Education and Empowering Workers in Times of Crisis

There are so many things happening around us that are just intolerable. From killings in Gaza to scapegoating protesters and our youth in Britain. From broken promises and betrayals in Whitehall or Washington. But to see the intolerable is not enough. We must also see the possibility of something better. Such is the aim and outcome of this trade union certificate on the past, present and future of labour law and the labour movement: to empower you and your fellow workers as well as all others who see the intolerable and want to see the coming of something better.

Mainstream labour law courses tend to focus on imparting to students the current shape of labour law and the technical details of rights. This is useful for the union activist or community organiser by providing a set of weapons to add to her armoury when defending or seeking to advance the interests of her constituency. But it is only one element of that armoury.

What about the school of experience and workers’ struggle? What about communal grief and the shame we share when workers and vulnerable populations are made into scapegoats, bribed into supporting policies and politics that do not advance their cause, or forcing them to compromise? We must create a labour-led education that goes beyond the mainstream concerns of a legal and political literature that seems to be made solely for and by managers and so-called experts. Let’s create a culture and education that, taking into account our voices and experiences, an analysis at once political, legal, historical, and literary, which would blast open the hidden but precise functions of militarism, scapegoating, bribery, infotainment buffoonery and barbarism which act as instruments of an anti-worker (mis)education.

This course covers industrial, political, negotiating, campaigning, historicising, thinking, and organising modes: to decide strategy or tactics to achieve the goal of defending and advancing our interests of and those of our constituents. To do that it is not only necessary to have a grasp of these elements but also to understand their interaction, their limits and their untapped possibilities. To evaluate this complex equation, history, experience and critical thinking play their part.

The course we propose therefore examines labour law and labour movements as well as their history in the multi-faceted context of the struggle between social justice and the total market. Aiming for the improvement of the lives of workers and communities, it seeks to provide insight into how and why the law, the media, geopolitics and the state operate as they do. We know there is a real barbarism in the buffoonery of today’s pantomimes of movement and reform. We know that not lifting a finger when we and others suffer so much is the cruellest violence.

This is especially so in the context of the tension between social justice and the vision of a “total market” that fantasises today with achieving harmony through calculation, governance by numbers, AI and digital infotainment and publicity in the wake of crises of financial or neoliberal capitalism, the consequential cost of living crisis, post-pandemic crisis, climate crisis and violence at the international level. Despite or because of these crises, neo-liberal capitalism has entered a totalitarian phase to persist in its pursuit of the transfer of wealth and income from wages to profits, as part of which it seeks to reduce expenditure on social security, the NHS, public health, education, transport and other infrastructure and services which benefit the public; at the same time expanding the means of force, surveillance and control through digital or AI mediation coopting and setting new limits to our political imagination.

Instead of wider socio-historical justice and political imagination, it seeks tax cuts for corporations and the rich. The post-war ‘consensus’ has been torn up and right and far-right populism and scapegoating embraced as a means of bribing us, of deflecting from social democracy and, in particular, socialism. This atmosphere of heightened crisis, uncertainty, and upwards redistribution from labour to capital has adversely affected community and working-class organisation, solidarity, negotiation, mutual care and mobilisation capabilities. It has fostered further division, hopelessness and despair and increased inequality – with all the evils that brings, not just to standards of living but also to physical and mental health and life expectancy.

Internationally, redistribution has transferred wealth and populations from peripheries to metropolitan centres, created newer peripheries in the centres and forced migration thereby facilitating exploitative and neo-colonial relations while making them less visible.

In such context, we wonder: what happened to the so-called Spirit of Philadelphia that illuminated larger creativity and imaginations derived from the 1944 International Labour Organisation’s Declaration of Philadelphia, a full-fledged social bill of rights that echoed with the welfarist spirit of ’45 in Britain, New Deal in the US and the decolonial momentum accompanying the UDHR and the UN Charter?

The Spirit of Philadelphia remains an important baseline despite the neoliberal turn in its current totalitarian re-turn. Because everywhere around the world workers and communities continue to challenge unequal and exploitative relations by taking on global corporations, captured institutions, and ideological apparatuses, as well as technologies, on their own terms.

In doing so they face repression on a vast scale – from attacks on hard-won rights, blacklisting and prosecution to assassination and disappearance. Nonetheless, in both so-called developed and developing countries unions and communities are transforming themselves to confront employer power in ways appropriate to contemporary frameworks of surplus labour and value-extraction. These include inventive industrial, legal, and political tactics and strategies. While newer popular techniques have been introduced into such tactics and strategies: a renewed focus on confronting precariousness in work, cuts in pay, lengthening hours, intensification of work, electronic monitoring and growing managerial power. While building resistance against attacks on freedom of association, collective bargaining, non-discrimination, and industrial action.

The response has been a radicalisation of the young, inventive forms of protest turning collective shame and suffering into possibilities, a proliferation of campaigns on many fronts from rent and housing to climate change, the invention of new parties or newer forms of political communication and geopolitical transnational solidarity, including, in particular, local and general strikes and horizontal and vertical mobilisation.

This course aims to find what is fullest of possibility in the images, sounds, in reforms, resistance and revolt, and in the new spirit of our movements.

More information about the GFTU’s ‘Empowering Workers: A Trade Union Certificate in Labour Law and the Labour Movement’ course, including key dates and course fees, can be found by following this link.

The Course will take place over various weekend sessions (in-person and online) between October 2025 – July 2026.  Teaching is led by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Professor of Human Rights and Political Philosophy at Birkbeck School of Law, together with Lord John Hendy KC, former Thompsons CEO Geoff Shears, and Prof. Keith Ewing of the Institute of Employment Rights.

Applications for the course must be submitted by 12 September 2025.