I’ve put my fiver in to the Atheist Bus Campaign, and am looking forward to the idea of a ‘bright’ start to my working day, riding one of the few London buses that doesn’t have religious advertising on it.

Paul at Stronger Unions has a good round-up post on this week’s news from Canada, that Wal-Mart have (again) closed a branch after it unionised. The company claimed that if they had to give the 5 staff working at a Quebec Tire and Lube store a pay raise, they’d need to increase prices by 30%, …

The guy in the photo is called Ze Preto (or rather that’s his nickname, it means Joe Black, which is something along the lines of Joe Blogs), and he lives on a subsistence farmstead a very bumpy half hour drive outside the inland market town of Ouricuri in Pernambuco, in North East Brazil. I met …

Excellent riposte to my suggestion for union demotivators from Paul. Anyone else have an idea? Use Despair.inc’s Demotivator generator and LabourStart flickr group photos (or anything you have around) to show the side of trade unionism we all know and (sometimes) love. UPDATE 10/10/08: May Day gets Demotivated by Donnacha UPDATE 11/10/08: Organising again, this …

I love Despair Inc‘s Demotivators – A series of posters that subvert the motivational designs on the walls of offices everywhere. They do a sharp job of pointing out the gap between the lofty aspirations in the posters and the reality of daily working lives. Paul of Stronger Unions was amused by the ‘Blogging‘ one, …

Today is, depending on where you’re standing, WDDW, WFMA or JMTD. It’s a great new initiative from the ITUC in Brussels, who have decided that to campaign on labour rights in an age of globalisation, you need to take the campaign itself global. This means drawing the links between what makes work work in many …

The new MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) from Mythic Entertainment, Warhammer Age of Reckoning, has been getting some solid praise from the gaming community for getting mediæval on ‘gold farmers’ of late, banning the paid game accounts of people who try to sell the in-game virtual currency for real money.

First Nigel roundly berates the left blogohemisphere for our lack of a coherent critique of the current financial crisis (gulp), but then his colleagues Adam and Janet very kindly go and plug up the gap a bit themselves, at least enough to keep me safe for opinions at dinner parties for a little while (now …

“…is to face them down.” A very good speech that, solid social democratic territory. Straight through. No grovelling, even where he admitted mistakes. “I’m not going to change to something I’m not”. A coherent vision around ‘fairness’ and a ‘new settlement for new times’. Clear new policies that illustrate the fairness vision and that should …

Waiting for Gordon to come on the telly. Interesting choice of music to settle the crowd in the conference hall, courtesy of Manchester legends James. Cracking tune obviously and has us humming nostalgically, but I’m sure the diarists are going over it already: