WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
A marred understanding of the present
Workers from the Covent Garden branch of TGI Fridays on a Unite the union organised strike in a dispute over pay in 2018
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
Nothing to Lose but Our Chains
by Jane Hardy
Pluto Press £19.99
THE key strength of Jane Hardy’s book is charting ‘new terrains of struggle’, some of it successful, among precarious, zero-hours workers, many of whom are migrants and women.
She focuses on “microcosms of struggle” and provides a useful record of some recent strikes, for instance by university lecturers, Birmingham care workers, outsourced cleaners in government departments and universities, McDonalds, Sports Direct and the games industry. Some have featured the new unionism of the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) and the United Voices of the World (UVW), but many feature old unions, the Bakers, Unite, PCS and GMB, so belying the accusations against them of ignoring “marginalised” workers.
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