Credit: Phil Wrigglesworth Liam Kennedy: Could you tell me a bit about how the UTAW branch came to be? Why the Communications Workers Union (CWU), for instance? John Chadfield: The idea for UTAW, or a tech worker union led by tech workers, started in 2019 and...
Russians demonstrate in 2014 against military intervention in Ukraine. Image: Dhārmikatva / Wikimedia Commons One early initiative in the ‘no war’ movement of Russian citizens, now filling the squares of Moscow, Saint Petersburg and other cities and facing brutal...
Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser waiving to a crowd in Mansoura, 1960 In 1919, a peasant-led revolt broke out in Egypt demanding an end to British occupation. In the aftermath of this widespread mobilisation, the country gained a nominal independence from 28...
Qiuyan Chen outside the Intermediate People’s Court in Beijing in 2015. Photo credit: Qiuyan Chen On 16 July 2021, 18 LGBTQ+ public accounts run by the members of ‘underground’ student rainbow societies were shut down by WeChat. These accounts now only appear on the...
The Stop Shopping Choir perform for ‘Joe’s Pub’ at the Public Theatre in New York. Photo: John Quilty Maybe we don’t need more artworks about icebergs. Or, more specifically, maybe we don’t need more fragmented blocks of ice left to melt poignantly in our city...
Photo credit: Alarichall Students and academics across the UK are preparing for a new round of strikes. They come at a time when university staff face extra difficulties with the cost of living crisis after a 20% real-term pay cut since 2010, postgraduate staff lack...
A map on which the countries marked in red have enforced compulsory voting. By SPQRobin (licensed under Creative Commons) Australia’s electoral mandate Should citizens be compelled to vote? Most of the world’s democracies say no, but a few compel electors to turn up...
The Uyghur tribunal published its findings in December 2021. Photo credit: Lily Vetch In September 2021, I attended a London tribunal that heard evidence from several Uyghurs who had experienced persecution at the hands of China. Despite having given my own evidence...
Protesters wave the Mapuche flag on the streets of Chile. Photo by Pablo Bell (Instagram: @_pablobell) On 21 January, Chile’s new president Gabriel Boric unveiled his much anticipated cabinet of ministers. To the delight of Chile’s strong contingent of feminist...
Stock market trading figures Margaret Thatcher claimed that shareholder democracy would give ordinary people the chance to have a greater stake in the economy and the companies they work for. At the same time, she demolished Britain’s post-war settlement and...
Credit: Montecruz Foto The landmark report released by Amnesty International last week can be condensed into a single, stark sentence: ‘whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior...
A cartoon from the February 1927 issue of US magazine Labor Age, depicting how systems of surveillance like Taylorism were intended to shape workers’ behaviour. The Covid-19 pandemic has turned the world upside down, forcing many changes at work. One of the most...