SOLOMON HUGHES recommends Sunjeev Sahota’s recent novel set in a trade union election campaign for its fresh approach to what unites and divides workers, but wishes the union backdrop was truer to life
TEN years ago today, more than 1,100 people were killed and more than 2,500 injured when the eight-storey Rana Plaza building collapsed in Bangladesh.
Corruption and greed were identified as the key causes. The building had been built on unstable ground on a filled-in pond, with substandard materials and with eight floors instead of the four for which the developer had permits.
These dangerous working conditions are not new and workers have always been the ones to face the cost. Over a century earlier, in 1911, 146 garment workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, while just a few years before the Rana Plaza collapse, in 2005, the Spectrum building just a few miles away collapsed, killing 64 workers and injuring 80.
PHILIP ENGLISH says military spending will not create the jobs young people need — instead, build an economy based around needs, not profit
Ben Chacko talks to RMT leader EDDIE DEMPSEY about how the key to fixing broken Britain lies in collective sectoral bargaining, restoring unions’ ability to take solidarity strike action and bringing about the much-vaunted ‘wave of insourcing’



