As part of a broader current of critique of the economic and political
dynamics of prison privatisation — a critique that initially emanated from
the USA — this paper focuses on Scotland and on research carried out at
its then only private penal institution, HMP Kilmarnock. The authors dismantle
the government’s case for extending prison privatisation by drilling
deep into the experience of Kilmarnock and demonstrating the deleterious
effects of marketisation for prison officers and prisoners alike. Degraded pay
and conditions and systemic understaffing corroded morale, exposed staff
and inmates to risk, and contributed to massive officer turnover. Compelling
evidence comes from sources ordinarily unavailable to critical researchers,
such as internal company and government documentation.

This paper explains rising labour unrest among China’s state-owned enterprise
employees through an examination of the tensions between the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) and urban industrial workers. In so doing, it
assesses the way the CCP has responded to labour pressure for better industrial
and political representation since the late-1980s, and how it has shown
concern over workers’ attempts to form independent labour organisations,
seeking instead to contain an increasingly restive working class within the
framework of state-controlled unionism. We argue that the CCP’s relaxation
of centralised control over a more open, ‘mixed’ economy has not been
matched in the area of labour representation by a greater tolerance of
autonomous organisation, leading to intensifying conflict with labour.

While there are emergent signs of anti-neoliberal resistance to EU policies
and practices, this resistance remains ambiguous and fractured, often unable
or unwilling to confront neoliberal European governance at the level of
Europe itself. This is partly due to the very substantive barriers to counterhegemonic
projects that the EU has put in place; but it also reflects a failure
on the part of much of the resistance to adequately identify, and engage with,
all of the terrain on which the battle against neoliberalism must be fought.

The article examines the •••• merger of the Association of University
Teachers (AUT) and the National Association of Teachers in Further and
Higher Education (NATFHE) to form the University and College Union
(UCU). It focuses on the impact of the merger on the strategy and tactics
adopted during the most significant pay dispute higher education has so far
witnessed. In particular, it details internal relations within the dominant
union in the dispute, the AUT, and suggests that these limited the effectiveness
of mobilisation and go some way to explaining the outcome of the dispute.

This paper describes and explains the takeover of a regional post-secondary
institution in British Columbia, Canada by one of the world’s ‘top forty’
universities: the transnational University of British Columbia (UBC). By
mapping connections between the University of British Columbia and the
provincial and national political and economic elite and bourgeoisie, the
authors establish the takeover of UBC Okanagan as a classic example of
neoliberalism that firmly places UBC within the corporate power structure of
the ‘Silicone Vineyard’ region of British Columbia.