A Great Day for Organised Labour

Colleagues,

Just about back from leave, but extremely happy to report that on Saturday I had the great pleasure of welcoming Alex Gordon (ex-President of the RMT) to Ruskin College to award the MA ILTUS 2010-12 cohort their MA certificates at a truly glorious graduation ceremony. This was the first MA group that I had overseen in my role as MA programme co-ordinator and so it was a particularly rewarding for me.



Alex Gordon kicks off the MA ILTUS graduation event with a rousing
speech underlining Ruskin's tradition of radical labour education.

As you can imagine the graduates celebrated in true labour movement style ending the evening dancing to the Pete Fryer band at the Florence Park Community Centre in Oxford. Pete is a long-standing UNISON activist and was very happy to announce our celebrations to the assembled locals.
Here are a few pictures - and in the next post a comment on a particularly nasty development, brought to us by the Coalition on the day before Parliament disbanded for the Summer recess and surely to become a major battle for the UK trade union movement and a wider body of campaigning and civil society organisations.



Don't we all scrub up well?!





In Solidarity

Ian

Hope for the Future

Colleagues,

Just a brief post before I sign off for a couple of weeks for a holiday with my family. Very happy to stay in the Uk to support the economy, although will be doing the usual and asking bar/hotel staff how they are employed and if they've heard of a union. Although the replies/discussion is not often what I want to hear the many young people (and usually it is younger workers employed seasonally) I speak to yearn for better work and standards.

It is for these reasons that I remain ever optimistic of a future for organised labour and so want to leave readers with a good news story, as there are always plenty if you look.

And so over in the US we have been witnessing the rise of strike action, and other forms of mobilisation, on the part of fastfood workers - and as ever, from a UK perspective it if a form of action well worth observing and analysing for lessons to be learnt.

One of these is how much easier it is in the UK for pro-labour coalition bodies to emerge to develop and sustain such campaigns. Although we are witnessing this more in the UK now (witness London Citizens, People's Assembly etc) the US has a history of spontaniety and vibrance that we would do well to embrace and replicate.

Jobs with Justice (http://www.jwj.org/about/index.html) is a relatively new coalition of organisations with a strict focus on justice for workers, and they have grown rapdily on the back of a series of successes aross the UK - follow the link to read more.

There is a detaield news report on the fastfood action and the role of JWJ, and other organisations here: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/15366/fast_food_slow_burn/

As we approach in the UK the 30th anniversary of the miners' strike it is important that we look widely and broadly for the means to recapture a means to pursue a concerted, direct response to a Conservative government in power hell bent again on destroying the culture, spirit and institutions of the working class. The lessons are in the UK, but they are being played out elsewhere also.

In Solidarity

Ian

Distressed Jeans by Distressed Workers

Colleagues,

This shocking new video on the production of distressed jeans has been created via a collaboration between War on Want, SACOM and the Clean Clothes Campaign.

Although the video is backed by a detailed report (http://www.waronwant.org/news/latest-news/17936-the-human-cost-of-distressed-jeans) the visualisation of the dehumanising and literally toxic working conditions do justice to creating a vivid, tangible sense of the economic and biological hazards to workers in this industry.

As the research, Breathless for Blue Jeans, confirms although the chemical practice of creating jeans with the distressed look is accepted as posing significant health hazards, the process has now gone underground:

The research reveals that workers are at high risk of contracting silicosis, a deadly lung disease, while blasting abrasive sand on to denim under high pressure. Employees work in sandblasting units for up to 15 hours a day, with little or no protection. The sandblasting process is fast and cheap, and can increase product value tenfold. Although sandblasting has been banned by major brands, the practice continues behind closed doors, or through subcontracting to less traceable or illegal factories, workers commented.

Despite an awareness of the clandestine nature of this, it does not stop retailers from purchasing the garments.

Justin Jin / Panos Pictures

What's needed therefore is a profiling of this research, and the video, to raise awareness on the part of consumers and to make demands of retailers that they use their financial power to force manufacturers to eliminate the hazards in the process and improve terms and conditions.

Follow-up on this item read the research and raise this issue within your trade union as a way to support this critically important new campaign.

In Solidarity

Ian

Tooth & Nail: Billy Bragg - Tolpuddle 2013

Colleagues,

I am particularlyy proud of the fact the Ruskin College is the only institution of its kind to return to Tolpuddle year-after-year.

And this year the appearance of Billy Bragg is made all the more special as my wife has brougnt me tickets to see Mr. Bragg in Birmingham as part of the tour for his new album.

So, thanks Billy for supporting Tolpuddle once again and see you in Birmingham in November!

In Solidarity

Ian

A Workers' Society: The El-Ghazl Factory, Mahalla, Egypt

Colleagues,

Long before mass, popular resistance brought down the Mubarak regime, ushering in the doomed Islamist Morsi, I spent a glorious period in Egypt exploring at close quarters the work of the unofficial pro-union Centre for Workers & Trade Union Services CWTUS (http://www.ctuws.com/Default.aspx).

The leader of the Centre, Kamal Abbas (of whom I have blogged before) has been serially brutalised by the regime but nevertheless was party to the historic creation of official, independent new federation of Egyptian trade unions born in the aftermath of Mubarak and before Morsi (http://www.ctuws.com/Default.aspx?item=1287).

A distinct feature of Egyptian workplace activism that I was familiar with before my visit, but that I learnt more of in my time there, was that despite the official labour movement acting as a mouthpiece for Mubarak, there thrived a dominant, independent labour movement (of which CWTUS and other NGOs provided support) which bore bitter, constant state-inspired assault but which remained undimished helping to inspire the populist backlash rendered most vivid in Tahrir Square in 2011.

The filmmakers Cristina Bocchialini and Ayman El Gazwy have created a rich, vivid portrayal of this secular, working class movement bound within the lives of 'a workers' society' at the gigantic El-Ghazl factory in Mahalla, Egypt.

The strapline for the film is all you need to know of why you must watch this eye witness "insight on the cauldron of revolt where workers inspired an uprising".

To view the film click on this link: http://aje.me/yqr2zN

There is some helpful background historical material here: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/revolutionthrougharabeyes/2012/01/201213013135991429.html

In Solidarity

Ian

Welcome to the New World Order

Colleagues,

One of my all time favourite Springsteen tracks (The Ghost of Tom Joad) carriers the profound lyrics

Shelter line stretchin' 'round the corner
Welcome to the new world order
Families sleepin' in their cars in the Southwest
No home no job no peace no rest

Finishing the song with narrative lifted directly from The Grapes of Wrath

Now Tom said "Mom, wherever there's a cop beatin' a guy
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Where there's a fight 'gainst the blood and hatred in the air
Look for me Mom I'll be there
Wherever there's somebody fightin' for a place to stand
Or decent job or a helpin' hand
Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free
Look in their eyes Mom you'll see me."

I recommend a reading of the book as it is a classic of sociological analysis of the implications of industrialisation, economic degradation but also of the triumph of the human spirit.

I am posting the item as I have returned to the song recently and never cease to be in awe of how in crafting its structure it allows for the layering of the US depression era in the current context of the economic crisis.

YouTube has many different live versions of the song, this is one of the best.

In Solidarity

Ian

Small Unions: Part of the Big Picture

Colleagues,

Working for the GFTU, the UK’s federation for small, specialist unions and professional associations, it is always of interest when there is a development which helps (re)inform our labour movement understanding of the way in which small groups of workers comprising their own bargaining unit are of critical relevance to organising strategy.



Grunwick: An insight upon state fear of worker mobilisation

Classic workers’ struggles represented throughout the UK’s labour history from Tolpuddle to Grunwick illustrates the power of small groups of workers to challenge employer and state power. Indeed, direct state aggression/violence in both of these cases represents a critically valuable insight on the potentially far-reaching implications of worker resistance and of what the state feared.

So the current response of employers and their acolytes across right wing politics in the US around the mis-named micro unions is a contemporary perspective on an historic tradition of labour movement expansion of new forms and models of collective representation of workers.

In a fascinating piece which was published recently by In These Times there is an important investigation of the way in which the employer-right-wing-lobby nexus is attempting to curtail the capacity of independent small groups of workers to gain formal recognition for collective bargaining purposes.

The nexus is attempting to re-classify, re-brand and toxify an age-old tradition of workers voluntarily and organically seeking to gain recognition as a means of either creating a new, standalone union or gaining additional power through merger with a larger, long-standing union or federation. Thus the term ‘micro union’ has been crafted to suggest that officials from the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have been actively encouraging groups of workers to organise and thereby offering them easier access to recognition.

As Bruce Vail outlines in the In These Times piece

A micro-union, in short, is a relatively new description for a time-worn labor organizing technique that focuses on smaller, sharply defined groups of workers for the purpose of creating collective workplace action. That tactic, although nothing new, rubs against the grain of the popular imagination of labor organizing as a mass movement against large, highly visible corporations.

In short, what is happening in the US is an attempt to circumvent by statute the most natural form of expression on the part of workers: the right to collectivise their interests and mobilise these in the form of a union.

Although there is some suggestion that the latest attempt to curb this tradition will fail the article is well-worth a read regardless, if nothing else for a sense in the US of the right-wing backlash in the face of a nascent upturn in the appeal of unions as a voice for workers:

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/15183/what_are_micro-unions_and_why_is_big_business_so_upset_about_them/

In Solidarity

Ian