Oh well, that will be my career up then. Personnel Today magazine and the TUC have been talking to union reps, and found that 92 per cent think that taking on the role of rep has damaged their career prospects.

Hmm. Not so sure, and I think you can spin it pretty well to work for some jobs. It shows an interest in other people and their problems and a willingness to muck in in difficult situations. It suggests you might be able to take on big new responsibilities, and make something of them with near-zero resources. People skills, business awareness and HR knowledge are also bonuses for a good rep. All in all, I reckon it might even make you pretty employable.

This seems to be borne out a bit in the survey with only 36 per cent of HR professionals agreeing with the 92 per cent of reps, and more of them thinking well of the reps’ professionalism than those reps might suppose.

(I said some jobs mind… I might not keep it in such pride of place on my CV if ever I were forced to apply to RyanAir).

Our left blogohemisphere is getting quite excited about Sen Barack Obama’s race for the Democratic presidential nomination over the pond. It’s like Howard Dean never screamed, hurrah!

And there’s quite a lot to get excited about - as this video shows (thanks, parburypolitica!): Top orator, Impeccable community politics CV, all career moves covered by good altruistic reasons. He’s a kind of fantasy football candidate, and if he loses will have a great potential career playing inspirational presidents in disaster movies.

Naysaying seems to be focused around good old fashioned racism (including his rather unfortunate middle name of Hussein), his lack of cash and national campaign team, and possibly more tellingly that he’s new kid on the block, without the Washington experience of Howard Dean, let alone Hillary Clinton.

Anyway, watching the vid confused me a little. He does a great spiel on breaking down false divisions between red & blue, though I wondered a bit who he was trying to reach out to. The hardcore religious right deal in moral absolutes, so might be pretty immune to the shades of grey involved in trade-off politics and coalition building. For every one he won over with talk of worshipping “an awesome god” in the blue states, he probably alienated them again straight away by acknowledging the mere existence of “gay friends” in the red states.

As a tack for uniting those on the near right, with self-hating liberal tendencies though, I think it might work very well!

Maybe he is actually Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest character - trying to sucker the two sides into something which will make them both look silly.

Jak sie masz?

Tragic news from Guatemala this week, as STEPQ dockers’ union leader Pedro Zamora was executed in broad daylight as he picked up his young sons from hospital on Monday. The murder looks to have been committed by rightwing paramilitaries, following threats over his union’s campaign against port privatisation in Puerto Quetzal. STEPQ are trying to ensure dockers are consulted in the changes to the management of the port, and favour a programme of modernisation without handing it over to a private concern.

“This gruesome killing recalls the darkest days of Guatemala’s decades of civil conflict, and the country’s reputation will continue to suffer unless action is taken to root out and punish those who commission and perpetrate intimidation and murder. This murder was planned and premeditated, and appears designed to send a message to those who dare to stand up for fundamental rights”. Guy Ryder, ITUC General Secretary

Please take just a moment to visit the ITF site, where they are running a petition to demand the Guatemalan government bring his killers to justice, and protect the dockers from further anti-union violence and intimidation.

(Hattip to Dave Osler for following this story.)

It throws another recent story into sharp relief, as the ETUC holds a petition to safeguard public services in Europe from the creeping spectre of privatisation in under the scary-sounding Bolkenstein directive. They’re hoping for a million signatures (well, that’s Unison kept busy then) to demonstrate popular support for quality public services, and convince the EU to give basic universal provision a better legal standing in the debate on public services modernisation. Modern doesn’t necessarily have to mean the current fashion for liberalisation - indeed, universal access to public services should be a fundamental right, something incompatible with a business run solely for shareholder profit. Written in endearingly obscure Euro-unionese (”Services of general economic interest”, anyone?), the petition and campaign pages on the ETUC site are also well worth another 30 seconds of your life. You can sign it here.

Brave people like Pedro Zamora are standing up daily for the ideal of universal public services run for everyone, not just those who can afford to buy them out, and available to everyone, not just those who can keep pace with the market. We, who have things a thousand times eaasier owe it to them as well as ourselves to keep that ideal alive wherever we are.

Hurrah! Good news for the B&B industry in this little corner of Wiltshire, which has recently been freed from under the shadow of discrimination - or did I get the story wrong?

Norman Tebbit had the most weaselly quote of the day with: “The concerns which are being expressed this evening are primarily about sodomy rather than about sexual orientation - that is doing, not being”. Well it’s nice to see that his “doing not being” has well and truly “been done”.

A quick word of warning to any Blogger-based bloggers looking to switch from the old Blogger service to new Blogger. Don’t do it!

It seems more than a little buggy, and I’ve suffered from broken feeds (so I don’t imagine anyone else will be reading this without the feed links from bloggers4labour and tigmoo.co.uk!), as well as losing a post yesterday that I’m too lazy to write out again
Give it a few weeks for them to iron out the wrinkles. I know it’s hard to ignore the pretty baubles of tags and trackbacks, but better safe than sorry!

UPDATE: Thanks heartily to Mr B4L who spotted the problem here - New Blogger is allergic to smart quotes it seems (the 6699’s that Microsoft likes to litter your docs with) so an old post was monkeying with the feed.