How has social media contributed to the growing success of Corbynism? In asking this question, we risk falling into the trap of determinism by constructing ‘social media’ as an independent force bringing about effects in an otherwise unchanged world. This often… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘labour’
Against the ‘political rulebook’
Much of the reaction to Labour’s election success last week has been framed in terms of their ‘rewriting the rules’. One particularly explicit example of this can be seen in an article by Jonathan Freedland, an enthusiastic critic of Corbyn,… Read More ›
How Corbyn hacked the media
It’s conventional wisdom that Corbyn’s leadership campaign was the target of brutal coverage by the media. I was interested to learn in The Candidate, by Alex Nunns, that this wasn’t quite how the campaign itself saw the situation. Understanding why… Read More ›
Conservatism eats itself: An irreverent look at the conservative mind by Deborah Talbot
by Deborah Talbot Conservative politics are everywhere, but what is it, and what are they really like? In the cities, you don’t notice conservatism. It’s there, for sure, but is pretty quiet about itself. Political parties of a more left… Read More ›
Liberating discretionary effort by robbing your staff of a personal life
There’s an interesting extract in The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, concerning discretionary effort: what could your employees do if they were properly motivated? I’m fascinated by this concept because of its open-ended character. Once one begins to think like this, it’s always possible to… Read More ›
An interview with Jamie Woodcock about Working the Phones
Find out more about the book here How did call centre emerge and proliferate? Would it be a mistake to see this as solely a matter of technological feasibility? The growth of call centres in the UK is a result… Read More ›
Bounded autonomy in the workplace
In John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, he describes what might be termed the bounded autonomy enjoyed by some editorial teams within publishing houses. From pg 128: the devolution of editorial decision-making to small editorial teams operating with a high degree… Read More ›
The tragically incompetent elites of the centre left
This critique by Thomas Frank, on loc 2729 of his Pity the Billionaire, applies as well to proponents of the ‘third way’ within the Labour Party as it does to the leaders of the Democratic Party in relation to whom… Read More ›
Reclaiming ‘aspiration’ for the left
This is powerful stuff from Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the UK’s Labour Party, in his recent LSE lecture: I am not talking here about the aspiration of the delusional Del Boys – “This time next year Rodney, we’ll be millionaires” –… Read More ›
1st Conference of the European Labour History Network – Worker’s Writing in Europe
14 – 16 December 2015, Torino/Turin (Italy) Workshop : Worker’s Writing in Europe (19th-20th centuries) A contribution to the cultural history of the worlds of work Within the framework of constructing a cultural history of the worlds of work “seen… Read More ›
How obsessive auditing produces “a profession which is incompatible with a normal life”
80% of new teachers in 2005 were still teaching after their first year. In 2015 that has shrunk to just 62%, coupled with record numbers leaving mid career. In the intervening period, we’ve seen successive governments seek to transform schooling… Read More ›
The Dark Side of Chocolate
Chocolate comes from cocoa beans, and about 70% of coco beans come from Ghana and the Ivory Coast in Africa. Coco bean plantations where it is grown and harvested have historically relied on child, slave labor to harvest those coco… Read More ›
“Invisible Lives”: Romanian Night Workers in London
Global cities like London have an incessant rhythm of consumption that needs to be maintained around-the-clock. This short film shines a light on the invisible lives of people working at night whilst the majority sleep or enjoy the nocturnal life…. Read More ›
Rosemary Crompton’s Journey to Sociology
Rosemary Crompton () was a famous British sociologist of work who researched white-collar work, women’s employment, organisational careers and class, cross-national variations in gender relations and related policies and their impacts on employment and family life. Yet, she was – as I… Read More ›
Pro-wrestling, unionisation and American capitalism
This fascinating article on Jacobin offers an historical persepctive on professional wrestling, a sport that “with its screaming neon lunatics, potbellied big daddies, and tasseled ‘ring rats’, has been considered too absurd to be taken seriously”. Yet the dominant World… Read More ›
The emotional wellbeing of non-tenure track faculty
The Academe blog has an interesting post reporting on a new research paper which explores the emotional impact of the academic “caste system” that afflicts American higher education (and is present elsewhere in a less explicitly codified form). It seems… Read More ›
Trafficked Filipino Teachers in the USA
I just read an article about something new and shocking to me – qualified teachers of mathematics (and other subjects) from the Philiphines who are recruited on one-year contracts to teach in USA public schools, but often end up in… Read More ›
Bullshit jobs
Today I came across another good article by David Graeber about why there are so many really bad jobs around: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs. “In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have… Read More ›
The academic ethics of strikebreaking
This insightful reflection on academic strikebreaking captures something very important about the contemporary politics of higher education: The disavowal at work here is stunning in its mundanity, the fact that it went unremarked as it was stated. ‘The union should adopt different… Read More ›
The Perils of Passion: Videogames, Higher Education and Precarious Labour
The Jacobin Magazine has a fascinating article exploring the role played by a passion for gaming in facilitating the expansion and intensification of precarious labour within the video game industry. With seemingly endless cohorts of eager young gamers desperate to… Read More ›
“My summer at an Indian call center” by Andrew Marantz
For our readers interested in the globalisation of labour and workers’ experiences, today’s reading is about call centres. Two documentary films, the 2005 film Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night and the 2006 film Bombay Calling also tackle this recent… Read More ›
The death toll of postsocialist mass privatisation
In , I did over 50 interviews with Bulgarian maritime workers. I wanted to study the post-socialist transformations of institutions and practices of maritime labour – and how those changes affected the working lives of seafarers and other maritime workers…. Read More ›
New collaborative labour history project
LabourStart, an internation news and campaigning website for trade unionists, has launched a new collaborative project and is asking labour history enthusiasts to help! They want to produce a ‘Today in Labour History’ calendar that can be added as a widget… Read More ›
Seafarers’ fatigue: new research by Cardiff University
The Seafarers International Research Institute (SIRC) in Cardiff have concluded a large-scale study of fatigue among seafarers and have produced a 30-minute movie which summarises their questions and findings. The SIRC team studied merchant mariners and fishermen. As Andy… Read More ›
SI SPORT WEEK #4-1: Researcher’s profile: Deborah Butler discusses Careers in the Racing Industry
Most people may have heard about Arkle, Red Rum, even Desert Orchid. How many people will have given a thought about the individuals who made sure these equine athletes made it the racetrack, fit and ready to race? It is… Read More ›
‘Salad Slaves’: migrant labour in European agriculture
It is a public secret that the European agricultural industry relies heavily on cheap and precarious migrant labour: mostly Moroccans, West Africans, and, since about a decade ago, also Eastern-Europeans. Here is one of the few pieces of investigative journalism… Read More ›
Soviet ‘health and safety’ posters
(click here follow link to gallery)