Tony Blair once reassured a journalist that, even after New Labour’s moderate reforms to employment law, Britain would still have “the most restrictive union laws in the western world.” What do those laws consist of, where do they come from, and how can we resist them? Prof. Mustill, Ellie, and Daniel rattle through the chronology. Ellie also bigs up the ongoing election campaign of John Moloney, standing to be re-elected as Assistant General Secretary of her union, PCS. We’ve mentioned John on a previous episode (https://soundcloud.com/labour-days/rank-and-filism-101-whats-the-bureaucracy-whats-the-rank-and-file), particularly highlighting his pledge to take the same salary he was paid as a rank-and-file worker and donate the rest of his official’s salary to the PCS strike fund. Voting for PCS members opens on 9 November and closes on 14 December. Check out John’s campaign here: https://john4ags.org/ John is running alongside Marion Lloyd, who is standing for General Secretary: https://twitter.com/Marion4GS Throughout the episode, we refer to the Free Our Unions campaign, which you can check out online at https://freeourunions.org. We also acknowledge that we’re recording several days into the latest war in Israel/Palestine, with Israel besieging Gaza following Hamas attacks. It’s beyond the scope of our podcast to meaningfully discuss the issues involved, but we wanted to link to workers’ organisations active in Palestine and Israel in a spirit of international class solidarity: Democracy and Workers Rights Centre (Palestine): https://dwrc.org/ Ma’an Workers Association (Israel/Palestine): https://wac-maan.org.il/home-eng/ Koah L’Ovdim - Power to Workers (Israel): https://workers.org.il/?lang=en See also the call from Palestinian trade unions for workers’ action to block arms shipments to Israel: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RPslgoxPrXNsjTjA4mxnUWtU_KeXctm3 The quote at the top of the show is taken from the Modern Records Centre's Pentonville Voices audio archive: https://warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/archives_online/speakingarchives/pentonville/

Our own Liam McNulty has written a new political biography of the Irish revolutionary James Connolly, entitled ‘James Connolly: Socialist, Nationalist & Internationalist.’ In this episode we discuss Connolly as a workplace organiser and theorist of trade union organisation, looking at his role in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and in major disputes such as the 1913 Dublin Lockout. You can buy Liam’s book here: https://www.merlinpress.co.uk/page/backlist/?act=search&find=connolly For further reading, try Liam’s article on ‘Connolly’s Legacy’: https://workersliberty.org/legacy-james-connolly-wl-373 You can also learn more about Connolly’s trade unionism in the Workers’ Liberty pamphlet ‘Effective Trade Unionism’, which brings together several of Connolly’s writing on workplace organisation and features a foreword by Liam: https://www.workersliberty.org/connolly-unions See previous episode descriptions for copyright info on our intro music.