A rather cramped demo this morning in front of Australia House in London. Roadworks all round the building meant most people having to squash into a rather narrow corridor of construction fences, and not actually coming into contact with that many passers-by. Still, everyone stayed cheerful, and rattled their protest boomerangs.

Paul in the piccy here (right) told me about one of the tactics that people often use to get good demo turnouts in Australia - they hold them in the pub! Distances are too great to travel to national demos, so local groups have ‘Pubs and clubs’ rallies, sometimes in the morning, where they have a pint and cheer on the national demo on telly. Then they go to work. Strewth! Don’t think I could get into much of a rally mood before breakfast - let alone sink a cold one - but each to their own I guess.

Anyway, totals from demos across Oz are still being totted up (hope the pubs aren’t counting double by now), but it looks like a pretty good number - over 250,000 (even if the flagship national rally was smaller than hoped). You can see more at the ACTU site, and Brendan Barber (TUC Gen Sec) has a good posting at Comment is Free on the problems the Aussie unions are up against.

Luckily as an avowed sports hater, I’m immune to the current wave of cricket-inspired Aussiephobia, and can show a bit of solidarity with their unions and working people.

It’s a year to the day on Thursday since John Howard’s government introduced sweeping new labour laws, which were a body-blow to people trying to organise and defend their working rights. The law lets employers move people one at a time onto ‘individual contracts’, outside of the protections previously negotiated with their unions. It removes unions’ rights in many workplaces at a stroke, divides the workforce if troublemakers can be singled out for much worse conditions under their own contract, and obviously it’s now much more difficult for unions to fight hundreds of little battles, rather than one large one.

It doesn’t stop there though - employees in firms with less than 100 staff have lost unfair dismissal protection, and for larger firms a new clause of ‘operational reasons’ does much the same. Minimum wages have been restructured to be updated according to economic competitiveness rather than tackling unfair pay. Differing state-level labour rights have been rounded down to a minimum set. Access to unions in the workplace has been more tightly controlled. And the independent body which oversees industrial relations has had powers removed and been prevented from getting involved in new areas.

Ouch! Makes some of our Trade Union Freedom Bill problems look pretty small beer, and I’m very glad we don’t have to deal with this bundle of bother over here. Unions have been knocked sideways by this blow, and are devoting a lot of effort to public campaigning now that the changes are enshrined in law. They are marking the date with protests around the country, and you can view their rather effective TV ad campaign online at their campaign site yourrightsatwork.com.au

In the UK, Amicus has called a demo outside Australia House in the Strand in London at 9.30am on Thursday. I’ll stop off on my way into work - hope to see more people there to support our colleages down under!

Thanks to Martin at Blogging4Merton for a bit of nostalgia whilst reading Bloggers4Labour on my commute in to work*. Where were you on 22 November 1990, when Maggie announced her resignation?

I was at 6th form college, in my A level politics class, when we heard cheering coming through the wall from the class next door. A few seconds later, one of the maths teachers burst into our classroom to announce “She’s gone!”. He was breathless, after he’d been on a tour of most of the campus already, wanting to be the first to bring the news to everyone. Off he went to the next classroom, and the cheering started in ours.

*Thanks to some quirk of RSS (or maybe my phone’s cacheing software), his post was displayed a week late, so apologies for my (characteristically) getting to this a long while after everyone else!

Here’s a story from last week (have been PC-free this last weekend). John Monks, General Secretary of the ETUC (and former GS of the TUC) was in town to give the annual Bevan Lecture, entitled “The Challenge of the New Capitalism”.

His speech is online and is well worth a read (as is Stefan Stern’s commentary in the FT). I’ve always respected him as one of the UK’s foremost thinkers on unions and industrial relations, so it was a shock to read (I didn’t make it to the lecture) a very frank discussion of his doubts about the nature of new forms of capitalism and the prospects for a fair system of partnership.

Capitalism has been changing behind the scenes, Monks argues. The world of finance, particularly high risk finance schemes like hedge funds, is upsetting the partnership dynamic between workers and business owners, both of whom had an interest in the sustainable operation of the firm. Now with investors changing hands at a moment’s notice, much of the capital no longer has an interest in the actual business of the company, only in making a gambler’s fast buck. How can you enter into partnership with owners who aren’t even in the game for a period of weeks, let alone years? The results range from companies which collapse at a moment’s notice, to those which run down, split and sell their own firms, skimping on R&D and treating personnel as a resource to be bought in and laid off without responsibility, as happened at Gate Gourmet.

The answers are still harder, Monks admits, and need brave action by our business owners, government and the EU. We should stop treating speculative finance as a special case industry - it still makes us far less money than exports- and we need to look at new ways of funding R&D and exposing corporate wrong-doing. Unions are very much part of the picture too. We need to form better international links, and really expand our activity on shareholder action (through our pensions, we mini-capitalists own huge chunks of companies, and can have a big voice in decisions). John Monks has laid down a challenge to all of us (himself included) that goes to the heart of our thinking on industrial relations. Uncomfortable but essential reading.

This post from Tom Watson scared me not inconsiderably! A creationist lobby group sending DVDs to MPs, purporting to offer evidence why creationism should make it into the GCSE biology syllabus. Made me wonder after reading Mr Tony’s recent New Scientist Interview:

NS: One subject that is of great concern to scientists is creationism. There has been a suggestion that creationism is being taught in some British schools. What are your views on this?

TB: This can be hugely exaggerated. I’ve visited one of the schools in question and as far as I’m aware they are teaching the curriculum in a normal way. If I notice creationism becoming the mainstream of the education system in this country then that’s the time to start worrying.

If they’ve got as far as the Palace of Westminster inboxes, does that mean that word from the top says it’s time for us good science-fearing folk to pack up and run for the hills?

I think the only rational response to this news is a knee-jerk cartoon:

Bigger version here…

A very apt book to kick off the tigmoo bookclub, this is at once a very illuminating peek into the world of working for a dotcom, and a hilarious satire. Stand-up comedian and story-teller Mike Daisey spent three years (21 dog years) working at Amazon in the US during the early days, and wrote up his experiences.

The memoir well captures the enthusiasm, bordering on obsession, of the headquarters staff - even those like Mike exiled to Customer Services. It must have been a rollercoaster ride - big projects, massive staff parties and a social life totally revolving around the firm, dogs in the office and mass idolisation of CEO “Jeff”, and his brave new vision for the retail industry. Only towards the end of Mike’s time there, when the organisation grows far too large to feel like a family (or treat each other like one), and staff are becoming burned out from keeping up with the company’s long hours culture, does the shine start to come off the party.

It also explains partly why Amazon management chose to portray the GPMU’s organising attempt at their UK branch as a roar of the dinosaurs - something totally irrelevant to the shiny new future of fully-engaged working - miles away from a sense of alienation with your work and company.

Mike is a fantastic performer and if you get the chance to see one of his shows (I think I managed to see his only ever performance this side of the pond though!) you should jump at it.

Buy “21 Dog Years” now at Amazon.co.uk here.

(Buying from Amazon? WTF? No, I’ve not lost my marbles, click here to find out more about the tigmoo bookclub).

Or, more precisely, I’m about to have a diet forced upon me now that Goddards’ Pie House in Greenwich town centre has closed its doors and sold its final portion of stewed eels.

No more of my customary weekend lunches of Banks ale and soya pie, with mash, peas and parsely liquor, followed by an excellent rhubarb pie and custard. As a wise man once said: “Nooooooooooo!!!”

Greenwich is very much a poorer place for its loss. Not sure why it’s happening - maybe they’ve fallen victim to the rent hikes which are knocking the stuffing out of the independent traders (which we’d always feared, given their seemingly suicidal pricing policy - most customers wouldn’t have blinked at a doubling of the price), or maybe they just got sick of stirring big pots of eels (which surely can’t be all that pleasant).

And the good burghers of Greenwich are also likely to be poorer themselves - I somehow doubt that the chainstore gourmet burger bar allegedly taking its place will be serving two hearty meals for a fiver. Also means I’m going to have to get off my a*se and start to visit friends again, after getting used to them coming to visit me (drawn, if I’m honest, more by the prospect of pie eating sessions than by my company).

The centre of Greenwich is a lovely, whimsical place, though almost entirely unsustainable now that the naval charity which owns much of the land has decided to stop holding off on exploiting their goldmine and start asking traders for real market rents for this kind of real estate. The kind of place where you can have a huge craft market that only opens a few days a week, a printmakers’ co-operative, or a shop selling clothing for dogs exists outside of modern economics, and I’ve a feeling that things are going to get nasty in Trumpton, en route to our glorious chainstore future.

One tip - if you’re still seeking pastry thrills in the area, be wary of Goddards’ in Deptford - the other branch of the Goddards’ pie making dynasty. I made myself out a right middle-class ponce by going in there last year and asking for a soya pie, only to notice too late that they only serve one dish - called ‘Pie’, and with no clue as to what meaty goodness (or not) lies within.

Commiserations to Cllr Kerron Cross (and especially his cat), who seems to have had a pretty miserable firework season. I’ll declare up front that I do like fireworks very much, so am rather partisan, but I’m not sure though that a ban is the best way to deal with growing firework bother.

I often have to check myself these days, in case my increasingly regular pronouncements on the wastefulness of today’s standards of living (don’t get me started on mini-motos and patio heaters) betray my transformation from angry young man to grumpy old man, but in this case I think I’m justified in harking back to my 70’s childhood, when fireworks were small, ground-based and rather unspectacular. For something impressive you had to go to a public display, but for the back garden, a little box of Screamers, Traffic Lights and Air Bomb Repeaters, was more than enough to wow the kids and make Dad feel useful.

But we’re all ‘pro-sumers’ now, and our firework displays are no exception. Stores now sell the same monster rockets you see on Clapham Common bonfire night, and we’ve got the cash for them, so everyone is now staging displays big enough for a crowd, just for their own families and friends. The result is the growing state of annoyance amongst pet-owners, pensioners, and anyone who likes quiet life.

The danger is on the up too, with serious amounts of explosives in homes and shops. If you look at the side, they now say to either leave 25m or 50m clear around the firework in case it did detonate at ground level. Obviously nobody does this, as they don’t have the garden space, so you’ve kiddies, flammable garden waste and likely neighbours well within a blast zone. What worries me most, is where those 3’ wooden poles go to – they can’t totally burn up, surely? Are they raining down on peoples’ heads in Croydon? Fireworks are being imported from all over, much cheaper than the UK manufactured tiddlers, and with less idea about the safety standards behind them.

So how about a bit of back to basics? Ban all fireworks for public sale over a certain volume of gunpowder (I think there would be a long queue for the job of Head Firework Tester at the HSE). Make a chartermark (which you can tax to subsidise the Fire Service) for those manufacturers who take up the challenge of making small fireworks to a high standard of safety. Make the sale of any firework without the chartermark an offence, with high fines. Adhering to a local standard would also limit dodgy imports (a bit protectionist mebbe, but would help out UK makers like time honoured favourites Standard).

People would still get small displays if they really want them, but anyone in favour of big thrills goes to a public display (I’d certainly want to run a display for my son when he grows up, but I’d hope we wouldn’t care if it was just a quick ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at a Traffic Light and a wave of a sparkler over a cup of hot Vimto). Even the noisy ones of yore, like the fabled Screamer, weren’t that noisy in comparison to today’s megarockets, so a lot of the neighbour annoyance might subside.

However….

Before killjoys like Kerron and I either ban or tax your fireworks, I do heartily (and hypocritically) recommend letting off a big ‘un at least once in your life. When I lived in South Oxford and still had a garden, I used to spend most of my firework dosh on one big rocket (yes, yes, flagrantly breaching the distance guidelines) and hold a very short firework display for friends.

Lighting it is quite different from a little rocket, and a very different experience to a big display. Start the wick (no piddly blue touchpaper here) and peg it back to your pals. You can feel the air sucking in at ground level as you go, and with a whoosh, it’s off and powering up and up, seeming like it’s taking a bit of you on board with it, til it splashes out across the sky, illuminating the whole street for a split second and a ‘thump’ that you feel in your chest, and you’re left with a sheepish grin on your face, and a burning urge to say “See that? I did that!”.

Heh heh. Like I said, I like fireworks, I do…

Well, it looks like a reasonable result over the pond, but thought I’d share something from yesterday which caught my eye. This, via the AFLCIO’s blog, is a very scary account culled from US blogs about last minute Republican dirty tricks.

Some absolute (evil-) genius stuff here - Why not set up one of those automatic phone message machines to cold call with a broadcast from your opponent? Yes, stick with it, it does make a twisted kind of sense… Then auto-call the same broadcast again, again, again and again, till you manage to get everyone in the phonebook heartily pissed off with your opponent, for supposedly intruding into their privacy. Apparently this kind of stuff is actually illegal in some states, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping them.

Also nasty is fake opinion polling. Ring your opponent’s voters, saying you’re conducting an election opinion poll. Then ask them a set of loaded questions, trying to shake their faith in their candidate. “Would the knowledge that Sen X eats babies change your perception of them for the better or worse?”

Worrying in that it’s cheap and very easy (if you have no scruples). So when the GOP spent nearly $42 million on negative campaigning (the Dems were no slouch either with $18m), this is making a mockery of the whole election, especially when the Senate result is still running so close. More if you can stomach it at AFLCIOnow.

And on the subject of webcameron… Have you seen their new web-widget, which is finally live? It’s neat-o in a not tremendously useful way to the user, though it probably does wonders for webdave’s googlejuice, having all those keyword terms linking in from around the web.

I thought I’d put it here, but mainly because I noticed a bit of a ’separated at birth’ moment. Remember Dave the Chameleon, and his attempts to pinch policies from all and sundry? Well, funny how you never see them on the same site at the same time and all that…

dinner for Dave	webcameron widget