Capital & Class

The trade union bureaucracy debate has significant implications for both analysis and union strategy. Recently receiving renewed academic attention, this debate centres around whether there is a dichotomy between rank-and-file workers and full-time union officials, and whether these officials – the trade union bureaucracy – tend towards industrial conservatism. The case study of labour relations in the Pilbara iron ore industry in the north of Western Australia 1965–1986 enriches our analysis of the trade union bureaucracy by viewing its role in the class struggle over a number of decades, in varying contexts of union development, union power and union decline. Throughout this entire period, there was significant conflict between the bureaucracy and rank and file. The remoteness of the Pilbara region, and workers’ industrial militancy makes it an extreme case suited to unveiling insights on the nature of the trade union bureaucracy. The Australian focus broadens a largely British debate. This article also offers a greater consideration of the role of full-time shop stewards’ convenors than has occurred previously. Finally, the trade union bureaucracy theory illuminates our understanding of this period in Pilbara labour history.

In the last decade, repurchase-agreements (repos) between banks and financial institutions have grown significantly as banks systemically low on cash see repos as the cheapest, safest, and quickest way to get the funding they need for running regular services. However, hikes in interest rates by the Federal Reserve since March 2022 have increased the cost of interbank borrowing. This causes stress on many banks, and ultimately, brings into question the financial system’s long-term reliance on repos and other obscure short-term funding methods. Awareness of the Fed’s repo market policy, and their monetary policy in general, ought to matter to political economists and workers alike because it reveals precisely how the economy is controlled by a few levers inside the marriage between state and finance capital. Consequently, in this article I outline the repo market and its significance to the Fed’s management of economic crises. This requires a relative understanding of their general monetary policy, which in itself requires significant material economic contextualizing. It is this context that ultimately matters most, and which will therefore be the focal point of discussion. Only after such contextualization does the discussion end with a word on the rise of repos, the risks of increased reliance on it, and possible future directions from the perspective of both capital and labor.

Unions can increase the power of workers through both collective bargaining and political avenues, potentially creating less income inequality and poverty. However, this potential may not be realized. Drawing on power resource theory, this study uses panel data to investigate the connection between unionization and two measures of after-tax inequality – the income share of the top 1% and the Gini coefficient – and three measures of poverty – the percentage of the population below the low-income cut-off, the average income of the bottom decile, and the percent of the population below the low-income measure – between Canadian provinces from 2000 to 2020. We find that unionization is negatively associated with income inequality in Canada. This relationship is statistically significant. However, we do not find evidence of any statistical association between unionization and poverty in Canada.

This article aims to reconstruct the ‘silent’ reformulation of the notion of disability within social policy systems in recent decades. Particular attention is given to the practices implemented in the United Kingdom as an example of a conditional welfare state with advanced workfare arrangements (primarily in the form of the Employment and Support Allowance scheme). The redefinition of disability from the perspective of changes in the criteria determining social benefits – that is, in reality, limiting the social rights of this, as one British economist put it, ‘silent minority’ – is framed as part of a broader trend termed ‘antisocial social policy’ and is captured through the lens of welfare scarcity, a component of welfare sociology. This proposed framing, based on a Marx-inspired critical analysis, fills the gaps in the concept of welfare state retrenchment which excessively focuses on conservative right-wing politics.

This article advances a zemiological framework of work-based harms, as a means of interrogating the contemporary crisis in the quality of work. Such a framework provides a more nuanced conceptualisation and a stronger political framing of the various harms that are incurred in the workplace than alternative understandings. We critically appraise the development of zemiology out of critical criminology and review recent models which demonstrate the value and insights of the approach to the topic of work-based harms. Nonetheless, these accounts tend to neglect the role of worker resistance in determining the distribution of harm, and we draw on Class Composition Analysis from Autonomist Marxism as a way of better understanding the bargaining power of workers, which in our understanding is synonymous with their ability to resist the imposition of harm. We apply this combined framework to an analysis of hospitality work in Sheffield. First, we describe workers’ experiences of three significant forms of harm (employment insecurity, wage thefts and health and safety during the COVID pandemic). Second, we explore the barriers to union organisation, which very often are linked to the dynamics generating harms in the workplace. Finally, we examine how those barriers were overcome and harms effectively contested, drawing on the example of the Sheffield Needs A Pay Rise campaign.