From London’s holly-sellers to Engels’s flaming Christmas centrepiece, the plum pudding was more than festive fare in Victorian Britain, says KEITH FLETT
IN WHAT is another victory for trade unions in the United States, President Joe Biden has fired all ten of Donald Trump’s appointees to the Federal Service Impasses Panel — a powerful labour relations body set up to arbitrate and resolve dispute between federal unions and management.
Biden took out its Trump appointees in one swoop when he demanded the resignation of union busters from the panel. Eight resigned and two who refused were fired.
Trump’s appointees, all anti-union activists, had blocked the right of unions to organise and to undertake collective bargaining.
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
TONY BURKE says an International Labour Conference next month will try for a new convention to protect often super-exploited workers providing services such as ride-hailing (taxis) such as Uber as well as fast food and package delivery



