The Greater Manchester mayor has shifted left over the years — but his record still shows a tendency to wobble when pressure comes from the right, says SOLOMON HUGHES
OVER the last 30 years there has been a slow, patchy, inconsistent and faltering return to an organic bottom-up organising culture in British trade unions, based primarily on a renewed understanding of the dynamics of class conflict at work.
Truthfully, this evolution was not assisted in any major fashion by the Labour government of 1997 to 2010, whose focus was on individual rather than collective employment rights that could be organised around, enforced as they were on a case-by-case basis through employment tribunals.
With the prospect of another Labour government, unions must learn the lessons of our failure to capitalise on the last one to grow our organisations.
CWU leader DAVE WARD tells Ben Chacko a strategy to unite workers on class lines is needed – and sectoral collective bargaining must be at its heart
LAURA PIDCOCK and PAUL O’CONNELL introduces Rise, a political platform for working-class activism
It is only trade union power at work that will materially improve the lot of working people as a class but without sector-wide collective bargaining and a right to take sympathetic strike action, we are hamstrung in the fight to tilt back the balance of power, argues ADRIAN WEIR
KEVAN NELSON reveals how, through its Organising to Win strategy, which has launched targeted campaigns like Pay Fair for Patient Care, Britain’s largest union bucked the trend of national decline by growing by 70,000 members in two years


