Resisting New Labour’s ‘hard labour'

Contrary to the myriad of assorted ‘end of class’ or ‘death of class’ proclamations of the past few decades, public sector workers in the UK today now comprise some of the key sections of the working class. Our image of the working class is constantly changing as the workforce is replenished as more ethnically diverse, with more recognised women workers, and from recent movements of migrant labour. Welfare workers are just as representative of this shift, indeed more so as it employs women in greater proportions and traditionally recruits from abroad to occupy positions in the welfare state that are difficult to fill from the local labour market. Women, migrants and ethnic minority groups are of course often found at the very bottom of the welfare industry hierarchy. Against neo-liberalism’s central drive to corrode and erode social and political solidarity, new forms of struggle and resistance have emerged and are emerging – locally, nationally and multinationally. Certainly this is not undertaken in conditions of their own choosing but in active response to welfare restructuring. Welfare workers and their unions are challenging the fundamental neoliberal premises advanced by New Labour using tried-and-tested forms of action as well as new, imaginative participatory strategies with their allies in the wider social and welfare movements.