Union organising

James Farrar, chair of the United Private Hire Drivers’ branch of the IWGB union, spoke to Solidarity about working for Uber and the cancellation of their licence. I am a founder as well as the chair of the United Private Hire Drivers’ (UPHD) branch of the IWGB union. We came into being because there was no dedicated organisation for minicab drivers in London. All the other trade unions also represent taxi drivers and operators. Some refuse membership to private hire drivers. The industry has been rife with labour abuse for decades. Uber has taken that to an industrial scale. For our members...

The most important industrial disputes that I’ve been involved in were the 1985 SEQEB (South East Queensland Electricity Board) dispute; the maritime dispute of 1998; and the 63-day Queensland Children’s Hospital construction workers’ dispute of 2012, after which I had a long battle against both criminal charges and litigation for civil damages. A more important strike that I had a little bit to do with was the British miners’ strike of 1984-1985. The Seamen’s Union of Australia in those days put on a complete ban on any coal to go to Britain during the strike. Not one ounce of Australian coal...

I always had a strong underlying humanist bias. I tended not to view things not just from an ideological viewpoint, as was the rule in the SPA [Socialist Party of Australia, a “hardline” pro-USSR split-off from the Communist Party of Australia]. My moral break from authoritarian state-capitalism, or Stalinism, which still infects the Australian left and the Australian trade union movement to a much larger degree than people realise, took a long time. I would say it took from 1979, when I joined the SPA, to the final break in about 1994. The last five years has been my great political growing...

Looking back, the watershed moment of the modern Australian labour movement was really 1975. The Governor-General sacked the reforming Labor government and put in the conservatives under Malcolm Fraser to govern instead. Workers organised a huge surge of strikes and demonstrations in response; but the union leaders limited and deflected the movement. After that, the left-wing ferment of Australia’s early 1970s subsided quite fast, thought the trade union movement remained strong. You would have been in your early teens then. Do you remember what you made of it? I remember my father being...

The Builders Labourer, the journal of the Builders Labourers Federation of Queensland, carried this tribute by Bill Hunt to Bob Carnegie in 2008 when Bob decided to step down as a full-time organiser with the BLF to return to work on the sites. By now many if not most of our members will be aware that Bob Carnegie is no longer an organiser with the BLF Bob has a job with Grocon as a peggy [site cleaner] and is looking forward to reacquainting himself with the rank and file. Bob Carnegie was born to unionism. His father was a seaman who brooked no bullshit from anyone and was affectionately...

As Solidarity goes to press, the annual general meeting of the National Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport workers (RMT) is debating a series of motions at its annual general meeting on its relationship with the Labour Party. The RMT, whose predecessor union helped found Labour, effectively had its affiliation cancelled by the New Labour leadership in 2004, after the RMT leadership refused to censure Scottish branches which wanted to back candidates of the Scottish Socialist Party, then an active and growing force. Since then, RMT has backed a number of electoral efforts against Labour...

On 16 June over 100 people attended a short-notice demonstration called at Brixton’s Ritzy cinema, in protest at the sacking of three trade union reps. Three reps for the Bectu union at the Ritzy were sacked for failing to report to management the contents of an email sent from a Bectu branch email address to members’ private emails, which mentioned actions that community supporters of cinema workers’ strikes planned to undertake. One other rep remains suspended and awaiting disciplinary. The implication is chillingly feudal: that workers should be compelled to report everything to their...

In May the US mining company Freeport McMoRan sacked 3,000 workers at the Grasberg copper and gold mine in West Papua, Indonesia. Workers had just begun a 30-day strike protesting against the company’s furlough policy — the temporary laying off of workers because of breaks in production. The company has been in dispute with the Indonesian government over new conditions for its licence to mine in West Papua and this had interrupted production. Since 2011 there have been a number of strikes at the mine over wages and conditions, the backdrop to which has been continuing human rights and...

Security guards at the central University of London site in Bloomsbury took a third day of strike action against the university and contractor Cordant on 16 May, following two last month. They want an end to disguised use of zero-hours contracts, itemised pay slips and a pay rise they were promised six years ago when UoL’s outsourced workers first won the Living Wage. In part the dispute represents the impact of earlier struggles by their union, the Independent Workers of Great Britain, working through. The guards were supposed to get a 25pc pay increase to maintain their previous differential...

Fast food giant McDonald’s recently announced it will scrap zero-hours contracts for its workers in the UK. Solidarity spoke to Gareth Lane, an organiser for the Bakers, Food, and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU), about this move, and his union’s ongoing efforts to organise fast food workers. The BFAWU has been organising fast food workers for nearly two years now. Organising fast food workers is not easy to say the least. Economic hardships like extreme poverty and chaos caused by low income and insecure hours makes organising routines and communications among workers quite difficult. Every day...