Labour’s persistent failure to address its electorate’s salient concerns is behind the protest vote, asserts DIANE ABBOTT
IMAGINE getting groped and fondled on the job, twice in one month, by two different male coworkers — and your supervisors turn a deaf ear. So much so that you’re forced to take three weeks off work without pay to try to recover.
That’s what happened last year to Tanya Harrel, an African-American McDonald’s worker in New Orleans and one of 10 women of colour forced to file federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints against the fast-food giant in late May.
And two days later, McDonald’s workers took their cases — against sexual harassment, against low pay and against company labour law-breaking — to McDonald’s shareholders too.
Organised workers at the notoriously anti-union global giant are scoring victory after victory, and now international bodies are pitching in to finally force this figurehead of corporate capitalism to give in to unionisation, writes EMILIO AVELAR



