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This article contributes to a better understanding of labour anti-communism in Britain through an exploration of the evolution of ideas and attitudes within the co-operative movement during the early Cold War. It demonstrates that the period witnessed an increasingly rigid separation of co-operation from communism and argues that this separation made it harder for activists within the co-operative movement to imagine a total or utopian alternative to capitalism. Drawing particularly on a close reading of the co-operative press as well as other sources, the study is divided into three main parts. The first section discusses sympathy among co-operators for the achievements of the Soviet Union, which increased during the war against fascism. The article then moves on to consider the continuing dialogue between British co-operators and their counterparts in European communist states and how international tensions shaped co-operators' views. The final major section explores the hardening of attitude towards communism after Marshall Aid was declared in June 1947, and underlines the role played by figures such as A. V. Alexander and Jack Bailey who worked with the Information Research Department at the Foreign Office to spread anti-communism within the movement. The conclusion reflects, more speculatively, on what implications this shift may have had for the medium and long-term decline of co-operation and the hegemony of capitalist consumerism post-war., (© The Author(s) [2018]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Interrogating critiques of the 'African labour aristocracy' thesis, the article proposes that public service industrial-class manual workers in Botswana form, if not a labour 'aristocracy' in the sense first defined by Saul and Arrighi, then a marginal worker 'elite'. They are privileged in having a regular salary above minimum pay, augmented by periodic lump-sum gratuity payments. This sets them apart from the other low-paid workers in the private sector, casual workers in the informal economy and a vast army of unemployed job seekers. In the absence of a national unemployment benefit scheme in Botswana, the article explores some of the strategies deployed by women members of the Manual Workers Union in their attempts to contend with the spectre of future unemployment and impoverishment. In gender terms, the article highlights the independence, autonomy and decision-making capacity of women trade unionist leaders, who straddle the worlds of workers' rights and citizens' rights, and manoeuvre their way through the maze of rules and regulations they encounter in both.

The attitudes among social workers toward labor unions are a topic of significance. Historically, social workers have had an ambivalent relationship with unions. This article analyzes the extent to which unions matter to social workers and whether unions represent the interests of professional social workers. The relationship between social work and unions is conceptualized as reciprocal in nature. Insights about social workers' current attitudes toward unions are informed through critical analysis of a recent research study that examined attitudes toward unions among social work union members. The authors discuss the potential for a collaborative progressive agenda between the social work profession and labor.