OMG how cool is this? A little video about unions that I shot in my lunchbreak 7 years ago has just been remade by trade unionists in Croatia – in Croatian!

This really surprised me as I know colleagues in Spain and the Netherlands tried to translate it into their languages, but found the grammar rules made it a little tricky. Much respect to the guys at SSSH (Union of Autonomous Trade Unions of Croatia) for trying it. Made my day!

So far I’ve had 280,000 Youtube views for the original version, which has been frankly more to do with networks than with me. Labourstart.org picked up on it early on, pushing it to about 40,000 views, and getting me requests for offline copies, which have now been shown at union training sessions in the States, UK, Australia and Pakistan, put on cable TV in Australia and put in a shorts section of labour film festivals in the US and Canada. Then after a couple of quiet years on it I got a knock from Upworthy, to run it in their former Workonomics section. Overnight it put on another 200,000 views, mostly in the States, where the typo I failed to spot (grr) confused people less than the lack of a ‘z’ in organisation.

But this is probably my favourite experience from it so far. I’ll raise a glass of sljivovica to our Croatian colleagues, and hope it works out useful for them. If you’re reading this in Croatia – go join an SSSH union now!

PS – here’s the original for those whose Croatian is as rusty as mine…

(and continued kudos to Moby for very kindly making so much of his music free for indy/amateur films at mobygratis.com)