Blue Singlets and Broccoli: Tradition and Change in Union Culture

Raymond Williams once wrote that "the task of a successful socialist movement will be one of feeling and imagination quite as much as one of fact and organisation". Yet studies of labour struggle in Australia, past and present, emphasise the political, legal and strategic elements of campaigns, largely ignoring what might broadly be' termed the "cultural aspect" of struggle, or. if they deal with it at all, it is in a celebratory rather than an analytical way.) And while there are now many studies, particularly in Britain and France, of working class struggles that pay attention to culture, little specific attention is given to union culture.