Last day’s work at the Burberry factory in the Rhondda. Good luck and best wishes to the GMB members there as they plan to march out of the factory after work today to a Welsh choir and with their banners and heads held high. Even though it will be an extremely difficult day for the …
Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain has found himself well and truly pwned, after setting up the now obligatory candidate page on MySpace. Unfortunately McCain got a rather lazy assistant to make page, and they just pinched a designer’s template, without crediting him. Worse, they kept using the designer’s original image files, direct from his …
A very interesting project from the European Metalworkers’ Federation (though they’re a bit shy and you wouldn’t know it was them from looking at the site). The General Motors Workers’ Blog lets workers at General Motors around the world sign up and add their own posts to a central news service of what GM management …
I got a round robin email recently from Derek Blackadder, LabourStart’s man in Canada, drawing my attention to a new virtual international union network called New Unionism. It looks quite interesting. They have a manifesto for the future of trade unionism, which seeks to unite the two schools of western unionism, Organising and Partnership. They …
At the Speak Up For Public Services rally back in January, I heard an interesting point made in a speech by Doug Nichols of the CYWU. He said we often forget that the reason we have public services, run by the state, is that most of these originally started as voluntary efforts. After a while, …
Well, I must have made it in some way, as I’ve had my first blog visit from an actual union leader! Interestingly though it’s from Patrick Harrington, President of the new ‘British Workers’ Union’, Solidarity. Patrick (very politely) takes issue with three of my posts, which refer to his union, and has left me some …
The Register have an interesting piece about the current breakdown in negotiations at Vodafone, where the union Connect have a member base of over half the Northern technical bargaining unit, and are trying for recognition by the statutory route (or as the employer prefers to call it, the ‘over my dead body route’). Interesting to …
Move over Ming… Facebook is *so* 2006. John Edwards is letting us know what’s he’s up to minute by minute (or at least a couple times a day) at Twitter. Not sure of the *exact* point of this but, man, it’s current! He seems to be trying for the ‘internet candidate’ vote that Howard Dean …
Better weather for the Zimbabwe demonstration than Septemeber’s ZCTU one! Many of the protestors seemed to be expats and involved with MDC (who have borne the brunt of the latest crackdown), but there was at least one Amicus “Solidarity with the ZCTU” placard on display, after the raid on their offices. A core group of …
As if things couldn’t be bad enough in Zimbabwe, we’ve just had reports this morning that plain-clothes police have raided the offices of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (9.45 Zim time), demanding they hand over publicity materials for the planned strike on 3/4 April or face a beating. Staff at the top of the …