New Forms of Worker Organisation

Colleagues,

I am very pleased to annouce a visit to Ruskin College next year by Manny Ness as part of a UK tour to launch his latest book, New Forms of Worker Organisations.

Manny's output is of central relevant to the labour and trade union studies students at Ruskin as his work has focused on an exploration of how best labour movements respond to the changing needs of workers and the rapid changes across the US labour market drawing in, for example, mass waves of documented and undocumented migrants.

This new book takes a step back and explores new labour movements and organisations - particularly rooted in syndicalist approaches to worker mobilisation - and asks whether these approaches are indicative of a positive turning point in labour's response to a neo-liberal globalisation.

There is a great accompanying website for the launch of the book and I'd encourage you to review the contents and ultimately get a copy: http://www.workerorganization.org/what-theyre-saying/

As a taster here a couple of review comments:

Immanuel Ness has added another book to his excellent series for understanding the survival strategies of the politically most profound, yet most deprived section of the citizens, during the last almost five centuries. I expect this book to stimulate the fresh debate on what de-politicization of the working class amounts to. Besides, after reading the chapters in this work, the question that haunts the liberal minds is why is this unprecedented intolerance of capitalism occurring at a mature stage of its development? Autonomist restoration is born of the spectacle of irrationality. Its impulse is to demand order in the midst of chaos; it protests, it demands, it insists that the outrage be brought to an end. These essays are most likely to throw challenges to the conventional economics of collective bargaining.
Debdas Banerjee, Professor of Economist, Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata, India and author, Labour, Globalization and the State.

By organizing a strike or going out on the street to protest with demands against the bastions of capital, labor activists rarely think about the historical significance of what they are doing. This collection of vivid chapters of major labor struggles reveals the essential nature of the labor movement in the last quarter century. Here in Russia, this book will be very useful as we need to learn the international experience of workers’ struggles.
Vadim Bolshakov, trade unionist and labor movement activist since 1989.  From 2005 to 2009, Bolshakov was coordinator of the Committee of Solidarity Actions in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region.

In Solidarity

Ian