AngryWorkers’ wants to set up some local groups. So far people from Croydon, east London, Heathrow, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Derry are participating in this process. If you live in one of these places and want to get in involved in getting something off the ground there, get in touch. You can find short descriptions of the local groups below, and for longer descriptions click on the town name. For a general presentation of our vision see here.
If you share these ideas and are up for participating in a weekly coordination and discussion meeting on Zoom, we encourage you to start a group in your own place.
angryworkersworld@gmail.com
Heathrow’s a huge workplace with big problems. Covid-19 has grounded fleets of planes, with all the predictable consequences for the airlines and their suppliers. With the same level of predictability, companies like British Airways, Gate Gourmet and Alpha LSG (airline caterers) are using the opportunity to slash staff numbers and hours, and attack remaining workers’ contracts. What with the climate catastrophe also looming, now is the time for a rank-and-file voice to challenge the notion that workers have to choose between (worsening) jobs, and their health and the future of the planet.
Workers themselves need to lead the discussion about the future of their livelihoods and the planet. This is why we want to set up a Let’s Get Rooted project here. The aims of the group are to help develop and broaden the power of working class people. It should be a focal point for militant workers to get together and discuss their situation, devise strategies best suited to them, and then act. Through honest reflection of what’s happening on the ground, our victories and defeats, we can acquire the capabilities we need to build the genuine, bottom-up power in our workplaces and communities and retain the historic memory to sustain them.
With a Heathrow-focused solidarity network, we can link our workplaces with our homes and communities. By creating our own Heathrow newspaper we can share our experiences and ideas, and try and break down some of the barriers between different groups of workers. We should produce educational groups guided by the participants toward mutual aid. It can be a home where individuals can grow and feel safe. While working within mass movements and unions we will seek to enable the development of an autonomous class consciousness. There are various levels of engagement. On a basic level, we need some people who can commit to a regular presence at Heathrow so people who live in west London would be a bonus. So too are Punjabi, Hindi and Romanian speakers. Even if you don’t live nearby, you can help us remotely through design/IT/written translation skills. We plan to kick-start this with a first edition of a Heathrow newsletter at the end of October and solidarity network meetings starting from November. Get in touch and we can discuss next steps!
Over the next year, we plan to be focusing our time and organising energies on the larger workplaces in the logistics and healthcare sector.
We are looking for other working class militants to join us on a local level with visiting, leafleting and working in these workplaces with an eye to building broad class solidarity in everything we do. In the next few months, we want to be looking towards building a solidarity network in the area, and produce some kind of area newsletter to distribute to workers that focuses on class struggle in the area and how companies are antagonising the workers.
East London
We want to see how we can get to grips with what’s going on in and around strategic workplaces and industries locally – public/health sector, logistics and distribution, transport, utilities, manufacturing, tech.
We could also look at developing local working class solidarity activity, while engaging with AngryWorkers’ theoretical and political development, linked to sympathetic groups and networks around the UK and internationally.
‘East London’ is an arbitrary name for the huge area stretching between Haringey and Hackney in the north to Waltham Forest and out to Dagenham. At the moment most of LGR’s contacts and fellow-travellers are ‘doing their own thing’ in Tower Hamlets and Newham, though we’ve done some collective activity around the local council workers’ strikes in Tower Hamlets, using our @East_Wildcat Twitter feed to reach out and make ourselves known.
It’s early days, so get in touch if you want to see if this could be a way for you to develop your own contribution to local working class action, and connect with the best new political current for a while.
On the edge of London, Croydon is located close to the M25, with busy train stations and roads that connect London to the south-east and the UK’s second busiest airport, Gatwick. There are numerous significant industries and workplaces which we have mapped and carried out some research on. In the coming few months we will be focusing on Amazon and Tesco.
We’ve made some inroads in both workplaces, two of the group having worked in Tesco for a time, and a wider workers’ movement present in Amazon locations across the world. We also want to keep a close eye on the council workers following news of mass redundancies and also have the second edition of our workers’ newsletter to distribute from the beginning of October. So we need people willing to leaflet and/or research and write. We aim to do at least one leafleting session per week, and meet as a group fortnightly. Get in touch!
Partly inspired by the Angry Workers project in west London in the last few years, a small group of us have been trying to organise in our neighbourhood; giving out newsletters, talking to people, doing door to door leafleting, and generally getting to know what’s going on here. This project has stalled and is currently dormant, but a small number of us are engaged with the LGR project and are thinking through what our next steps for organising should be in Leeds, and possibly the wider Yorkshire area. Please get in touch with us if this sounds like something you’d like to be a part of.
