A BLEAK FUTURE
The trade union movement has been extremely important in furthering the desires of workers and improving our living conditions. This movement was vital in raising many workers out of the gruelling fourteen hour days, unsafe working conditions, poverty pay, and general degradation of the industrial revolution.
DEMOCRACY
OWNERS AND WORKERS
MEANS OF SURVIVAL
A former employee of popular burger chain Almost Famous protested outside a partner restaurant in Manchester after his no-notice redundancy left him without pay for a month. 
On January 27th, over 110 employees at restaurant chain Almost Famous (Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool) were made redundant, tossed aside with zero consultation or notice. The owners were quick to inform the media but some staff only found out via social media. Redundancy without notice is illegal. The owners of Almost Famous knew at least a fortnight beforehand about the pending insolvency, but kept staff in the dark, and monthly paid staff effectively worked for nothing in January. Rather than getting outstanding wages and holidays, staff were told to apply via an external company and the Government’s Redundancy Payment Services. The owners didn’t even bother to submit the details needed for staff to begin a claim.
For our fifth reading group we will be reading Anarchism and The Black Revolution by Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin. Ervin was a Vietnam war conscript who became an anti-war activist, went on to join the Black Panthers, and became an anarchist while in prison for high-jacking an aircraft to escape to Cuba after being alleged in an attempt to kill a Ku Klux Klan leader. Anarchism and The Black Revolution, written in prison and first published in 1979, is not only a classic work of late 20th century anarchism, but brings a black perspective to anarchism that has often been missing in a movement dominated by the ideas of white European thinkers.