…is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear. Or so ran the strapline at veteran British political blog Harry’s Place until yesterday, when their DNS host locked them out in response to a complaint on behalf of Sheffield academic and UCU activist, Jenna Delich. Delich had been the target of a …
As Zimbabwe prepares to put its union leadership on trial for criticising the government’s violent excesses, a similar story is unfolding in neighbouring Swaziland. Jan Sithole, Secretary General of the Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions (SFTU), was arrested on Friday, after 30 armed police stormed his house in the early hours of the morning.
This courtesy of Brian Shaler’s very cute crappy graphs graph-maker. So… I reckon a number of unions and some membership organisations are having problems in taking up as much of the 2.0 whizziness as they could because we’ve been a bit too used to our organisational structures too long.
A cause close to my heart this week, with a campaign from the CWU to tighten the Dangerous Dogs Act, to spare the nation’s posties from the jaws of the nation’s best friends. Up to 6,000 UK posties are attacked by dogs every year on their rounds, and many injured seriously, just so dog owners …
Another Facebook exile, but a whole different problem. Pippa Wagstaff runs a critical blog on Welsh politics – Miss Wagstaff Presents. She recently found herself on the receiving end of an email from Facebook customer services, just like booted-out unionist Derek Blackadder. The charge though was that Pippa wasn’t really Pippa at all, and as …
Anne All at IT Business Edge has a post about a recent(ish) survey, which suggested39% of US 18-24 year-olds would consider quitting their job if their employer banned Facebook (with another 21% who would be ‘annoyed’). Worth a read – as are the comments. Anne’s response is a common one in the media, helpfully suggesting …
After the news that the ZCTU’s Wellington Chibebe and Lovemore Matombo will need to wait another month for their trial in Harare, keeping them silenced on unfair bail conditions that prohibit their addressing public gatherings, there are now worrying reports of another way the Mugabe regime is trying to shut up the embattled Zimbabwean union …
A quick, and getting rather late, plug for the new ITUC website, We Are ZCTU (www.wearezctu.org). It’s set up in support of Wellington Chibebe and Lovemore Matombo of the Zimbawe Congress of Trade Unions, who are due in court in Harare this Wednesday (30 July). They’ve been charged with “spreading falsehoods prejudicial to the state”, …
That’s prettier than anything purporting to categorise me has any right to be. Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds – is just that. It’s a clever little site that interprets documents, or in this case RSS feeds (the one from this here blog), and makes clouds to highlight common themes. Very much fun playing with it, …
Worrying news out of Italy for us labor-geeks. Davide Barillari, a rep with IBM Italy, and one of the prime movers behind the international web-based linking and virtual world protests of the last year, is concerned his union may be trying to sideline his attempts to evangelise for the transition to a 2.0 organisation, by …