The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Sebastian, Four Mothers, Restless, and The Most Precious of Cargoes
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Solving unions’ entrenched identity crisis
This is an important book dealing with an important subject of critical concern to all labour movement activists, writes MARY DAVIS
picket
JOHN GREEN explores the argument that psychiatry needs to move away from the idea of just seeing and treating the individual
SYLVIA HIKINS applauds a polemic against “cleanfluencers” and considers radical alternatives to current inequalities of housework
RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
High quality pulp, rollicking online murders, Abnorman Britain, and high skates drama: reviews of The Get Off, Everyone In The Group Chat Dies, Pagans and First To Fall
DENNIS BROE notes what happens to content when the streaming giants incorporate AI and deregulation into their economic models
Arise: Power, Strategy and Union Resurgence
Jane Holgate
Pluto Press, £16.99
TAKING her cue from Hobsbawm’s analysis of the decline in trade union power, Holgate seeks to address the same problem — namely why trade union power has continued to decline since 1979, and whether this means that trade unionism in the 21st century requires “a fundamental rethink about the structure and strategy of trade union organising.”
Holgate’s book centres on how trade unions organise and the main organising models that have been adopted during the past 40 or so years in response to union decline.
She analyses these models and finds them deficient in that they ignore what, for her, is the vital question — the locus of power.
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