In Japan, the Labour Union Act (LUA) guarantees workers the right to associate, bargain collectively and go on strike and the Antimonopoly Act (AMA) does not apply to these actions. To determine whether individuals constitute workers under the LUA, the court assesses multiple factors such as whether they are integrated into a business organisation and if the contract terms are unilaterally decided by the employers. Once they fall outside the definition of workers, their practices fall within the scope of AMA to the extent that they carry out the business as enterprises. Only a practice that has an anticompetitive effect is deemed unlawful under the AMA. With the increase of self-employed workers, the distinction between employee (worker) and enterprise has become blurred. There is also no precedent which indicates how the anticompetitive effect would be examined under the AMA in the case of collective actions of a sole-trader and other microenterprises. Although the AMA exempts the actions of cooperatives, the cooperative may be ill-suited for the selfemployed. These legal environments create serious uncertainty, which may deter taking collective action in order to establish fair trading and working conditions

This chapter returns to white workers’ voices. Drawing on interviews with men who entered blue-collar work and joined the MWU before or during the Wiehahn reforms, it demonstrates the persistence of proud working-class identification, the presence of deep ambivalence around race and whiteness, and working-class resentment towards wealthy Afrikaners. This contradicts the simplistic racial tropes, naturalisation of ethnic identity, and denial of class in the Solidarity Movement’s official framing. At the same time, the union veterans display deep commitment to the Movement and its ideals in the face of the loss of past certainties, perceptions of social decline, personal vulnerability, and anxiety about the future they perceive. This sees them subjected to pressure from the leadership to manage Solidarity’s race- and culture-based membership on the ground. Together, the men’s counternarratives, ambivalences, and vulnerabilities demonstrate the specificity of blue-collar subjectivities and workplace experiences. In this way, the testimonies presented in this chapter expose the persistent reality of class otherwise not readily visible within the white, Afrikaner population, and provide striking insight into how white workers experienced and sought to negotiate the demise of the racial state.

This chapter examines the ‘servant problem’ from the servant’s point of view through a history of the Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland (est. 1909–1910). It is the first ever in-depth history of this or any other servants’ trade union in Britain. It provides an important new perspective on both class relations in the suffrage movement and the gender politics of labour organising in the years leading up to the First World War. My account relies upon the correspondence pages of the Woman Worker and the Glasgow Herald, and on press cuttings from the local and radical press. These letters provide an unusual opportunity for the voices of rank-and-file domestic workers to be heard discussing working conditions and the possibility of self-organisation. The DWU aimed to be a union run ‘by servants for servants’. It sought to reconfigure the mistress–maid relationship as a formal employment contract, and did not shy away from the potential for class antagonism between these two groups of women despite also having its roots in the suffrage movement.