With the death of Pope Francis, the world loses not only a church leader but also a moral compass
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Putting the class politics into union-building
MARTIN SMITH revisits some core organising principles that were to the fore in battles of the ’90s and which remain just as relevant today
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We face austerity, privatisation, and toxic influence. But we are growing, and cannot be beaten
OVER the last 30 years there has been a slow, patchy, inconsistent and faltering return to an organic bottom-up organising culture in British trade unions, based primarily on a renewed understanding of the dynamics of class conflict at work.
Truthfully, this evolution was not assisted in any major fashion by the Labour government of 1997 to 2010, whose focus was on individual rather than collective employment rights that could be organised around, enforced as they were on a case-by-case basis through employment tribunals.
With the prospect of another Labour government, unions must learn the lessons of our failure to capitalise on the last one to grow our organisations.
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