casualisation

Port Adelaide struggles, 1928-1931

Strikers congregate near the police station

Photo gallery of the strikes and riots at Port Adelaide in Australia which began in 1928 when the employers introduced new working conditions. They cut workers' break time - when workers already did 16 to 48 hour shifts, and crucially strengthened the "bull system", whereby bosses would handpick workers. This meant not only workers having to wait around for hours each day to potentially not get any work but also that union workers could be denied hiring. Union leaders rapidly called off the action but workers continued to fight for three years.

‘It’s only the beginning’: UK McDonald’s staff take historic strike action

Workers at McDonald’s stores in Cambridge (East England) and Crayford (Southern England) are mounting historic strikes on Monday morning. Organised by the BFAWU (Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union), they will be the first ever unionised strikes at a UK McDonald’s.

Spanish dockworkers prepare for strikes against job losses and casualisation

Dock workers vote to strike

Dockworkers' unions in Spain have suspended a series of one day strikes until March 17, the day after a planned parliamentary vote on opening up port employment to competition, with the threat of an end to job security and reasonable pay.

An account of the British Film Institute strikes, 2002

Picket line outside the head office

A short personal account of the strikes at the British Film Institute (BFI) in London in 2002.

Building a fuckin' parking garage

A manual worker's account of day labour from The Best of Temp Slave!.

A more perfect victim

An account of a former office temp getting revenge on a CEO.

10 tenets for temping

Some rules of temp work according to an ungrateful worker.

I work for Boreco INC.

An account of being a temp in a North American factory from the excellent Best of Temp Slave!

Reflections on The lump by Dave Lamb - Dave Walton

Building workers rally in Liverpool against a union sell-out

A couple of decades on after the publication of the controversial Solidarity pamphlet on the lump (a way of casualising construction work), Dave Walton, a former construction worker looks back on it and the struggles of the time.

The call centre diaries, part 1

The Call Centre Diaries will be a semi regular series detailing my experiences as a precarious worker. To kick things off I’m going to share my experiences of working at Manpower, a major UK recruitment agency. Hopefully this won’t just touch on my experiences as a worker but also how the environment fostered in the kind of companies that thrive in economies structured around temporary contracts is adversely affecting the lives of both their own workers and the unemployed they are supposed to be finding work for.