Winning a battle against the odds: A cleaners’ campaign

This article analyses a campaign urging a British university to re-establish in-house cleaning services after years of outsourcing. The small independent union leading the campaign began from an extremely low level of power resources and managed to build enough associational and societal power to win the dispute on cleaners’ working conditions. The study is based on participant observation of the union’s activities, document analysis and interviews. The article argues that the strategy emerging from the study, centred around three key strategies (collectivization of individual grievances, education, and disruption of core business activities), can be articulated in a process following the main categories of Mobilization Theory: organization, mobilization and collective action. Additionally, the union managed to conciliate servicing and organizing strategies, as well as attention to class-oriented and migrant-specific issues.

The concept and essence of mobbing, ways to overcome it

Today, employers like to complain about the low efficiency of their employees. However, they do not take into account the fact that they themselves are not only unable to adequately organize the labor process, but also very often create their own non-working atmosphere, full of intrigue, harassment and violence. As a result, labor productivity is low, there is hatred for each other in the team, and the most promising employees can not withstand the pressure and are fired. For the most part, in post-Soviet labor collectives with a well-developed informal management apparatus, the rights of workers enshrined in the current legislation are leveled and the practices of “etching” or “surviving” people from work become acceptable. These may be workers with other socio-political views, those who do not succumb to the dominant practices of psychological or sexual oppression, aim to create an independent union, who prefer to work decently, rather than participate in the competition "who is closer to the throne" at regular banquets and meetings, gradually losing professional and personal dignity. The spread of mobbing in the field of labor shows the vulnerability of the most vulnerable categories of the population to increased labor exploitation, declining social status and lack of social support. Predatory laws of the market system dictate predatory behavior to labor market participants who are afraid of losing their livelihoods. Mobbing is a clear result of material stratification and marginalization of a large part of the population of Ukraine. It is to such consequences that global capitalism leads. And of course, we need to treat the causes, not the consequences. However, with adequate legal mechanisms to combat mobbing, one can hope to reduce the violent pressure on the employee. This will be facilitated by the "legal mechanism of counteraction" and not by the punitive pressure of law enforcement agencies, which stigmatizes victims of mobbing as informers and justifies the need for violence against them instead of protecting professional honor and human dignity.

Title VIII Economic and Monetary Policy

Title VIII of Part Three of the TFEU deals with economic and monetary policy of the Union. It brings together two policy fields of intense sensitivity for the MS and for citizens, in a highly asymmetrical fashion. Economic policy is an area in which MS retain extensive competences, and in which the TFEU provisions envisage forms of coordination based on multilateral surveillance in which the Commission and the Council jointly exercise key responsibilities and from which the Court is largely excluded in practical terms (see also Commentary on Article 5 TFEU). Monetary policy is a competence of the Union (see Article 3 TFEU) that is largely exercised by the ECB as an independent Union institution, which is relatively insulated from the other institutions so that it can achieve its primary task of ensuring price stability.

The use of external perceived injustices by AMCU in the South African Platinum Mining Industry

Social movement theories applied to industrial relations are insufficient to explain recruitment and collective action focused on perceived injustices that are external to the workplace and that an employer has a limited ability to influence. The South African platinum mining industry has been characterised by increased collective action and the emergence of a new independent union at the expense of the incumbent union. The new union has mobilised primarily on external injustices that employers cannot directly influence. 299 Union members were interviewed of rival unions to examine the effect of using external perceived injustices as the main driver for collective action in the platinum mining industry in 2012//2013. The findings extend prior research on social movement theory and industrial relations and discuss the implications for unions allied to government and employers.

Challenging ‘umthetho we femu’ (the law of the firm): gender relations and shop-floor battles for union recognition in Natal's textile industry, 1973–85

As part of a growing working-class movement that sought full legal status as employees in South Africa, stable urban residence and union recognition, female African factory workers became part of a dynamic new labour movement emanating from the shop floor. At the same time, this new role allowed them to challenge patriarchal structures of authority in the factory, the community and the home. This article examines the gender dimension of a bitter inter-union rivalry that beset Durban's Frame textile complex during the early 1980s. With African unions at last recognized by the apartheid state, Frame sought to bolster the strength of a compliant company union in order to thwart the organizing drive of a more confrontational independent union, an affiliate of the newly established Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU). This union rivalry was fought out in the courts as well as inside the factory, in the streets of Durban's townships, and in an African workers’ hostel in nearby Clermont. The legal dispute generated affidavits by women workers attesting to the pressures they faced to join the company union and their reasons for preferring FOSATU. This evidence shows that African women successfully challenged the patriarchal authority of male managers, security personnel, indunas and male co-workers at Frame in order to join an independent union.