Unionists (YTU) |
If you head down to the IBEW Local 24 Union Hall Auditorium on W. Patapsco Avenue in Baltimore on the first Tuesday of any month, you’ll encounter a meeting of an energetic group of young union members from the Metro Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area. The Young Trade Unionists (YTU) was founded in November 2009 by Cory McCray, a graduate of both the Baltimore City Public School System and the five-year apprenticeship program of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Participants in the YTU include young workers from the IBEW, UFCW, teachers’ unions, building trades, public employees’ and other sectors.
17 October 2011 — MRZine
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“I’m just a soccer mom. Well, a swimming mom, if you want to be exact.” This is how the middle-aged women holding up the “Worked 1973-2003” sign at Saturday’s Occupy Wall Street rally at Times Square described herself to me. She stood next to a young boy leaning against his dad, the son holding up his father’s IBEW Local 827 sign and urging his father to go up and tell his story. His father didn’t, but another father who was standing nearby did step up to mic that is the human microphone at #OWS. Dressed in jeans and a faded grey shirt, his voice was repeated across the Times Square crowd:
The New Dark Age 