NEARLY ONE-THIRD of all Southern Rail’s trains were late or failed to run last year. And 2017 could be even worse, with up to 46 per cent of trains cancelled or delayed in January. Furious season ticket holders and other passengers are claiming compensation, running into thousands of pounds. How can a private company absorb […]

UNITE GENERAL Secretary Len McCluskey has triggered an early election campaign for the position he currently holds. The three candidates, McCluskey, Gerard Coyne and Ian Allinson, have until 17 February to gain an undemocratically high 50 branch nominations to get on the ballot paper. Members then have from 27 March to 19 April to vote. […]

LEN MCCLUSKEY, head of Britain’s biggest union Unite which is also the Labour Party’s biggest donor, has resigned from his post and is standing for re-election. He last did this in 2013, three years into his first five-year term, to avoid embarrassing then Labour leader Ed Miliband with a major union election at the same […]

By Mike Black WORKERS AT the factory that makes Humbug sweets are striking against their Scrooge employer. GMB members at the Tangerine Confectionery site in York are in dispute with their bosses, who have been eroding conditions and making cuts to pension contributions. The 2016 pay offer was a measly 1 per cent increase backdated […]

RAIL UNION Aslef has announced that 87 per cent of its drivers at Southern Rail voted to strike. These strikes will take place in December and January, alongside an immediate and indefinite overtime ban. This is in addition to RMT strikes, on different dates, as guards continue their industrial action. Both unions are protesting the […]

CONSTRUCTION WORKERS at the Crossrail site in Tottenham Court Road took two days of unofficial strike action on 30 November and 1 December to defend Unite steward Terry Wilson. Employers Laing O’Rourke insisted Terry be transferred to another job while refusing to recognise him as a union negotiator. A further protest on 2 December was […]

TEACHING ASSISTANTS employed by Durham County Council have voted overwhelmingly for strike action against the imposition of new contracts that would see some workers lose up to 23 per cent – or £6,000 a year. The Labour led Council in Durham voted in May to dismiss all of the 2,700 teaching assistants employed by the […]

By a UNISON activist THE NEW Tory government is unleashing a new series of attacks on working class people and their trade unions. In the NHS, on the railways, in our schools, union members are fighting back. But they are not struggling on a level playing field. The government, the media and the judges pick on […]

By Jeremy Dewar The boycotts of the ridiculous and cruel tests of children as young as five by parents earlier this year, and the public outcry at the threat by Education Secretary Nicky Morgan to force all schools to become academies prove that families would support action Teachers have delivered an overwhelming mandate to strike […]

By Marcus Halaby It is an often-repeated truism that giving in to bullies only encourages them. Workers at the Grangemouth plant near Falkirk in Scotland are learning this the hard way. After a shameful climb-down by Unite the Union general secretary Len McCluskey, hailed as having been necessary to “save jobs”, employers INEOS are now […]

On the 125th anniversary of the matchwomen’s strike in the East End of London, Joy Macready examines the strike’s origins and how it sparked the “New Unionism” movement “Born in slums, driven to work while still children, undersized because under-fed, oppressed because helpless, flung aside as soon as worked out, who cares if they die […]

RANK AND FILE candidate Jerry Hicks has now secured 84 validated branch nominations – with several days still to go to the deadline for nominations. Barring a veritable bureaucratic coup d’état Jerry will run against Len McCluskey for general secretary of Unite. Jeremy Dewar looks at the reasoning behind the Socialist Party’s backing for the […]

In Workers Power 367 we saw how the Communist Part of Great Britain (CPGB) initiated the powerful rank and file Minority Movement, but became ever more uncritical supporters of the union leaders when the British TUC formed the Anglo-Russian committee with the Russian trade unions. Dave Stockton looks at what this meant for the 1926 […]

By Andy Yorke A debate has opened up in the labour movement since the vote at the Brighton TUC to consider the ‘practicalities of a general strike’. The debate has inevitably exposed differences on the left. Not everyone on the left supports a general strike, much less campaigns for it. The Alliance for Workers Liberty […]

Jeremy Dewar recounts how the anti-union laws shackled the unions and calls for defiance

The 1926 General Strike is rich in lessons for today. Dave Stockton looks at how the ruling class prepared for it while the unions leaders did not. In the mid-1920s the Miners Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) had almost a million members, and was the militant core of the working class movement. Coal was still […]

Forty years ago, four London dockers were arrested and held in north London’s Pentonville Prison. The next morning a fifth was arrested outside while protesting at their arrest. Yet within five days the Pentonville Five were freed by a wave of unofficial action and the threat of a general strike. Dave Stockton looks at the […]

In part two of this commemorative article, Dave Stockton looks at how the miners built the first rank and file trade union movement in the UK.   In Part one of this article, we looked at the work of Tom Mann in bringing many of the ideas of transatlantic and continental revolutionary trade unionism (syndicalism) to […]

In this timely commemorative article, Dave Stockton looks at the lessons from the great working class struggles before World War One. Part two will follow next month.   We have just marked the 100th anniversary of the miners’ strike of February-April 1912. This was the first national strike by a section of workers who in […]

THE 28 MARCH strike by London schools and colleges showed just how impressive a nation-wide strike could have been. Around 1,500 schools were shut down or severely disrupted, while almost all colleges and most ‘new’ universities faced chaos or closure. Ten thousand marched in central London, bringing traffic to a halt and cheers from passers-by. […]

On the fortieth anniversary of the Battle of Saltley Gate Norman Goodwin, then a shop steward at GKN Salisbury Transmissions plant in Witton, recounts his memories of the day when Birmingham engineering workers struck in solidarity with the miners against the Tory government. ON 10 FEBRUARY 1972 I started out for work. But I would do […]

By Mark Booth AFTER A TURBULENT week of union executive meetings, 300 militants packed into Friends Meeting House for an emergency conference to fight the pensions sell out. It soon became clear to everyone at Unite the Resistance’s gathering that the PCS and NUT leaders would not be calling more strikes in the next few […]

The building workers' strike holds lessons on the dangers of Broad Leftism for union activists today

Increasing numbers of young people are being forced to work for free as school leavers, college leavers and university graduates enter a flat jobs market, writes Rachel Brooks.

The miners are now locked in a life or death struggle with the Tory government and Thatcher’s henchman at the NCB.

THE COMING struggle in the mines is likely to be a long and bitter one. It will involve not only the miners but their wives and families in tremendous sacrifices. Already miners’ families will have discovered that one of Thatcher’s measures in 1980 has deprived them of between £12 and £14 a week in social […]

An action programme for health, produced by Workers Power's health worker fraction Red Pulse.

As unemployment approaches 1.5 million, we need a programme to force trade union leaders to fight -- or act without them.

The Labour government's Incomes Policy is designed to lower workers' living standards, and protect the bosses' profits