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 300 workers and their families, I hope they can still manage to be very proud in what they achieved by standing together. A much better redundancy package, retraining opportunities, community investment, and the possibility of further smaller ventures are a lot more than they would have got without their campaign.

They’ve shown other unions the way for future actions too. Celebrity involvement, brand engagement, international links, and even blogging have pulled together in the hands of a strong community to make a positive, compelling, and modern campaign.

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 server, breaking the unwritten law that you ‘never mess with another man’s bandwidth’.

++unfortunately for McCain, the designer he unwittingly ripped off was Mike Davidson, CEO of the rather popular news aggregator Newsvine.com. Davidson thought that if he was being tricked into serving up images, he might as well serve something funny, so he changed the picture file to a ’signed’ statement from McCain that he had reversed his hardline stand on gay marriage, and come out in favour, “particularly marriage between passionate females”.

He then wrote up the story on Newsvine, and unsurprisingly it got out far, wide, and quickly. In the 13 hours before McCain’s team twigged and pulled the plug on the image, it was on TechCrunch & Slashdot, all round the world and even made it onto telly.

McCain isn’t out of the woods yet, as he now has a very messed up MySpace page with no template, and a sneaky commenter has pulled the same trick on him again by posting positive images and switching the remotely hosted files after moderation.

A very cautionary tale to any of our own politicians trying to tick the yoof box on the cheap with half-hearted dabbling in social networking.

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 is up to in each others’ countries.

The idea is to beat divide-and-conquer management and deal more effectively with an employer who is able to move around the globe at will, and play country off against country and plant against plant.

It’s a bit clunky (as most things run by union federations tend to be - it’s always a huge pain co-ordinating people and sites in a second language, and on a limited budget), but I think it’s a pretty good idea, and I’ll be fascinated to see how it goes. My main concern would be that the lack of polish (as opposed to Polish - which is catered for!) and easy explanation of how to work with it may turn off those people who aren’t bloggers already (ie. most people).

Good luck to all the GM bloggers, and let’s hope this is the first of many.

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 contend that far from being opposites, if you want either of them done properly, they need to be done in conjunction with the other - two sides of the same coin.

We on the left are very fond of splitterism, and it’s easy for two groups who agree on 99% of something to be more concerned about the 1% where they differ in approach. Hence each technique’s camp tends to start to use the other word as shorthand to define that group rather than the technique itself, and we lose sight a bit maybe of the considerable benefits that both the techniques offer.

I like Derek so reckon anything he’s involved with must be pretty kosher. He and the others (including a good number from UK unions) who have signed up to this are being commendably open in signing up to a position which might see them shot at from both sides.

It seems to be a bit of a Euston Manifesto for unions (just without the pub). A statement which isn’t really that contentious to all but the most hardened splitters, focusing on the things we can agree on, and trying to reinvigorate the basic principles the movement, to make us more appropriate to the times.

The site’s a bit tricky to find your way around at first, and a lot of it is hidden for members only, but there is still quite a lot to take in there, including a very interesting summary of the UK’s attempts at New Unionism in the late 90’s - which has gathered some pretty illuminating comments (the kind of thing which suggests others are taking them seriously).

Less information on what they’ll actually be able to do though. This is maybe unfair, as they’ve only just started building a network, but as people are signing in a personal capacity, rather than on behalf of their unions, they’re not necessarily committing any organisations to put resources behind it. No bad thing maybe as they plan to work out a lot of what they will do democratically as they go along, using the strengths of the web to collaborate.

The idea is a nice one though - and I can agree with the principles behind their approach. Will have to think a bit more about it - Anyone else thinking of signing?

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, it became obvious that you couldn’t coherently run a national system from a hundreds of local voluntary endeavours, so the state stepped in, and we got state-run policing, education, hospitals and so on.

This, he said, gave him pause whenever he heard of more and more local state services being transfered out to be managed by the voluntary sector. He worried that fracturing services in this way (along with more obvious privatisation) would result in services losing the scope to be consistent and efficient that nationalisation had brought them so long ago.

I was thinking of this whilst reading Jon Rogers‘ post on the ongoing dispute at Fremantle. Whilst not wanting to tar all voluntary or private sector provided services with this rather simplistic brush, the debacle going on in Barnet at the moment certainly highlights this potential for losing the service’s much needed consistency and efficiency.

Care staff have been TUPE’d over from Barnet Council to the non-profit Fremantle Trust, but have been told to sign away a huge chunk of their pay and conditions, or face the sack. Had the work stayed public, care work across Barnet would have had consistent conditions, and the same high standards of motivation and care could have been expected. If the Fremantle staff lose their dispute, they are going to be paying for the inefficiency of the new system, directly out of their own pay packets.

Good luck to all the staff at Fremantle, and the Unison & GMB colleagues representing them. If you’d like to chuck in your 2pworth, the woman to email is Fremantle Trust Chief Exec, Carol Sawyer. carole.sawyers@fremantletrust.org

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 comments to state his case:

• A solidarity of one?
• Sullied-arity
• Euro out of here!

He does indeed pull me up correctly on a factual blunder (Solidarity don’t yet have a certificate of independence) and on making too little explanation on why I think Solidarity members will be assumed to be BNP supporters, but I’ve tried to answer his other points in a similar spirit.

True - there are no direct links between Solidarity and the BNP. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence; co-membership by senior figures in Solidarity (though not Patrick himself), the BNP have welcomed and supported the union, and a BNP spokesperson claimed it would quite likely raise funds for the party (though his comments were disowned by Solidarity). So it certainly looks like a BNP front, but can’t be totally proven as such.

It also follows that they certainly won’t restrict membership to BNP supporters, but the close perceived association between the two organisations, and the likelihood that the current high levels of BNP internal publicity for the union means that many early members are BNP supporters, will I believe cause a lot of people who aren’t BNP (or at least other right nationalist) supporters to be extremely reluctant to have anything to do with it, for fear they will be assumed to be a supporter too.

The recent ASLEF legal win on their right to expel a BNP activist doesn’t mean that there’s no longer any point for political dissidents in joining unions - just those political dissidents whose political activities are in direct opposition to the union’s platform.

Patrick believes that unions should be speaking out about the impact of Eastern European migrant workers, which he believes is depressing working conditions for others. I’d counter that this is exactly what many unions are doing, based on principles of solidarity - the ideal rather than the union ;). Defend migrants from exploitation by bad bosses and demand the same conditions for them. Tackle undercutting in this way and you’ll be safeguarding better conditions for everyone.

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 see though that Vodafone are not averse to recognising unions in Germany and Ireland, just at home in the UK. It’s the reverse of the even more anti-UK-union T-Mobile (part of Deutsche Telekom), who also have a deal back in Germany.

My contract with Vodafone is up this month. I’ve always avoided T-Mobile as I knew they were a nasty bunch on the employment and unions front, but if Vodafone aren’t a lot better, now might be time to leave them. Shame, as they do have a good service, and in many places seem to have the best reception (the only network to get any signal at all at last year’s TUC in the Brighton centre). However O2 are unionised (and have nattier phones) so I may be off there next month, and dropping Vodafone a quick letter to let them know.

Hat tip: uk computer and telephone workers union

Move over Ming… Facebook is *so* 2006.

John Edwards is letting us know what’s he’s up to minute by minute (or at least a couple times a day) at Twitter. Not sure of the *exact* point of this but, man, it’s current!

He seems to be trying for the ‘internet candidate’ vote that Howard Dean took last time. Obama started off a slouch on the web, but has quickly slapped up a pretty good looking site to rival Edwards’ - though he doesn’t yet seem to have his wife and kids slaving away in the blog comments for him.

Better weather for the Zimbabwe demonstration than Septemeber’s ZCTU one!

Many of the protestors seemed to be expats and involved with MDC (who have borne the brunt of the latest crackdown), but there was at least one Amicus “Solidarity with the ZCTU” placard on display, after the raid on their offices.

A core group of demonstrators kept up a lively dancing protest for ages, until they were obviously in need of a break, but overall there seemed to be a tangible sense of unease and fear for those affected by the latest round of arrests and violence. Hardly surprising when many more of the demonstrators were directly connected with events than those at the ZCTU demo last year.

ZimVigil have kept this pressure up for a long time now with their Saturday vigils. All strength to them in continuing for as long as is needed to see Zimbabwe finally free.

As if things couldn’t be bad enough in Zimbabwe, we’ve just had reports this morning that plain-clothes police have raided the offices of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (9.45 Zim time), demanding they hand over publicity materials for the planned strike on 3/4 April or face a beating.

Staff at the top of the building managed to get out, but a lot of them have been locked into the building, and are being threatened to make them hand over the materials.

General Secretary Wellington Chibebe was out of the office in court at the time, facing charges over his last arrest, when he and other colleagues were severely beaten in police custody after staging a peaceful demonstration (a fate which also seems also to have met Morgan Tsvangirai and MDC leaders this week). I don’t know any more about who’s been detained in the offices, but given what they were willing to do to the high profile figures of the movement, I’m worried about the rest of their staff.

Zimbabwe’s UK Embassy’s email is zimlondon@yahoo.co.uk and their fax is 02073791167 (The Ambassador is Mr Gabriel Mharadze Machinga) - I’m off now to give him an email earful. If you want to waste some of Mad Bob’s fax paper, it’s 002634703858. He likes to be addressed as ‘your Excellency’ if you’re writing to him, though I don’t imagine too many people would give him that title if they didn’t know.

See you at Zimbabwe Vigil’s special demonstration outside the Embassy on the Strand 1-4pm tomorrow (Wed 14 Mar) - www.zimvigil.co.uk

UPDATE 11:00 GMT: Just heard that the police have gone from the office for the moment, though staff fear they will be back. They beat two staffers and then took away printed materials and equipment. One ZCTU staff member was taken into custody.