Six months ago, news broke that Belgian police had arrested the newly-elected general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) as part of the “Qatargate” scandal. The government of Qatar was accused of paying…
Let’s start with the good news. At the end of April, we held the most successful Global Solidarity Conference ever. Nearly 300 trade unionists from 30 countries gathered in Tbilisi, Georgia in an impressive display…
I’ve just come back from an international conference that could not have happened thirty years ago. And it’s a conference that might also prove impossible to hold in just a few short years. LabourStart’s Global…
The following was my opening speech to the LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference – Tbilisi, Georgia – 28 April 2023. Tbilisi, Georgia: Opening plenary of the LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference, 28.4.23. Friends, brothers and sisters, comrades….
The opening pages of this book by one of America’s greatest writers were a shock both to Richard Wright’s agent and publisher. They were so violent and painful to read that the book could not…
I must be the last person in England to have never read anything by “national treasure” Stephen Fry, but this book came up in conversation recently, so I have now done so. The book had…
This short book feels like a much longer one, as it covers some of the long history of Georgian culture, focussing on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s a book about poets and…
Thomas Mullen is an author I’d never come across before, but his other books have gotten rave reviews. And this one had an intriguing premise: imagine a world where in the course of a few…
As a company based in Sweden, which is home to some of the world’s most powerful unions, you would think that IKEA would be an employer that understood the importance of workers’ rights. And if…
This is a very good and important book, and it deserves a wide audience. I read a lot about this subject and I still managed to learn things I didn’t know before. (I didn’t know,…