Ten Times Workers Won in 2022
As 2022 draws to a close, Tribune looks back at ten landmark trade union victories – showing how organised workers are fighting back against greed and exploitation.
4358 Articles by:
Raven Hart
Raven Hart is co-founder of the Bristol Cooperative Alliance, an organisation that aims to promote a decentralised economy that empowers local communities and facilitates democratic self-determination.
2022: The Year Trade Unions Came Back
In 2022, trade unions responded to the cost of living crisis with a wave of strikes – the biggest fightback waged by the organised working class in decades.
Warm Banks Shouldn’t Exist
The opening of hundreds of warm spaces across the country is proof of how desperate so many have become – and an indictment of a government willing to let people freeze in their own homes.
Yes, We Can Afford Pay Rises
There’s plenty of money available for the Tory government to give workers pay rises – but they are too busy funnelling it into the pockets of the rich.
Keeping Christmas On the Picket Line
By December 1984, Britain’s miners had been on strike for nine months – but local and international solidarity brought them everything from turkeys to children’s toys, and stopped even Thatcher from crushing their festive spirit.
No Firefighters in Foodbanks
They were hospitalised fighting wildfires in summer. They drove ambulances and moved the bodies of the deceased during Covid. Now they’re being offered yet another real-terms pay cut. That’s why the FBU is balloting on strike action.
Jeremy Corbyn: ‘Public Ownership Is About Democracy’
Public ownership isn’t just more effective, it’s more democratic – it’s time to take vital services like rail, mail, energy, and water out of the control of remote CEOs and unaccountable shareholders.
Don’t Let Royal Mail Die
Postal workers have played a vital role in communities for centuries – but now that’s under existential threat from a corporate leadership hell-bent on turning Royal Mail into another Uber. We can’t let that happen.
Red Library: Korean Fiction
Amid a global wave of interest in Korean culture, Korean writers have created some of the most striking politicised fiction of the last few years.
Forwards, Not Forgetting
Newly reissued, Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow’s 1932 film Kuhle Wampe is one of the true classics of socialist cinema, offering a glimpse of the last moment before the German left were crushed by Nazism.
Let’s Not Cancel Tolstoy
Not for the first time, Russian imperialism is casting a shadow over the country’s literature. But the last work of Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murad, provided both a mirror and an indictment.
The War Against Noise
Despite doomed patrician attempts to shut it out, noise can never entirely be avoided — and a level of ‘social noise’ is part of convivial life.
A Letter from Los Angeles
Immediately after World War Two and just before McCarthyism, ten Communists commissioned a modernist, racially integrated housing co-operative in the Silver Lake neighbourhood of L.A.
Tribune’s Alternative to the Cold War
During the tumultuous years after the end of World War Two, Tribune’s editorial team advocated an alternative to both American and Soviet domination: a democratic socialist ‘third force’.
The Ministry of Nurseries
Britain’s childcare system is appallingly expensive, complicated, and neglected – but for a time in the Second World War, public nurseries were considered part of the new welfare state.
To Infinity and Beyond
A new film depicts the story of a Soviet architectural ‘UFO’ in Kyiv, which still stands as both a resistance to Stalinist philistinism and wild capitalism.
Coming Up For Air
A new speculative fiction about a revolutionary near future takes the form of an oral history project with inhabitants of the New York Commune, and imagines how abolitionist theories might play out in practice.
‘I Was So Dissatisfied When Pulp Got Famous — It Didn’t Cause a Revolution’
Owen Hatherley interviews Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker about his upbringing, his politics — and what he kept that others might have thrown away.
A Workers’ Hero: Avtar Singh Jouhl
Avtar Singh Jouhl, the former president of the Indian Workers’ Association, passed away in October. He was a committed anti-racist and trade unionist, inviting Malcolm X to Britain and sending coaches of IWA members to support the miners’ strike in 1984.
Behind the South Liverpool Tribune Reading Group
In L8, the South Liverpool Tribune Reading Group is organising political education to help a diverse working-class community fight decades of government neglect.