Why Join a Trade Union?

Jo Phillips

• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781849542760
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Économie du travail

The Labour Party was built on them; Margaret Thatcher set out to destroy them. Trades unions, who needs them? The answer is quite simply, anyone who goes to work and who cares about pay & conditions, equal rights, safety and training (or so the trades unions themselves would tell you). Others may call them wreckers and bullies, who just want a fight with the bosses. In a world of portfolio jobs and economic austerity, will people need unions even more for protection or have they had their day along with sheepskin coats and picket lines?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• A marriage of inconvenience
• The case against
• The case for
• Can’t see the join?
• Back to the future
• Smokestacks to motherboards
• Left far behind
• Fear and loathing
• A different class
• Life on Mars
• Consumed with anger
• Hate figures 1: Maggie, Maggie, Maggie
• Hate figures 2: fat cats in flat caps
• Mr Gordon Taylor: an interlude
• Mr Adam Crozier: another interlude
• The way of the working world
• Genesis of the unions
• Long ago and Pharaoh way
• TIGMOO: yet another interlude
• Good news! Millions dead!
• Trouble at t’mill
• Give us a break
• It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t Captain Swing
• Top of the Charters
• An everyday story of country folk
• Strike a light OR Light a strike
• Rise and fall
• Meet the activists
• Division of labour
• Don’t be left behind, all right?
• The TUC
• Sisters aren’t doing it
• Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde aka Brenda
• Billy and Arthur
• The Falklands, part two
• Don’t pick that scab!
• Requiem for the picket line
• Pickets, my arse
• Coming second
• Socialist Workers plc
• And now for something a bit different
• The General Strike
• When in Rome
• Political strikes
• Now is the winter of our discontent…
• The reverse strike: a cunning trick
• Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…
• My Lords, Ladies and Comrades…
• A load of old ballots
• From hurdles to the high jump
• Snapshot of a dispute
• Just our Bill
• Boring stuff
• You can always get what you want
• From closed to closed down
• The closed shop: a musical interlude
• Buy one collective bargain, get one free
• Money, money, money (it’s a rich man’s world)
• I fought the law and the law won
• You’re not wanted any more
• The hour has come
• Victims of hate
• Elf and fairy stories
• Inhuman resources
• Labour pains
• Hard-pressed
• Kiss my arse
• Of baggage, banners and brass bands
• As dead as an industrial correspondent
• An end to cloth caps
• Soap and chocolate
• Can’t join, shan’t join
• Lord, bless this union. Please
• ALSO BY JO PHILLIPS AND DAVID SEYMOUR
• Copyright