Taj Ali is an industrial correspondent at Tribune.
The town of Rugeley, England, once boasted a thriving, unionized coal industry that underpinned the community. Today it is the site of a hyperexploitative Amazon warehouse — typifying the effects of deindustrialization and union decline across the UK.
Standing alongside other prominent performers, comedian and actor Rob Delaney hosted a rally in London in support of the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. He spoke to us about working conditions in Hollywood and the meaning of solidarity.
We spoke to writer Kenan Malik, whose new book, Not So Black and White, interrogates race and its relationship to class struggle today, tracing the rise of identity politics alongside the decline of the labor movement and universalism.
In the UK, university staff are engaged in a grading and assessment boycott as part of a long-running dispute over pay, pensions, and precarity. But university administrations are refusing to listen, leaving many students unable to graduate as normal.
Yesterday, staff at Amazon’s Coventry warehouse did something no British workers at the company had previously done: they walked off the job.
Thanks to over a decade of Conservative-imposed austerity, the UK’s public services are stretched to the breaking point. Public sector workers are going on strike to save the country’s public goods from dangerous underfunding.
The cost-of-living crisis is only getting worse in Britain, and Amazon isn’t offering its workers nearly enough to fix it. That’s why British Amazon workers have recently carried out a series of wildcat strikes.