Steven Johns
Articles by Steven Johns, London-based libertarian communist council worker and occasional stand-in for Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of French electronic music duo Daft Punk when Guy is ill.
Shirking 9 to 5: diary of a reluctant temp
An agency worker recalls several years' temping in London, trying to help his co-workers and do as little work as possible.
An incomplete text, I will be adding to it in the coming days and weeks.
Introduction
Cost of living pay increase struggles interview, 2008
An interview between Freedom newspaper and Steven Johns, libcom editor, local government worker and UNISON convenor analysing the UK pay disputes of 2008.
This year's big public sector pay disputes seemed to be gearing up for a fight, then fizzled out. What happened?
Rioting explodes across Greece
A powder keg of public anger over government economic policy has been ignited by a spark of outrage over the killing of a 15-year-old boy by police in Athens.
For updates and background, see our Greece unrest archive: http://libcom.org/tags/greece-unrest
Alexandros Grigoropoulos was shot dead by police in the Exarchia area, an anarchist stronghold of Greece's capital city on Saturday 6 December.
A brief account of Unison's national conference, 2008
A critical account of the 2008 Unison national delegate conference by libcom group member John Stevens, analysing how the union's bureaucracy systematically attempts to remove control of the union from its rank and file and also looking at the response to the from the union's left-wing.
I recently attended Unison's national delegate conference in Bournemouth as a delegate from a London local government branch. It was an eye opening experience with respect to the machinations of political groupings within the union.
In particular some of the ways in which the new Labour-linked bureaucracy maintained control over the supposedly lay lead organisation became clear.
April 24 – hundreds of thousands to walk out
On Thursday April 24 thousands of civil servants, coastguards, council workers, FE lecturers and charity workers will join a national teachers strike of 200,000.
Employer attacks on workers' pay is the main issue at stake.
Teachers in the NUT are walking out over their pay deal which was supposed to be revised when inflation rose, but the government refused: effectively cutting their wages.
Interview with a member of libcom.org, 2007
A critical interview by Wayne Foster of Steven Johns from the libcom group, about the libcom.org project and the general state of things.
Libcom.org is a constantly expanding online resource that seeks to promote working class self-organisation through publishing news, theoretical texts and historical articles. Site traffic has risen from 25-35,000 visits per month in 2005 to 110-170,000 now and there are now 2,600 active users.
The Anarchist Youth Network (AYN), personal recollections, 2002-2004
Brief historical notes on the organisation the Anarchist Youth Network (AYN). The AYN was a loosely-organised grouping of young anarchists, supposed to be based in Britain and Ireland.
Lasting only from 2002 to 2004, it suffered many of the weaknesses common in the contemporary anarchist movement of the English speaking world.
Lessons of MWR - Interview with former McDonalds Workers Resistance member, 2006
libcom.org interviews one of the founder members of the workplace group McDonalds Workers Resistance about the experiences and lessons learned from one of the UK's most important recent attempts at libertarian organisation.
So, who are you?
The proletarian formerly known as Funnywump.
Briefly, what was McDonald’s Workers Resistance?
2006: The French movement against the CPE
libcom.org’s brief summary of the mass movement which swept France in early 2006 against the further casualisation of labour which forced the government into a humiliating defeat.
French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin unveiled his labour law liberalisation package the CPE (’first employment contract’) on 16th January. He said that “urgent” action was needed to “bring the French labour market into the modern era”. The law would see employers hire 18-26 year-olds on two year contracts that would allow them to fire the youths without notice, and without explanation.
