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‘Demise of unions has set us back to 19th century’
Ramparts Of Resistance by Sheila Cohen,
WORKERS of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your bling (elaborate and highly ostentatious jewellery no doubt produced by some home worker on a pittance).
Karl Marx’s slightly updated rallying call has greater urgency now than any time since the industrial revolution – yet no one seems to be listening.
Sheila Cohen, pictured, says, in her banner-waving new book Ramparts Of Resistance, that bosses in Britain and America, let alone the new industrial developing nations, have never had it so good.
Wages do not meet diminishing quality of life. That’s true for Britain’s army of government workers, those in the newly privatised industries, prison workers at Pentonville and migrant workers. It’s particularly true in the third world, where workers make clothes for the Western market on starvation wages.
At the same time it seems that Margaret Thatcher so systematically neutered trade unionism that many of her children have been bequeathed a workplace system that would have made any 19th-century mill owner blush.
Even in today’s prosperous London, short-term and freelance contracts mean insecurity and stress in the workplace, lunch breaks have virtually disappeared, and wages don’t reflect the prices of renting, never mind buying a home.
Sheila, an academic from Islington, has been involved in the trade union movement for two decades and produced and edited Trade Union News. She lives off Liverpool Road, is a member of Islington Trades Council and works for the National Union of Journalists.
“Trade union membership,” she writes, “has declined catastrophically since the 1970s, dropping sharply throughout the 1980s and 1990s to reach less than 33 per cent in Britain today.
“In the US union density fell to 12.5 per cent overall and a shocking eight per cent in the private sector by 2005.”
But she believes that, as working conditions worsen, the trade union movement will return.
She added: “Surveys show that it isn’t that workers don’t want to join unions. They would do so if they considered them strong enough.”
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