Union organising

Kim Moody’s new book Breaking the Impasse brings together an argument that the US left needs to look at the recent labour upsurges (Amazon, teachers’ strikes, nurses) as the way forward in breaking from the broken two-party model of American politics. He criticises the “New Social Democratic Nostalgia” which exists in wings of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for a rose-tinted view of how major reforms from the New Deal and Civil Rights era were won, supposedly by coalition politics. In short the book is a rejection of both the Communist Party popular front and the “realignment”...

Until I reached 11 or 12, the only takeaway food I can remember was fish and chips (lapsed Catholics) and very occasionally Chinese (my favourite dish was and is special fried rice). The rise of the giant convenience food companies began in the early seventies. Kentucky Fried Chicken (now KFC) and McDonald’s dominated. In my opinion, it was only really in the mid to late eighties that these companies became part of the common experience in Brisbane, the capital of Queensland. KFC had a store not far from one of the places we lived when I was a kid. We only ever visited it on a couple of...

Our members working for His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) in 65 magistrates’ courts across England and Wales will strike 22-30 October. They’re fighting for the removal of a computer system that’s been introduced for organising their work, called “Common Platform”. The system increases workload whilst also opening the door to job cuts, the worst of all worlds. It’s important that, while our national ballot continues (26 September to 7 November), local and departmental disputes continue to be fought, and that we keep a focus on them. We have a number of such disputes which are...

October 3 marks ten years since the dispute at the construction site for the Queensland Children’s Hospital was settled , except for the criminal contempt charges I was facing. The dispute lasted for 63 days and I proudly led it for the final 45 days after the organisers of the Construction and General Division of the CFMEU union were served injunctions which made their continued presence on the picket line difficulty to maintain. I was approached by CFMEU organisers and officials to take charge of the picket line. After meetings with CFMEU hierarchy I agreed to do it as a “community organiser...

The ballot of UK civil service and other members of PCS for industrial action began on 26 September, with a closing date of 7 November. The reports I’m getting are very encouraging, and I feel we’ve gotten off to a good, solid start. One objective measure of how we’re doing is that we’re recruiting new members at a much faster rate than we’ve done for years. We’ve gone through a period of sharp membership decline following the end of check off, followed by slow growth, but now, hundreds of new members are joining every week. That shows there’s an appetite to organise. People want to join the...

Food couriers working for Deliveroo, UberEats and JustEat staged a protest in Luton on the night of 27 September, speaking out against low pay. Over 100 drivers participated in a protest outside McDonald’s which ran from 10am to midnight. Speaking to Luton Today , one driver said: “Before, we used to make around 15 to 20 deliveries a day, but now that they are employing more drivers it’s gone down to around five or six a day. Some people are working from 7am to around 2.30am the next day just to make a living.” The Luton couriers are in contact with the IWGB union. From December 2021 to summer...

We are rapidly approaching the beginning of our national ballot over the cost of living (which includes pension costs), protecting jobs and redundancy pay. The votes will start going out on 26 September and the ballot will run from then for six weeks. The ballot is unusual in that our members are not all in one voting block. Instead the voting is disaggregated by what we call the employer. This means there will be over 200 ballots, ranging from very small voting blocks, all the way up to the tens of thousands of members in the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and Revenue and Customs (HMRC...

The first round of strikes by our outsourced worker members at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), planned for 5-6 September, has been suspended. Local reps felt managers for the contractor ISS were making concessions in talks that were sufficient to call the strikes off. Further strikes, planned for 13-14 September, remain on, and that action will take place if those concessions don’t turn into concrete guarantees. Our members at the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) centre in Liverpool, run by Hinduja Global Systems, are on strike between 5 to 10 September...

While industrial unionism is the central tenet of this collection – and what this review will focus on - there is a great deal else that readers will find relevant to contemporary matters of left organisation.

Across the NHS, trade unions are preparing for ballots on pay. RCN and Unison are running “pledge” campaigns asking members to commit to voting yes in the forthcoming ballots. The commitment to run formal ballots whatever the results of these processes is good, although accelerating the process would be even better. The pledge campaigns should be seen not as consultations but as vehicles to build support for ballots, involve members, recruit new reps, clean up membership data, get the phone-banking and communication systems of the unions in place at national and local levels. The process can...