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 …
At the Speak Up For Public Services rally back in January, I heard an interesting point made in a speech by Doug Nichols of the CYWU. He said we often forget that the reason we have public services, run by the state, is that most of these originally started as voluntary efforts. After a while, …
Well, I must have made it in some way, as I’ve had my first blog visit from an actual union leader! Interestingly though it’s from Patrick Harrington, President of the new ‘British Workers’ Union’, Solidarity. Patrick (very politely) takes issue with three of my posts, which refer to his union, and has left me some …
The Register have an interesting piece about the current breakdown in negotiations at Vodafone, where the union Connect have a member base of over half the Northern technical bargaining unit, and are trying for recognition by the statutory route (or as the employer prefers to call it, the ‘over my dead body route’). Interesting to …