The thick-necked union boss, who’s short on manners and long on tough talk and machismo, is in many ways an endangered American archetype. Amid rampant political correctness and professionalisation, they seem like anachronisms from a lost age; Sean O’Brien, president …
Will Hollywood strike back?
In the Fifties, television destroyed radio, many of whose stars were themselves survivors of the death of vaudeville, and persisted through radio and into film: The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields. And many of the first movie stars had come first …
Who are the strikers fooling?
The tide of industrial action rolls steadily on. Even physiotherapists are threatening to bring the country to its knees, rather than performing their usual task of setting it on its feet. Next, surely, it will be vicars, who will abandon …
Will the people blame the strikers?
There is nothing like extreme weather to snap a crisis into focus. During the icy winter of 1978-79, the government’s attempts to tackle inflation, and the ensuing wave of pay strikes, all played out amid snowdrifts, burst pipes and icebound …
This is not a class war
Headlines scream about a looming “class war“; reports warn of an inevitable “summer of discontent”. Britain’s newspapers are trying their hardest to evoke the chaos of the winter of 1978-79, which, in the neoliberal fairy-tale version of history, marked the …
Did the New York Times spy on its workers?
Binyamin Appelbaum, the lead writer on economics and business for the New York Times editorial board, is by all accounts a union man. In his recent essay on “The Power in Numbers”, he concluded with a rousing demand: the Government …
Parents are the new political tribe
Shortly after Glenn Youngkin was sworn in as governor of Virginia on Saturday, he issued a flurry of day-one executive orders. With those initial actions, the first Republican to win statewide in the Commonwealth since 2009 was true to the …