trade unions

Works Councils are coming to Britain. But what are Works Councils, and what will they mean for working people and trade unions? Are the TUC unions right to welcome the changes in labour relations which Works Councils will bring?

Works Councils, far from empowering people, act as a tool by which management can control and pacify people at work. The truth behind Works Councils is exposed here through the views of workers in France, who have witnessed their failure at first hand.

The message is clear; there is nothing to be gained and much to lose from the introduction of a Works Council system in Britain.

Out of the Frying Pan is a new, critical analysis of Works Councils and a look ahead at a real future for organising and fighting back in your workplace.

The Direct Action Movement's 1991 pamphlet on strategy, setting out a vision of networks of militant workers seeking to create explicitly revolutionary workplace and community based groups capable of initiating collective direct action - revolutionary unions. The DAM became Solidarity Federation in 1994.

• Throwing down the gauntlet
• The phoney war
• Class mobilisation
• On the offensive
• A call to arms

"One must try to increase as much as possible the theoretical content of all our activities, but without the 'dry and shriveled doctrinalism' which could destroy in part the great constructive action which our comrades are carrying forward in the relentless fight between the haves and the have nots. Our people stand for action on the march. It is while going forward that we overtake. Don't hold them back, even to teach them `the most beautiful theories' ..."

Francisco Ascaso, from Durruti — the People Armed

A DAM pamphlet from the 1980's outlining what is wrong with trade unionism, then a mass movement, and the anarcho-syndicalist alternative

The union makes us strong

"The union makes us strong is an axiom most people would agree with, but if we look at the question closely doubts appear.

Table of Contents

• 1. What’s wrong with the unions? [1]
  • Craft or industrial unionism? [2]
  • Doss house organising [3]
  • Coffin clubs [3]
  • Climbing the social ladder [3]
  • Trade unions and the state [4]
• 2. Strike action [4]
  • The lightning strike [5]
  • The boycott [6]
  • ”Work to rule” [6]
  • The social strike [6]
• 3. The social general strike [7]
  • Can it be done? [7]
  • The "June days” in France [8]
  • The balance sheet [9]
• 4. Workers’ control of industry [9]
  • Government by amateurs [10]
  • A new social principle [10]
• 5. A Spanish lesson [11]
  • Collectives everywhere [12]
  • The fertile land [12]
• 6. Revolution of construction [13]
• Aims and objects of the International Working Men’s Association [14]
• I. Introduction [14]
• II. Principles of revolutionary syndicalism [15]

First published in 1940 by Freedom Press, 27 Belsize Road, London. Revised and enlarged edition published October 1942. Reprinted Sept. 1943