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:
I was one of those very disappointed by Gordon Brown’s sudden withdrawal of the Home Computing Initiative (a salary sacrifice tax incentive on internet kit and connections) in 2006. The scheme was a great example of a partnership between government, industry and unions to tackle a problem that rightly concerned them all – IT skills, …
Jason over at the newly rejuvenated Communicate or Die has been coming up with some great posts of late – recommended reading even for us on the wrong side of the pond. I liked his distinction today between rough democracy and formal democracy, in trying to explain why unions are hesitant about going ‘open source’ …
LabourStart’s photo group on flickr is a great resource for unions and activists looking to illustrate internationally focused communications work. It’s a group of more than 3,000 mostly Creative Commons licensed photographs of unions at work (mostly marching to and fro with flags to be honest, but that gets better pics than branch meetings I …
No – not a reference to the way our current ‘extended lunchbreak of discontent’ levels of strike action are being touted in our cliché-befuddled national press, but I’m making a rare trip out West to see James Graham’s new play ‘Sons of York‘, a family drama illustrating the period of profound national change at the …
Iain Dale made a flying visit to Congress today – He doesn’t seem to have been impressed enough to hang around with us. Iain may lack Richard Balfe’s staying power (he’s been lurking in the corridors outside the hall for days now) but it looks like did shift a few copies of his Total Politics …
At Congress 2008 in Brighton, which is turning out as interesting as ever – spending a week in the company of pretty much every element of the UK labour movement. I spoke at a fringe today on online organising, along with Eric Lee and APT’s Paul Smith. For the 99.995% of trade unionists who didn’t …
Politics and new-media goodie-bag blog Dadblog is sadly shutting up shop, but luckily only to move a few doors down the road to “I’ve Said Too Much“, where lloydshep opens up again with an interesting take on how the internet both helps and hinders campaigning.
Here’s my post in transatlantic solidarity with Take Back Labor Day‘s Labour Day 08 Blogswarm, a US labor bloggers’ attempt to get people thinking about the meaning behind the September 1st holiday. This is a nice idea, as Labor Day as it stands is a bit of an oddity. Only the US, Canada and New …
The labour movement in Zimbabwe is being kept silent for yet another critical month, as Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) leaders Wellington Chibebe and Lovemore Matombo turned up in court to face charges of “speading falsehoods prejudicial to the state”, only to find the prosecutor had again not turned up for the trial. The …