Solidarity 110, 19 April 2007

Nurses in Ireland are taking industrial action over pay and working hours. 40,000 members of the Irish Nurses’ Organisation and the Psychiatric Nurses’ Association, seeking a 10.6% pay rise alongside a 4-hour cut in their 39-hour working week, are in the third week of working-to-rule, refusing to do clerical or IT work. One-hour stoppages have taken place across the country, including in the largest hospital in Ireland, St. James’s in Dublin. Nurses are the only qualified group in Irish hospitals to work a 39-hour week – other grades work 35, with some clerical staff working 33. Hospital...

In Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure, there is a strange, affecting scene, in which the butchering of a hand-raised pig is described. It is told with great sympathy and empathy from the pig’s point of view. (Parables for Socialists-5) Reared close to the family, as was common in nineteen century England, the pig is well-treated, mothered like a pet and fed on tit-bits — all the better to fatten it up so that it could at the right moment be turned into as much pork and bacon as possible. The pig is happy and contented, not knowing his place in the human scheme of things. Then one day the...

Tom Unterrainer's review (Solidarity 3/108) of Sheila Cohen's book "Ramparts of Resistance" sees the main reason for the British labour movement's defeats since the 1970s in "bureaucratisation" at workplace rep level. "An increase in facility time, more negotiations away from the shop floor (often in luxury hotels) and the active cultivation of 'friendly relations' between stewards and the bosses... revolutionised... the trade union movement... "As Thatcherism developed... the full implications of bureaucratisation revealed themselves... defeat followed defeat". This, of course, is the...