The Women's Movement and ‘Class Struggle’: gender,class formation and political identity in women's strikes, 1968–78.

ABSTRACT

Women workers’ industrial disputes were of fundamental importance to the WLM, reflected in the deeds of activists and early participant-histories. These disputes were sites of worker-employer conflict and conflict between feminists and the wider Labour Movement. This article considers how these differing interpretations related to the striking women themselves. It focuses on four key disputes and analyses contemporary reports and the accounts of those involved. It argues women strikers' particular experiences of trade unionism, class politics and feminism resulted in gendered, but still fundamentally class-based, identities, and concludes by considering the position of women workers' industrial actions in feminist histories.     

A Choice-Based Measure of Issue Importance in the Electorate

Measuring how much citizens care about different policy issues is critical for political scientists, yet existing measurement approaches have significant limitations. We provide a new survey-experimental, choice-based approach for measuring the importance voters attach to different positional issues, including issues not currently contested by political elites. We combine information from (a) direct questions eliciting respondents' positions on different issues with (b) a conjoint experiment asking respondents to trade off departures from their preferred positions on those issues. Applying this method to study the relative importance of 34 issues in the United Kingdom, we show that British voters attach significant importance to issues like the death penalty that are not presently the subject of political debate and attach more importance to those issues associated with social liberal–conservative rather than economic left–right divisions.     

Re‐imagining Geographic Labour Mobility through ‘Distance Labour’

Geographic labour mobility is necessary for increasing productivity in Australia. Long‐distance commuting has been found to be especially significant. However, important considerations are being excluded from policy discussions within the Productivity Commission on this topic. This commentary covers these important omissions. They are, namely, the problematic conflation of the terminologies of ‘fly‐in, fly‐out’ and ‘long‐distance commuting’ with mining, and a lack of qualitative research investigating the material impacts of these labour practices on people's lives. This commentary puts forward a new terminology, ‘distance labour’, to better include those industries on the margins of distance commuting. By accounting for the social worlds of workers engaged in distance labour, the Productivity Commission could increase the validity of its datasets, and provide more egalitarian policy recommendations.