Bread & roses
Far from being extinct, trade unions still matter – and in future, argues David Ransom, they’re going to matter even more.

Know your rights
The ‘core standards’ of the International Labour Organization.

Taming the Tigers
Unions are thriving in East Asia, reports Trini Leung – and have something to teach the traditional labour movement in the West as well.

TRADE UNIONS – THE FACTS

Shut up or die!
There is a human-rights catastrophe in Colombia. Mónica del Pilar describes how it has engulfed trade unionists.

Sweat & sour
Matthew Reiss talks to migrant Chinese workers in New York.

Sea change
The footsoldiers of the global economy are female, says Megan Rowling – and they expect their interests to be properly represented.

Jack the Rat
In remembrance of unions past,
by Alan Hughes.

What did the unions
ever do for us?
What we now take for granted –
Polyp illustrates the legacy.

Bitter fruit
What Haitian workers put into Grand Marnier and Cointreau liqueurs. Charles Arthur reports.

Growing in unity
Bananas, nature and peace get together with trade unions and Alistair Smith in Latin America.

Made in Mauritius
How privatization has been successfully resisted – a report from Lindsey Collen.

Your union needs you
Joining up.

Life must go on. This is the magazine we planned to give you last month, until the Twin Towers crashed and terror of one sort or another started to shake the ground beneath our feet, from America to Afghanistan. These are testing, perplexing times, when only the most enduring of human virtues will remain standing in defiance of the downward spiral of violent hatred and revenge.

Looking back over this issue on Trade Unions, which was conceived and written before the events of 11 September, it is remarkable to me now how little needed changing, how much still applies. The space we are permitted to occupy between the Twin Terrors may have narrowed. But that space had to be created in the first place by the power of human solidarity, on which the international labour movement still relies. It is no easier, or harder, to create it today. No-one ever promised us a rose garden.

Which is not to say that we carry on as if nothing had happened. At various points in this magazine we pick up on some of the issues raised last month in our magazine, Twin Terrors. No doubt we shall continue to do so in future. But though the world may be changed for the worse by headline gestures, by the contest for wealth and power, it is changed for the better by the daily, ceaseless struggle for dignity and compassion by common humanity. That is what this magazine is largely about.

David Ransom
for the New Internationalist Co-operative
davidr@newint.org