AngryWorkersWorld's blog

AngryWorkers book review of 'Striking Women' - Struggles and Strategies of South Asian Women Workers from Grunwick to Gate Gourmet', by Sundari Anitha and Ruth Pearson

Over the last four years we spoke to many night-shift cleaners from local food processing plants. Young guys having a spliff after shift, telling us that using the chemicals for cleaning in confined spaces make you think of Syria or other gas attacks. Women workers have less time, as they hurry to get the kids ready for school. From workers at Adelie sandwich plant to LSG Sky Chef airline caterer to Bakkavor ready-meal factory – they all tell us that the time given for cleaning the shop-floor is not enough and that despite their knowledge and responsibility they are paid the lowest possible wage. Read a longer report below…

The Bakkavor food factories in west London are a prime example of the tension between structural oppression of each individual worker - most of them migrant women workers - and a collective potential of working class power. It ain't always easy, but we continue to work within that tension.

We wrote down some thoughts for a discussion meeting with comrades of wildcat (Germany) about the global uprising of 1968, looking at the wider historical background of 1968 in India.

A short introduction to Angry Workers of the World, an unruly and irregular workers' paper from London.

In late September 2017 the IWW London branch invited friends and comrades to take part in an organising drive in West London factories and warehouses. We chose half a dozen companies, employing between 100 and 800 mainly migrant workers where there was no trade union present.

We write a 'system series' for our local working class paper WorkersWildWest. Part 1 dealt with the historical roots of the system, part 2 looks at the basic features of wage labour and exploitation. Trigger-warning: we shamelessly ignore the value-form, vulgar-Marxists that we are...

Issue no.7 of our local working class paper - we distribute 2,000 copies in front of local workplaces, job centres, housing estates. Find one of the articles below, remaining articles see PDF-file.

Last part of our series - find the collated articles in the attached PDF

The penultimate in our women's interview series: Meena talks about the sexism she has had to deal with in an overwhelmingly male work environment and the links between how a workplace is organised and sexual harassment.

We spoke with our friend Kulbir, a women worker originally from India, who has to survive below the radar.

AngryWorkers would like to share five stories of working women in the sprawling city of London in 2018. They are from a cross-section of people that we have met in our neck of the woods: the western suburban hinterland that is home to many migrants, new and old, who bust their asses at work and at home, who are on the frontlines of austerity and brexit policies, but who all live in relative obscurity.

To mark international women’s day...
AngryWorkers would like to share five stories of working women in the sprawling city of London in 2018. They are from a cross-section of people that we have met in our neck of the woods: the western suburban hinterland that is home to many migrants, new and old, who bust their asses at work and at home, who are on the frontlines of austerity and brexit policies, but who all live in relative obscurity.

Bakkavor runs four factories and one warehouse in our area, employing around 3,500 permanent and agency workers. This issue deals with the union election, sex pests and dodgy temp agencies.

Examples from Adelie in Southall, Royal Mail in Greenford, Sofology in Park Royal and XPO/House of Fraser in Milton Keynes

With our Amazon workers’ reports we hope to not provide yet another sad victim story of how Amazon turns humans into semi-robots. We leave this to the mainstream media.

We look at the recent history of migration to the UK and the current discussion about migration and wage decline, in particular within the nation state policies of Labour. We criticise the effort of trying to reconcile a largely liberal 'pro-migrant' position with Labour's national perspective and share our experiences of working and organising amongst migrant workers in west London.

Factory newsletter for Bakkavor workers. Bakkavor produces ready-meals for all major UK supermarkets. The company runs four factories and one warehouse in west London, employing in total around 3,000 workers.
PDF-version on: www.workerswildwest.wordpress.com