The Sydney Rockchoppers and the health benefits of striking
On 4 October Holland arrived in Broken Hill; the same night he addressed a meeting of over 2,000 at the Hippodrome – in a town whose entire population was only […]
Category Archives: job safety
The coal lumpers’ strike and the rapid growth of revolutionary socialism
Harry Holland and the early labour movement in Australia and New Zealand – Part 8 Holland and the Socialist Federation immediately threw themselves into four key industrial battles which, over […]
Capitalism’s trail of blood and “exemptions”
On June 8 Murray Taylor became the fourth person this year to die while working in a quarry in New Zealand. The excavator Taylor was operating became buried under 1500 […]
The Condition of the Working Class in New Zealand in 1890
In 1842 Friedrich Engels, the 22-year-old son of a German textile manufacturer, was sent to Manchester, England, to work in the family business. Manchester was at the time the centre […]
Agricultural workers and gold miners in Burkina Faso
Notes from a visit to West Africa in January 2015. Fourth article in a series. In the savannah regions of northern Ghana, Togo, and Benin, and southern Burkina Faso, most of […]
Deaths in the coal mines and union-busting: 100 years ago in Huntly …and today
12 September marks the hundredth anniversary of the second-deadliest single mine disaster in New Zealand history. On that day in 1914, an explosion ripped through the Ralph coal mine in […]
“All Black” fatuousness and death in the forests
My first and best lesson in industrial safety happened in 1978, a few weeks after I started work on the production line at the Ford car assembly plant in Wellington […]
