From Chartists and Suffragettes to Irish republicans and today’s Palestine activists, the treatment of hunger strikers exposes a consistent pattern in how the British state represses those it deems political prisoners, says KEITH FLETT
TIME and motion studies in factories were once led by brown-coated foremen with clipboards.
When trying to analyse the processes of well-organised shop floor workers, their puzzled expressions reflected the hopelessness of trying to get us working faster for no extra pay.
Nowadays, with less organisation in the workplace, just in time production, instant targets to meet and inhuman tracking and delivery in logistics and online ordering, the contemporary foreman needs a PhD in maths to shave a few seconds off “waste” in the labour process and unfortunately workers are more exposed and less able to collectively invent ruses to prevent speed-up.
Ben Chacko talks to RMT leader EDDIE DEMPSEY about how the key to fixing broken Britain lies in collective sectoral bargaining, restoring unions’ ability to take solidarity strike action and bringing about the much-vaunted ‘wave of insourcing’
Incoming Usdaw general secretary JOANNE THOMAS talks to Ben Chacko about workers’ rights, Labour and how to arrest the decline of the high street
DOUG NICHOLLS argues that to promote the aspirations for peace and socialism that defeated the Nazis 80 years ago we must today detach ourselves from the United States and assert the importance of national self-determination and peaceful coexistence



