Good to see this little victory for GMB members – they’ve waited long enough for the case to come all the way up to the House of Lords, and well done to them for staying the course. A group of 36 dinner ladies employed by St Helens Borough Council took out an equal pay claim …
Scary article on unionbusting in the States on afl-cioNOW. According to a survey by a union-friendly lobby group, 91% of US firms faced with an organising campaign will make employees attend one to one meetings with their managers about the union, and a whopping 82% engage a “union avoidance consultant” (the dreaded unionbusters). Worse still, …
Not so clever. For someone who purports to be interested in unions and blogging I shouldn’t really have missed comment on my own union running a live conference blog last week. I do have the half-excuse that I’m only just back from hols at a pal’s farmhouse in rural Spain, where the landlines haven’t ever …
As of this morning, the ZCTU are out on strike across Zimbabwe, in protest at Mugabe’s economic mismanagement. Inflation has risen to 1,700%, the highest in the world, meaning that people’s salaries have become worthless by the time of their next pay packet. Hunger is killing thousands, and reports suggest one third of the working …
Slick YouTube-style campaiging from a Belgian union. Their Equal Pay Day (31 March was the second of these annual campaign days – bit late, sorry!) is similar to the UK Work Your Proper Hours Day in terms of using dates to really bring home work-related statistics to people who may be affected by them but …
So Unite it is then – Christine Buckley has the scoop in the Times that it’s the least worst name for the new union. I didn’t think it was even one of the front runners for the name, but I think it fits the bill pretty well. You may think ‘what’s in a name?’, but …
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 …