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UK sponsors deregulation of labor rights in Ukraine

Proposed labour reforms, which the British Foreign Office has consulted on, could reduce Ukrainians’ rights at work. LeftEast is grateful to openDemocracy for the permission to reprint this article. The UK is supporting the deregulation of labour rights in Ukraine, openDemocracy reports today. Documents seen by openDemocracy show the British Foreign Office has advised the […]

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There is power in a union: Reflections on the Albanian miners’ struggle

Wealth concentrates while poverty spreads. While gravitational forces cause objects to fall toward the earth, market forces cause value to fall by the same place with orthodox rigorosity, year after year. The pattern is however cyclically interrupted. Social movements, financial crisis and technical advancements trigger systemic changes that open the way toward the reconstruction and […]

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After Years of Neoliberalism, Georgian Workers Have Forgotten What It Means to Win

LeftEast publishes Volodya Vagner’s interview with Georgian unionists in collaboration with OpenDemocracy-Russia. Georgia has recently seen a wave of strikes by newly established unions. In summer 2018, the Ertoba2013 union, which organises Tbilisi’s metro workers, shut down the Georgian capital for several days, before the city municipality eventually met its demands. Earlier this year, a new […]

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Race to the Bottom: The Battle over Minimum Wage in Bulgaria

Ten years after Bulgaria joined the European Union as its poorest member, its economy works at two speeds, deepening the income gap between poor low-skilled workers and a handful of well payed employees working in the country’s booming areas such as IT and auto parts. The following article was originally published in Serbo-Croatian by the online platform, […]

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Anger from the underground: Bulgarian miners in wildcat strike

Note from the LeftEast editors: we republish this material originally posted  by evgeni5150 on libcom.org  The miners from Obrochishte – the third largest manganese mine in the world, located in eastern Bulgaria, went on wildcat strike on 01.06.2017. The strike was supported by the anarchosyndicalists from ARS (Avtonomen Rabotnicheski Sindikat / Autonomous Workers Union), while the bureaucratic union […]

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BOOK REVIEW: “Welcome to the desert of post-socialism!”

Note from the LeftEast editors: This review of Igor Stiks and Srecko Horvath’s edited volume “Welcome to the desert of post-socialism: radical politics after Yugoslavia” (Verso, 2015)  has first appeared on LeftVoice under the title Yugoslavia after Capitalist Restoration. It has been reprinted with the permission of the author. by Philippe Alcoy Released in January 2015 […]

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International Workers’ Day: resounding struggles from Greece to Russia

“For more than twenty years have the wage workers of this country begged and prayed their masters, the factory lords, to reduce their burdens. It has been in vain.” – this proclamation could easily have come from a 1st of May rally in 2015, as it remains equally relevant today. But it dates back to […]

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International Workers’ Day: Christos Tsadaris

Christos Tsadaris has recently concluded his studies as a physicist, and is currently unemployed, searching for a job. He has been active in social movements of the youth in Greece and is a member of ATTACK, a youth collective against modern slavery, flexibility in work and unemployment. He is a member of the anti-capitalist coalition […]

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Working the global art market: labour, galleries, and activism in the Gulf. An interview with Haig Aivaizian.

LeftEast’s Konstantin Kilibarda interviews Haig Aivaizian of the Gulf Labour working group about the ’52 Weeks of Gulf Labour’ campaign. The campaign uses artistic interventions to shine a light on the labour practices underpinning recent projects like the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. LE: What motivated you to start the ’52 Weeks of Gulf Labour’ project?  HA: […]

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The disintegration effect of the world market on Yugoslavia and the working class. An interview with Vladimir Unkovski-Korica.

Among the numerous guests at the recent “Subversive festival”, was Vladimir Unkovski-Korica (foto), a historian and researcher who is currently a Fellow at the London School of Economics*. His upcoming book entitled “The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito’s Yugoslavia: From World War II to Non-Alignment” will be released soon. We discussed some themes from […]