Global Labor Photo of Year: UK Strike

by James Parks, Nov 6, 2008

This photo of the UK’s National Union of Teachers’ one-day national strike in April is LabourStart’s Labor Photo of the Year.

After nearly 3,000 online votes were counted, LabourStart readers from around the world selected Robert Day’s photo of striking teachers in the UK as LabourStart’s first-ever Labor Photo of the Year.

A panel of three distinguished labor photographers selected five finalists from among the hundreds of entries. Day’s winning photo shows members of the National Union of Teachers marching through the center of Birmingham, England, on April 24, to publicize their one-day national strike. Many other public-sector unions coordinated actions connected with their own disputes to happen on the same day.  

In a comment on LabourStart’s website, Harold Bell, a retired member of the Transport Workers in San Francisco, says of Day’s shot: 

This photo shows a lively and a fighting spirit. It has a great mix of men and women and black and white workers. I have a great admiration for teachers. 

Three of the other four finalist photos show workers protesting their working conditions: tax collectors in Egypt, railway workers in Switzerland and service workers in California. Another shot shows the solitary figure of a Bangladesh worker sweating in the hot sun, displaying the dignity of work in the most difficult of conditions.  

The four runners-up are: Brooke Anderson (USA), Khaled Hasan (Bangladesh), Gerardo Raffa (Switzerland) and Hossam el-Hamalawy (Egypt). Check out all the entries here and the five finalists here.

Based in London, LabourStart features daily labor news links in more than 20 languages and a news syndication service used by more than 700 trade union websites. News is collected from mainstream, trade union, and alternative news sources by a network of more than 500 volunteer correspondents based on every continent. 

LabourStart has been involved in online campaigning for several years, but ratcheted up efforts in July 2002 through the ActNOW campaigning system. Tens of thousands of trade unionists have participated in its various online campaigns and more than 50,000 are currently subscribed to LabourStart’s mailing list.

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