Platform Worker Organising at Deliveroo in the UK: From Wildcat Strikes to Building Power

It has been five years since the first strikes of Deliveroo workers in London in 2016. Since then, workers have continued to organise. The campaigns have involved five different aspects: first, wildcat strike action; second, networks and internationalisation; third, union organising with the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (iwgb); fourth, legal campaigning; and fifth, wider leverage campaigns. What is less understood so far is the different strengths and weaknesses of these aspects, and how they have contributed to the build of workers’ self-organisation and power at Deliveroo. This article explores the different aspects and considers the effectiveness of each. It concludes by considering what can be learned from these struggles for the understanding of platform work and trade union organising today.

Regimes, Resistance and Reforms: Comparing Workers' Politics in the Automobile Industry in China and India

The automobile industry in China was shaken by an unprecedented upsurge of labour unrest in 2010, beginning with the much-discussed wildcat strike at the Nanhai Honda transmission plant in Guangdong province. While worker activism in auto plants in India was not as concentrated as in China’s 2010 strike wave, the period 2009–2017 witnessed twenty-seven strikes nationwide, indicating a significant uptick after the global recession. The optimism that regarded the escalation of labour unrest as indicative of a global labour movement emerging from the Global South has died down. This is an appropriate moment to ask the question: Why did these protests not materialise into something more? Existing explanations in China tend to focus on the regime characteristics. In this article, we undertake a much-needed comparative analysis to explore the failure of these protests. We argue that their failure to sustain their momentum, let alone become a global movement, must be understood in the context of the structures and temporality of capitalism. While we show that there were regime-based divergences and national characteristics in each case, we also show the striking global convergence both in the ways that the protests materialised and how the states responded. KEYWORDS: labour resistance; temporary work; democracy; neo-liberalism; China; India

The Strike Begins

Chapter Three chronicles the first five days of the 1970 nationwide postal wildcat strike. It spread from New York City as postal union branches and locals across the nation debated and voted. In the end, almost one-third of the workforce walked off the job. NALC Branch 36 and the Manhattan-Bronx Postal Union led the rank-and-file effort, with prominent roles played by Vincent Sombrotto (NALC) and Moe Biller (MBPU).

Rising Expectations and Brewing Conflict

This chapter looks at the low pay and poor working conditions in the late 1960s and the upsurge of rank-and-file postal worker reform campaigns against what they called “collective begging” of Congress. Chronic postal deficits and a sudden service breakdown in Chicago in 1966 led to the 1967 Kappel Commission that first explored a postal corporation model. The chapter also charts the growing postal worker anger at Congress; presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon; and their own national union leaders for ignoring their pleas for living wages. Militant rank-and-file organizing in New York led up to the wildcat strike that began there on March 18, 1970.

The Strike Ends

Chapter Four follows the last three days of the 1970 postal wildcat strike. It starts from President Richard M. Nixon’s dramatic intervention on March 23, 1970 when he sent thousands of unarmed federal troops and National Guard to New York City as part of Operation Graphic Hand to try to move the mail and break the strike. Strikers across the country ended the strike March 25 on their own terms, threatening to walk out again the following week.

Aftershocks and Postal Reorganization

Chapter Five analyses the reasons for the success of the strike and charts the rocky aftermath of the 1970 postal wildcat strike with threats of more strikes. This would be the beginning of arguments both within and among the unions over proposed union reforms. The chapter also examines the political debates over the making of the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act (PRA) as a labor-government compromise. The year 1970 also saw the beginnings of union realignment as two key militant unions—the National Postal Union and the historically-black National Alliance of Postal and Federal Employees—were excluded from negotiations in the future USPS.

Undelivered

For eight days in March 1970, over 200,000 postal workers staged an illegal "wildcat" strike--the largest in United States history--for better wages and working conditions. Picket lines started in New York and spread across the country like wildfire. Strikers defied court injunctions, threats of termination, and their own union leaders. In the negotiated aftermath, the U.S. Post Office became the U.S. Postal Service, and postal workers received full collective bargaining rights and wage increases, all the while continuing to fight for greater democracy within their unions. Using archives, periodicals, and oral histories, Philip Rubio shows how this strike, born of frustration and rising expectations and emerging as part of a larger 1960s-1970s global rank-and-file labor upsurge, transformed the post office and postal unions. It also led to fifty years of clashes between postal unions and management over wages, speedup, privatization, automation, and service. Rubio revives the 1970 strike story and connects it to today's postal financial crisis that threatens the future of a vital 245-year-old public communications institution and its labor unions.

Evaluation of Labor Agency Strategy: The Case of a Strike at a South African Opencast Mine in 2012

The South African mining sector has experienced labor conflicts characterized by militancy and violence. Militancy and violence was evident along South Africa’s platinum belt between 2012 and 2014. In the case of Huntington mine, about three hundred workers managed to pull a spectacular strike action when they captured mine equipment and threatened to destroy it if their demands were not met. Drawing together concepts of space, power, and agency, it is argued that the wildcat strike was a failure because power resources were not consolidated and used effectively. As a result, their demands were not met, and they lost their jobs at Huntington mine.

Reasons Are Given for the Current Wildcat Strikes in Vietnam: The Blue-Collar Workers' Perspective

Despite the vast research by researchers on Vietnam's wildcat strike, little is known of the perspective of the Southern Focal Economic Zone. The overall reason that emerges from the literature included: (1) raising wages for workers; (2) contributing to social security for workers; (3) and paying a seniority allowance. The aim of the present research is to figure out the reasons for the current wildcat strikes among Vietnamese blue-collar workers. A group of 936 Vietnamese blue-collar workers (387 males and 549 females) from four Southern Vietnam cities participated in the survey. They completed the Reasons are given for Wildcat Strikes questionnaire. The descriptive results showed that the highest mean among those reasons is ‘‘Labor regulations at the company are too strict’’. The result of this research emphasizes the impact of each reason by investigating nonoffice workers’ perspective so as to predict which the potential reasons are for future strikes in Southern Vietnam.