Within recent memory part of the substantive debate around trade unions and equality was centred on the question of the extent to which white workers were seen to benefit from racism and working class men to benefit from the oppression of women. That debate has moved on significantly in the face of the collapse of trade union density. From the high of the 1970s with 13 million union members in the UK to the present day with 6 million there is less debate about the `social location` of members and much more about the sheer absence of members.
Dr Jane Holgate (Leeds University) in her review of `Racism, class and the Radicalised Outsider` (Satnam Virdee Glasgow University) draws on her vast knowledge of organising to remind us that those debates still have something concrete to say about the decline of union membership. In particular, in this work, with regard to the paradigm of race and class. Set against a background of two widely accepted trends – most trade union members are female and proportionally workers from an ethnic background are more likely to be trade union members – it is essential that organisers and activists consider the implications of this question.
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_challenge_of_whole_worker_organising_in_struggles_for_social_justice
A useful new source of trade union policy briefings and documents has been launched by the think tank Class. Publications from supporting unions and the wider trade union movement are now available in a library section of the Class website:
http://classonline.org.uk/library
The latest Spending Review does not need a particularly detailed analysis to reach an inescapable conclusion - the current government has no economic agenda but it does have an ideological one.
Only a Tory optimist could believe that this country is in any way approaching “recovery”. For the coalition at the receiving end of public spending cuts - those who have seen their wages and salaries plummet in the past five years, those working households whose wages are on poverty level and who depend on tax credits, families who rely on child benefit, those who rely on disability benefits, there is no recovery. For all those dedicated public workers whose jobs have been slashed there is no recovery. There is only more of the same for us.
If you examine Scottish independence using class as your starting point - it looks a lot less radical than some people make out. Once you start to look at the 'client capitalism' model of Scotland that the SNP want to create, it's not a pretty picture at all. Vince Mills argues in the Morning Star that the SNP is firmly committed to the neoliberal project. "A stronger Scottish Parliament is of no consequence if it does not house those who are prepared to use these powers to challenge the dominance of capital".
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/115708
