Name: The Streets and The Workplace: Social Movements and Workers' Struggle
Start: 2026-06-15T15:15:00+01:00
End: 2026-06-15T17:00:00+01:00
Location: Samuel Alexander Building

The Streets and The Workplace: Social Movements and Workers' Struggle

This plenary at the Alternative Futures and Popular Protest conference is open to the public.
About this Event

For those who are not not attending the , booking is essential due to room capacity.

The plenary will take place in room .

Social movements and workplace conflict are frequently discussed in starkly different terms. Two distinct disciplines – social movement studies and industrial relations – have emerged around the study of each, occasionally borrowing concepts from one another but with little attempts to identify points of divergence, convergence and any potential for deeper synthesis.

This panel aims to move towards a more thorough cross-pollination of ideas regarding social movements and workers’ struggle, understanding how these relate to one another respectively. Where have we witnessed instances of workers' struggles intersecting with mobilisation outside of the workplace? What has that relationship looked like? Why does this seem to be something rare?

The panel will bring together researchers from both academic fields and activists with experience of both street- and workplace-based organising.

Speakers
Liv O
Bio: Liv is an activist based in South Manchester. She is a member of the organisation rs21, has been an active member of Unite branch NW389 for Youth, Community and Not-for-Profit workers ever since 2020, and is currently a paid antifascist organiser for the rank-and-file organisation, GM Worker and Tenants Association (GMWTA).
Talk: I draw on the history of the Unite NW389 trade union branch as a case study of local intersections between industrial and social movement struggles in Manchester. The branch and its members have contributed to a range of social movements, including K*ll the Bill, Care and Support Workers Organise, the climate movement, Shelter strikes, the GM Workers for Palestine assembly, trans liberation protests, and, most recently, GMWTA. However, this relatively exceptional experience indicates that, even where a trade union branch is highly active in social movements, there is often a bifurcation between the workplace-focused activists and social movement activists; moreover, the highly active nature of the branch is in no small part down to the fact that we are third sector workers, who are disproportionately represented in the contemporary British left. Relatedly, the branch is dominated by retirees and a cycle of in-work activists due to the nature of work in the sector, which speaks to some of the limitations of more traditional trade unionism today. From there, I’ll briefly expand into a discussion of GM Workers’ and Tenants’ Association, founded by members of Unite NW389, and speak on the attempt to reconstruct a working class agency for struggle through the tenant/housing movement, social movements, and the merging of those with worker movements. I’ll speak on the emerging strategy of the organisation - its opportunities and pitfalls - and conclude with reflections on Jane McAlevey’s framing of ‘whole worker organising’.
Kate Hardy
Bio: Kate Hardy is a Professor in Global Labour with expertise in non- and under-waged work, feminism and labour. She is a feminist activist and has been in and around sex worker rights movements for two decades. She was a founder of Partisan Collective, a co-operative centre for social movements and progressive culture in Manchester.
Talk: I draw on sex worker rights movements around the world and the lessons they have shown us in terms of combining struggles from a labour position for survival and the transformation of the capitalist order through their engagement in wider social movements for land, housing, welfare and gendered based violence. Drawing on sex workers’ own theorisations of sex work within capitalism and their concrete struggles against it, I argue that we have much to learn from listening to sex workers themselves, particularly in the Global South, who are uniquely positioned at the margins and yet deeply embedded in the economy to critique their own conditions of work and of the social relations of capitalism itself.
Simin Fadaee
Bio: Simin Fadaee teaches Sociology at the University of Manchester and is the President of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Classes and Social Movements. She is the author or editor of several books including Global Marxism: Decolonisation and Revolutionary Politics.
Talk: Workers and the Making of Revolution in Iran
Drawing on the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the current revolutionary episode in Iran, I highlight the central role of workers and their struggles in shaping revolutionary trajectories. I argue that workers’ mobilisation and demobilisation have been significant not only in contributing to revolutionary breakthroughs or setbacks, but also in shaping the political and socio-economic developments that follow. Accordingly, I emphasise the relationship between workers’ struggles, street-based activism, and other forms of mobilisation as essential to understanding the dynamics of the present moment in Iran. By foregrounding these interconnections, the presentation contributes to broader debates on class politics, revolutions, and the conditions under which transformative change becomes possible.
Toby Mckenzie-Barnes
Bio: Toby is an organiser based in Sheffield. He is a member of Unite, rs21, and is on the elected committee of the Worker-Climate Project. He is currently working as a construction labourer in domestic retrofitting.
Talk: I'll focus on briefly giving an overview of how 'climate' or 'transition' has been approached within the British trade union movement (and how Worker-Climate Project has worked across it).
Before the climate movement disappeared, there was significant interplay between this social movement and attempts to translate transition demands into industrial bargaining and union structures. I will look at how trade unionists have attempted to bring these 'political' demands into the existing legislative and institutional framework of industrial relations i.e. using health and safety arguments to get around TU legislation restricting industrial action to only being around 'pay and conditions'.
My talk will outline how some of these industrial efforts have outlived the social movement they were once attached to, but are also diminished in ambition and creativity by the lack of this interaction. I will conclude by pointing to where a eco-socialist movement could be cohered to draw on both the worker-climate and social movement organising to build a propositional politics for our current moment of the climate crisis.
Chair: Morgan Rhys Powell
Bio: Morgan is currently a Research Fellow in Employment Relations at Leeds University Business School. His primary motivations are the merger of theory and practice in political activity, and closing the epistemological gap that has emerged between the theorisation of social movement struggles and workplace conflict. He has organised this plenary based on those interests.