Strike Leaders Research Articles

Strange Bedfellows or Trusted Comrades? Digital Solidarity Building among Myanmar’s Revolutionaries

The shock and anger felt by the Myanmar public as they witnessed their democratically elected government deposed in an illegal military coup in early 2021 has led to a revolutionary break in Burmese politics. The Bamar Buddhist political elites, formerly silent on the Rohingya Muslim crisis, apologised for failing to administer justice for the Rohingya victims; the coup breathed new life and possibilities into the formation of a federal democracy; and young students and strike leaders dared to challenge the dominance of the elites. However, little is known about whether this struggling together against military dictatorship might enable a broad-based development of solidarity among Myanmar’s traditionally divided ethnic communities. Since many revolutionary communities across Myanmar took to social media to mobilise resistance, studying these groups’ online interactions can provide critical insights to this question. By analysing conversations over the year following the coup on three of the most popular resistance Facebook groups from Bamar and non-Bamar communities, this article finds a two-step process of inter-ethnic solidarity building, driven by both instrumentalist interest and organic empathy. The findings deepen understanding on solidarity building among diverse anti-dictatorship forces, revolution dynamics in post-coup Myanmar, and the role of social media on forging inter-communal empathy.

Countertopographies of copper: Martha Rosler, Chris Kraus and the Great Arizona Copper Strike of 1983–1986

Chris Kraus is often read as a chronicler of women artists’ experience: their frustrated desires, stifled creativity and stolen labour. But while these are the struggles that her protagonists face, the novel sets such struggles within the pressing context of American Empire's expansion and reorganisation in the post-Vietnam era. The juxtaposition between these levels is what generates the drama of Kraus’ work. Foregrounding these juxtapositions, this article situates Kraus’ novels within a longer tradition of feminist conceptual artists like Martha Rosler who took the labour and domination of predominantly white middle-class housewives as a standpoint from which to attempt to understand the expansion of US-backed global capitalism. Specifically, the article draws on the concept of ‘countertopographies’ developed by feminist geographer Cindi Katz to argue that Rosler and Kraus’ work offers a form of ‘countertopographic aesthetics’. That is, they both turn to the sphere of the reproductive as a site from which to map the uneven effects of global capitalism, while also foregrounding their own uneasy relationship with the imperialist project of mapping itself, by drawing attention to the ideological practices and limits of their very mappings. To illustrate this claim, the article concludes by turning to a partially buried event in Kraus’ Summer of Hate (2012): the 1983 Clifton-Morenci Copper Strike, a crucial but often overlooked flashpoint in the roll-out of neoliberalism. This eighteen-month strike was fought by a largely Mexican-American workforce, and the Women's Auxiliary, who joined a long history of working-class housewives like the Housewives’ Committee of Siglo X in Bolivia in becoming strike leaders. I argue that the strike is both crucial to the conjecture that Kraus’ narrative traces, and also illuminating of the limit point of the protagonists’ politics and the form of mapping that is possible from such a perspective.

La solidarité et ses limites: La CFDT et les travailleurs dans “les années 68”

La solidarité et ses limites: La CFDT et les travailleurs dans “les années 68”

The 1886 Southwest Railroad Strike, J. West Goodwin's Law and Order League, and the Blacklisting of Martin Irons

AbstractThis article explores blacklisting practices following the massive 1886 Southwest strike staged by the Knights of Labor (KOL) against Jay Gould's railroad empire. It focuses mostly on strike leader Martin Irons and blacklisting advocate and newspaperman J. West Goodwin. The strike, which started in Sedalia, Missouri, before spreading to other states, was a disaster for the KOL. The union declined in its aftermath chiefly because of the repression unleashed by public and private forces, including businessmen-led Law and Order Leagues. After the strike, employers blacklisted many, including strike leader and Sedalia resident Martin Irons. Irons, constantly on the move, suffered from joblessness, underemployment, arrests, and broken health before he died in central Texas in 1900. Few blacklisting advocates wanted Irons to suffer more than J. West Goodwin. The Law and Order League leader and newspaperman repeatedly wrote about what he considered Martin Irons's moral lapses and shortsightedness. By focusing on Goodwin's promotion of blacklisting and Irons's post-strike struggles, this essay helps us better appreciate the underexplored dimensions of this form of punishment.

Zakłady „MORENA” w Bartoszycach w czasie strajku w 1980 r. w świetle relacji pracowników

The article is a collection of reports of the participants of the strike in 1980 at the «Morena» Clothing Industry Plant in Bartoszyce. They striked not only for higher wages and the improvement of their living conditions, but also for dignity. The communists did everything possible to block the strike action. Various provocations were made, including several attempts to poison the strikers. Despite this, the strike was successful, and the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union «Solidarity» was established in «Morena». However, after the introduction of martial law, the participants, and especially the strike leaders, were persecuted for many years. The author provided an insightful commentary on the published memoirs.

From apathy through anxiety to action: emotions as motivators for youth climate strike leaders

AbstractThe climate strikes of 2019 motivated millions worldwide onto the street and provided a platform for youth voices that demanded global climate action. This article explores the experiences of climate strike leaders in Aotearoa New Zealand questioning the motivational factors behind the youth action. In-depth interviews with 15 climate strike leaders identified emotions that influenced engagement and could motivate action. Climate strike leaders reported experiencing a series of turbulent emotional stages from apathy to action. Their experiences suggest that anxiety and anger are important stages in the emotional journey towards action. Using Boler’s Pedagogy of Discomfort, this paper examines these emotional stages that can disable or enable action. Considering youth perspectives increases our understanding of a suitable climate change educational framework that potentially supports both educators and students on this challenging journey.

The Future of Progressive Politics in a Post-Fordist World

The Future of Progressive Politics in a Post-Fordist World

Huelgas democratizadoras: La rebelión estudiantil en el Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica (1980–1982)

Huelgas democratizadoras: La rebelión estudiantil en el Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica (1980–1982)

Slow Time: Nyaparu (William) Gardiner and the Strike Camps of the Pilbara

ABSTRACTNyaparu (William) Gardiner’s drawings and paintings bring a lived perspective to histories of the 1946 pastoral workers’ strike in the Pilbara in Western Australia. This strike has been documented largely through the dramatic events of 1946 and through the subsequent struggles of strike leaders, including Clancy McKenna and Don McLeod, with the state government. Gardiner was born into the strike, and worked on its mining and pastoral settlements before leaving to take up station work elsewhere. His drawings and paintings document the “slow time” of strike life, of everyday labour and waiting, of his fellow workers on the strike camps, as well as his subsequent work with cattle and horses in the North West. Only beginning to make art in the last years of his life, Gardiner created his portraits of strike leaders, workers and landscapes from memory, and they contain a ghostly quality as they recall an era and many people who have died. His pictures testify to an impoverished autonomy for Aboriginal people and itinerant workers in the North West in the 1950s and 1960s. They offer a history from below, to supplement the political histories of the strike and its aftermath in this region of Australia.

The Deportation of James Larkin: Irish American Politics and the British, American, and Free State Governments

The Deportation of James Larkin:Irish American Politics and the British, American, and Free State Governments Gerry Watts (bio) James Larkin (1874–1947) was founder and leader of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU). Almost single-handedly he organized the lowest-paid workers in Ireland, laborers who worked in subhuman conditions and lived in cramped and unhygienic housing where malnourishment and disease were rampant and mortality rates high at the turn of the century. Through his inspiring leadership and oratorical skills, he captured the imagination of the Irish working class, empowering them with a sense of their own destiny. After the travails of the 1913 Lockout, Larkin left Ireland in 1914 and landed in the United States with the double aim of furthering Irish nationalism and worldwide social revolution. Although Larkin did not ultimately achieve these goals, he did play a part in promoting Irish nationalism in the run-up to the 1916 Rising. He also worked within American trade unions, campaigned against the war, and was instrumental in the formation of the American Communist Labor Party. After an initial period working with the Irish American organization Clan na Gael, Larkin fell out with the group over political aims and in 1920 was convicted of criminal anarchy and incarcerated in the New York state penitentiary system. Three years later, he was given a full pardon by the New York governor Al Smith, and shortly thereafter he was deported from the United States by the department of labor. For his troubles, he was often penniless, subject to arrest, and exposed to danger. This essay will look at the role played by individuals within the Bureau of Investigation (precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, [End Page 186] the FBI), Clan na Gael, and the Irish Free State and British governments in the deportation process of Larkin in America. This process was begun in February 1919 but only completed in April 1923. Deportation was the legal sanction for an alien charged and convicted of criminal anarchy. However, Larkin instead received a sentence of imprisonment, with deportation carried out only after a long delay. Consequently, he was unable to return to Ireland during the critical period of the War of Independence and the formation of the Free State between January 1919 and January 1923. A look at the people and circumstances surrounding his incarceration will renew focus on this period of Larkin's life, particularly the role played by Clan na Gael members in the judicial process, at his trial, and during his lengthy appeals process wherein a conviction was secured without deportation. This essay will inquire into whether or not this was a tactic on the part of Clan na Gael members to keep Larkin away from Ireland and stop him from interfering with the work of Sinn Féin. The "nationalist plot" to have Larkin assassinated in 1919, first brought to light by scholar Claire Culleton, is closely connected to these events and will receive attention here as well.1 I will first assess the authenticity of the plot and then ask if its underlying motives were similar to the tactics of Clan na Gael in Larkin's judicial process—namely, that in both cases the motive was to keep Larkin away from Irish affairs. The essay will also look at the role the British state and Free State played in keeping Larkin away from Ireland. It will consider aspects such as the British exclusion order keeping the labor leader out of Ireland, intelligence discussions on Larkin between Dublin Castle and the War Office in London, and the use made by the Free State of the Irish consular service in New York and the office of the Irish Trade Representative in tracking his activities. This analysis takes the form of an investigation and intends therefore to set out a series of exploratory questions. [End Page 187] Larkin is "Shadowed" by Dublin Castle Following the outcome of the 1913 Lockout, Larkin had become despondent. The outbreak of war in August 1914, however, changed the political landscape significantly, pushing Larkin to the fore once again—not as a revolutionary strike leader this time, but as...

The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom

The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom. By James Green. (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015. Pp. viii, 440. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-8021-2331-2.) No American industry of the late 1800s and early 1900s witnessed more furious and intractable conflict between labor and capital than the coal industry. Violence seemed to break out wherever men mined coal, from Pennsylvania to Colorado and Illinois to Alabama. But West Virginia undoubtedly witnessed the largest, bloodiest, and longest-lasting of these struggles. In The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginias Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom, esteemed labor historian James Green laments that knowledge of this enduring conflict has been all but lost to American memory (p. 8). Green has succeeded in restoring the West Virginia mine wars to their rightful place by telling the story of the industrial warfare that racked the Mountain State from the 1890s to the 1930s. Part 1 of The Devil Is Here in These Hills introduces the four sets of characters on which Green's narrative pivots: rank-and-file West Virginia mine workers; the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), the nation's largest union during most of the period Green explores; UMWA organizer Mary Harris Mother Jones; and Charles Francis Frank Keeney Jr., the militant Cabin Creek miner who led the UMWA's District 17 during many epic struggles in the 1910s and early 1920s. The author devotes Parts 2 and 3 to the mine wars that convulsed southern West Virginia from 1912 to 1921, with the nationwide strike surge of 1918-1919 serving as a watershed between two separate phases of strife. Green deftly examines the UMWA's ongoing struggles to unite West Virginia's diverse mine workforce in the face of ferocious opposition from the state's bitterly anti-union mine operators. During the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strike of 1912-1913, as in later disputes, mine owners hired the Baldwin-Felts detective agency to do their dirty work. As the violence escalated, Governor William E. Glasscock ordered martial law and dispatched National Guardsmen to the strike zone. A long, two-phase occupation followed, punctuated by a military tribunal that resulted in the conviction of strike leaders, including Nellie Spinelli, a mother of five, and African American activist Dan Chain. Henry D. Hatfield, Glasscock's successor, placed Jones and other UMWA and Socialist Party stalwarts before a military tribunal for their actions, which prompted U. …

Labor Activists and the New Working Class in China: Strike Leaders’ Struggles, by Parry P. Leung. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. x+199 pp. US $95.00/£55.00 (cloth); also available as an eBook.

<i>Labor Activists and the New Working Class in China: Strike Leaders’ Struggles</i>, by Parry P. Leung. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. x+199 pp. US $95.00/£55.00 (cloth); also available as an eBook.

Time for legal reform and regulation on business and human rights

16 | International Union Rights | 23/4 ICTUR IN ACTION | BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS Time for legal reform and regulation on business and human rights The ICTUR representatives opened their submissions by outlining concerns that the UK’s Good Business: Implementing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (2016) action plan does not address the question of Business and Human Rights adequately, for three reasons. First, the government fails to acknowledge or to take seriously the full extent of its human rights responsibilities. Secondly, the government shows insufficient awareness of, or concern for, the shortcomings of British business overseas and little acknowledgement of its role in addressing these. And thirdly, the government offers no meaningful commitment proactively to embrace human rights obligations with a view to ensuring that tragedies on the scale of Rana Plaza are prevented in the future. Concerning British law at home, ICTUR observed that the ILO Committee of Experts (CEACR) has expressed reservations about new restrictions on industrial action in what was then the Trade Union Bill, highlighting the application of these restrictions to transport and education workers, but that the government appears to have ignored these reservations. The Trade Union Act 2016 includes transport and education workers within the scope of the term ‘important public services’ to whom the new restrictions apply, relevant for present purposes because transport is now delivered mainly by private corporations. ICTUR further observed that the European Social Charter was ratified by the United Kingdom in 1962 and is the most comprehensive social rights treaty anywhere in the world, but expressed regret that this instrument is not mentioned in Good Business. British law, ICTUR noted, had been repeatedly found in breach by the European Social Rights Committee, responsible for monitoring that instrument. In the main body of its submissions, ICTUR turned to serious cases of human rights violations overseas involving British companies. ICTUR concentrated on the cases of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh and the 2012 Marikana strike in South Africa. While recognising and welcoming the fact that a number of British companies have engaged with compensation schemes and follow-up work around industrial safety in the wake of Rana Plaza, ICTUR focused its attention on the situation prior to the factory collapse, outlining a list of violence, repression, murders and industrial disasters, and arguing that British companies knew about – or should have known about – these conditions, and yet tolerated them. ICTUR recalled the industrial relations background in the years leading up to the Rana Palza collapse: ● Trade unions were banned in the EPZs. ● Workers toiled under poor and dangerous conditions. ● Lacking avenues for the airing of industrial grievances, workers’ anger spilled out into street protests on several occasions, to which employers and police often responded violently. ● In 2003 police fired on a workers’ demonstration in the garment sector, killing one person. The previous day their leader had been arrested on his way to join negotiations. ● In 2006 the arrest of two strike leaders and the killing of a worker by police led to mass protests by more than 5000 workers, which ended violently, with damage to factories and injuries to workers. After this the 2006 labour law reform was passed but unions remained banned in the EPZs. ● Six workers were killed and dozens injured by police in 2009. ● In 2010 45 garment workers were killed in various workplace fires and 150 were injured. ● Four garment workers were shot and killed by police on 12 December 2011 when police opened fire on a demonstration in the Cittagoing EPZ. ● In 2012 four garment workers were shot dead in protests over low pay and poor safety standards. ● On 4 April 2012 Aminul Islam, President of the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation (‘BGIWF’) and Organiser with the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity (‘BCWS’), disappeared and was later tortured and murdered. For all the welcome actions taken by a number of British companies since the factory collapse, ICTUR argued that too little attention has been paid to the fact that this was the situation in which MNEs had chosen to source their clothing. ‘Even a cursory investigation’ of the industrial relations situation, the ICTUR team argued, ‘would have revealed that this was a very...

The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom by James Green

Reviewed by: The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom by James Green Thomas G. Andrews The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom. By James Green. (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015. Pp. viii, 440. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-8021-2331-2.) No American industry of the late 1800s and early 1900s witnessed more furious and intractable conflict between labor and capital than the coal industry. [End Page 194] Violence seemed to break out wherever men mined coal, from Pennsylvania to Colorado and Illinois to Alabama. But West Virginia undoubtedly witnessed the largest, bloodiest, and longest-lasting of these struggles. In The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom, esteemed labor historian James Green laments that “knowledge of this enduring conflict has been all but lost to American memory” (p. 8). Green has succeeded in restoring the West Virginia mine wars to their rightful place by telling the story of the industrial warfare that racked the Mountain State from the 1890s to the 1930s. Part 1 of The Devil Is Here in These Hills introduces the four sets of characters on which Green’s narrative pivots: rank-and-file West Virginia mine workers; the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), the nation’s largest union during most of the period Green explores; UMWA organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones; and Charles Francis “Frank” Keeney Jr., the militant Cabin Creek miner who led the UMWA’s District 17 during many epic struggles in the 1910s and early 1920s. The author devotes Parts 2 and 3 to the mine wars that convulsed southern West Virginia from 1912 to 1921, with the nationwide strike surge of 1918–1919 serving as a watershed between two separate phases of strife. Green deftly examines the UMWA’s ongoing struggles to unite West Virginia’s diverse mine workforce in the face of ferocious opposition from the state’s bitterly anti-union mine operators. During the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strike of 1912–1913, as in later disputes, mine owners hired the Baldwin-Felts detective agency to do their dirty work. As the violence escalated, Governor William E. Glasscock ordered martial law and dispatched National Guardsmen to the strike zone. A long, two-phase occupation followed, punctuated by a military tribunal that resulted in the conviction of strike leaders, including Nellie Spinelli, a mother of five, and African American activist Dan Chain. Henry D. Hatfield, Glasscock’s successor, placed Jones and other UMWA and Socialist Party stalwarts before a military tribunal for their actions, which prompted U.S. Senate investigations. When Hatfield attempted to impose peace on estranged mine owners and mine workers in late spring 1913, he inadvertently exposed a fault line between the UMWA’s national leadership and Keeney’s militants, who decried Hatfield’s settlement as a “‘sell out’” (p. 142). Keeney responded by founding an independent union, the West Virginia Miners Organization, which swiftly won a contract providing Cabin Creek miners with better terms than those the UMWA had managed to broker in other parts of the state. Soon thereafter, Keeney assumed the presidency of UMWA District 17 and launched a series of successful organizing drives that brought the district’s membership rolls up to fifty thousand. The Devil Is Here in These Hills climaxes at the battle of Blair Mountain, “the largest civil insurrection the country had experienced since the Civil War” (p. 262). This short review cannot do justice to Green’s skillful, judicious interpretation of this struggle and its aftermath, but the author’s attentiveness to the worsening relationship between Keeney and the national leadership of the UMWA plays an especially prominent role; Jones lamented that Keeney and his lieutenants had gotten “‘carried away thinking they could [End Page 195] change the world over night . . . with guns and bullets’” (p. 259), while John L. Lewis excoriated a delegation from District 17 “‘for trying to shoot the union into West Virginia’” (pp. 305–6). Green’s book offers the first full-length history of the West Virginia mine wars. Yet despite Green’s...

Social Realistic Projections of Galsworthy’s Strife

&lt;p&gt;In this article, I intend to focus on the dramatic theory of Galsworthy with a view to fostering the realistic and psychological conflicts and dilemma of early 20&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; century powerful and domineering people in England. Here, this paper can be applied through the critical judgments of two eminent literary critics of Galsworthy for depicting the controversial attitudes of John Antony, the Chairman of the Trenartha Tin Plate Works, and David Roberts, the Strike leader of the workers as reflected in the play-text, &lt;em&gt;Strife&lt;/em&gt;. It aims also to look at social realism through the psychological viewpoints of Galsworthy. In this way, the whole submission deals with the analytical projections of social reality, Galsworthy as a realistic dramatist, the impact of social realism in the play, &lt;em&gt;Strife&lt;/em&gt;, and its significance as well.&lt;/p&gt;

The Pelican Bay Hunger Strike: Resistance within the Structural Constraints of a US Supermax Prison

On July 1, 2011, approximately four hundred prisoners in California’s Pelican Bay State Prison began a sustained hunger strike. Most of these prisoners had been in total solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation, for five or more years; a few had been in isolation for more than twenty years. The prisoners vowed to refuse food until five core demands were met. These demands were poignantly simple, including provision of warm clothes for their one hour per day of outdoor exercise in the “dog run,” permission to make one phone call per week, a supply of adequate food, and the possibility that indefinite assignment to total solitary confinement might be reviewed after some number of years. The first phase of the strike lasted three weeks, until correctional officials promised to reconsider the state’s segregation policies. Drawing on previously unavailable videos of negotiations between the strike leaders, published media interviews and correspondence with hunger strikers and correctional administrators, and contemporary news reports of the events, this article examines the history, tactics, and implications of the massive hunger strike that took place in California’s highest-security prison (a supermax) in the summer of 2011. The article argues that the strike embodies a legitimacy paradox. Although the history of prison organizing in California, and of hunger strikes around the world, suggests that prisoners willing to die to protest prison injustices also undermine the legitimacy of the system inflicting those injustices, the 2011 California prisoners on hunger strike repeatedly invoked the broader legitimacy of the US prison system. Indeed, the article argues that, although prisoners drew on an international dialogue about basic human rights and appropriate tactics of resistance to rights violations, the US supermax context limited the reform conversation to small, mundane debates about the language of rules and the slight adjustments in privileges provided to prisoners. But that very conversation ultimately highlighted the extremity of the conditions in supermax confinement, driving unprecedented and sustained media and legal attention to the use of supermaxes, across the United States and internationally, and inspiring another larger (thirty thousand prisoners participated at the peak) and longer (sixty days) hunger strike in 2013.

Clara Lemlich: A Strike Leader's Diary (review)

Clara Lemlich: A Strike Leader's Diary (2004) Directed by Alex Szalat Distributed by Icarus Films 51 minutes Alez Szalat's Clara Lemlich: A Strike Leader's Diary goes beyond the history of Clara Lemlich Shavelson's early activism into contemporary issues of family, labor, and immigration. Bringing together historic and contemporary scenes of urban streets, interviews with descendents, historians, and labor leaders, labor songs, along with still images of sweatshops, union activities, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the film is a sophisticated treatment of the relationship between past and present. Clara Lemlich was born in 1886 near Kishinev in the Ukraine. After a pogrom in Kishinev in 1903, she moved to the New York City with her family. There she found work in the garment trades, working long hours and spending late nights at the Broadway Branch of the New York Public Library, educating herself in literature and social theory. In 1909 she delivered a rousing speech in Yiddish at Cooper Union that helped solidify support for what came to be known as the Uprising of 20,000, a strike of mostly young female Jewish and Italian workers for better pay and working conditions. As noted by labor historian Alice Kessler-Harris in an interview in the film, Lemlich was the spark that struck a tinderbox in the strikes of 1909. While the strike ended with modest gains by workers, it also demonstrated to the male leadership of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union that women were indeed capable of conducting a strike. The workers' demands were placed in dramatic context in 1911, when 146 young female immigrants lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. Drawing on the richness of the primary source material, Szalat demonstrates the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual character of the strike and the gender dynamics of labor protest in this era. The film opens with Lemlich Shavelson's daughter and granddaughters watching a dramatization of the famous Cooper Union speech from the film Vm Not Rappaport, and interviews with descendents are interwoven in the biographical narrative. Daughter Rita Margules and three grandchildren remember the lessons of their famous relative. They comb through photos, walk the streets of New York's Lower East Side, and make a visit to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where they discuss some of the family tensions and joys created by activist daughters and parents. …

La contestation sociale en Égypte depuis 2004

Depuis 2004, plus de 1,7 million d&#8217;&#201;gyptiens ont protest&#233; sur leur lieu de travail en recourant &#224; la gr&#232;ve, au sit-in ou &#224; d&#8217;autres formes de protestation. L&#8217;une des particularit&#233;s de ces mobilisations qui constituent le plus important mouvement de contestation depuis 1952 est d&#8217;&#233;maner de secteurs tr&#232;s vari&#233;s de l&#8217;&#233;conomie. Cet article &#233;tudie d&#8217;une part l&#8217;impact du contexte politique et &#233;conomique &#224; l&#8217;&#233;chelle locale. Par ailleurs, &#224; travers une &#233;tude ethnographique r&#233;alis&#233;e dans deux usines textiles situ&#233;es dans la r&#233;gion du Delta &#8211; Misr li-lghazl wa al-nasij &#224; Mahalla al-Kubra et Indorama &#224; Shibin al-Kawm &#8211; je propose de pr&#233;senter le mode d&#8217;organisation &#224; l&#8217;&#233;chelle locale en mettant en &#233;vidence les r&#233;seaux sociaux, les structures permettant de promouvoir les revendications des gr&#233;vistes ainsi que les trajectoires des organisateurs.

Popular Politics, the New State and the Birth of the Iranian Working Class: The 1929 Abadan Oil Refinery Strike

Popular Politics, the New State and the Birth of the Iranian Working Class: The 1929 Abadan Oil Refinery Strike

Zasady solidarności w nauce Jana Pawła II i w Strajku w Gdańsku w 1980 r.

At the end of the XX century something extraordinary happened in history of Poland. Without using violence the country become independent and Soviet occupation was stopped. The phenomenon proved John Paul II’ s teachings that “peace is made of justice and solidarity”. This article is divided into two parts. The first one is about the principles of solidarity used during the 1980 strike in the Shipyard of Gdańsk. These principles enabled the strike leaders to hold talks with the communist authorities. The agreement was the key which freed the country from the Soviet occupation and eventually gave it its freedom. The second part of the article consists of a description of interhuman and international solidarity which is found in John Paul II’s works. His teaching during the 3rd pilgrimage to Poland that took place in 1987 and which was addressed mainly to the working people of Gdańsk and Gdynia had a great impact on Polish people. However after Poland regained its independence the idea of solidarity was forgotten. It could not be found in the reality described in newspapers or other mass media. It’s high time this changed. Scientists and journalists responsible for the picture of public life, should remind society of the solidarity principles. They should also show the advantages of using these rules in the national economy. Thus showing the way to a successful, peaceful development of work, economic development and well-being in our present day society.