Fownhope’s Heart of Oak Society traces its roots to the age of friendly societies, when communities provided their own safety net. Its anniversary celebrations reveal a tradition still very much alive, says MARK SEDDON
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Avtar Singh Jouhl 1937 - 2022
Paul Mackney, former general secretary of NATFHE/UCU, remembers a beloved comrade, lifelong socialist and union man who once brought Malcolm X to the West Midlands during the fight against racial segregation
Avtar Singh Jouhl speaks at a Birmingham May Day rally
ANGUS REID explains the significance of Cuba’s egalitarian in letter and spirit Family Code and the pertinent lessons it holds for democracies anywhere in the world
Special report by PEOPLE’S WORLD
NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
ON Tuesday morning, October 10, a large and loud gathering of UCU strike pickets, outside South and City College Birmingham, stopped their singing, chanting, blowing of whistles and vuvuzela playing to observe a minute’s silence.
It was a fitting tribute to one of their members — Avtar Singh Jouhl, a trade union studies lecturer at that college in the 1980s and 1990s — who had died three days earlier.
Jouhl was born in the Indian Panjab in 1937 and came to the Black Country in the 1950s. He soon became central to the establishment of the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA) and to the unionisation, by the TGWU, of the foundry industry.
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A joint statement from Derby Indian Workers’ Association and Vox Feminarum/Women’s Voices
