And they’re off! The motions for TUC Congress 2007 have been announced, and the shape of the event is starting to get clearer. They’re going to be amended, collated, composited and spat out the other side before September, but on a brief flick through the book (see it here) it looks like a good snapshot of issues that concern the UK’s unions.

Not as much as I might have thought on private equity, given current profile. Connect (p34) are calling for a database to monitor private equity fund activities, which is interesting, and might be a useful step in getting the hard proof needed to show how PE takeovers have historically resulted in worsened work conditions - an area where the PE lobby are currently calling unions’ bluff. There’s also an oddly worded motion from BECTU on accountancy as a revolutionary tactic (p69) may well prove useful in dealing with tax and transparency issues.

The TUC’s co-ordinating work on countering public sector privatisation will get a boost from Unison and Prospect (p45 and 46), and the media will likely use PCS and NUT’s public sector pay motions (p47 and 48) to bash visiting ministers (of whom there may be a good crop, given a new cabinet wanting to establish itself).

I think around 95% of Congress motions pass, with only a minority seriously contested, so much of this will be a shoe-in. Card votes in the past (where opinion is too close to call on a show of hands) have often come in the Global Solidarity section, and this year mightn’t disappoint. No Israel boycotts on the menu, but controversy in the international arena may come from the FBU’s Venezuela motion (p76), which supports Chavez’s revoking of a TV station’s licence, and the RMT’s motion (p72) to call for a referendum (and a ‘no’ vote campaign) on the new EU Reform Treaty.

The POA are getting a bit miffed about motions that don’t get followed up properly during the year. They had a motion in last year, politely chastising those unions who don’t fulfil the commitments they make in their Congress votes every year, and are on the same theme again, a little more directly, with motion P15: “Congress notes the need for the TUC and its affiliated unions fully to support TUC policies, once democratically adopted by Congress”. That’ll tell ‘em!

The PFA (p18) have an interesting organising motion, asking the TUC to help share good practice between unions who want to do more to be seen as key professional development bodies, something my own union (NUJ) are keen on. A practical initiative that might help our niche unions really play up their strengths in organising.

Adjacent motions on environmentally friendly freight may have a little barney, with ASLEF (p37) unsurprisingly calling for priority to rail freight and Nautilus UK (p38) to shipping. Strange that URTU and BALPA don’t have motions here

Incidentally, I was very glad to see that Nautilus UK are calling for Congress’ support in dealing with “mythical obstacles to the use of short sea shipping”. Scylla and Charybdis be warned!

I probably won’t be there this year, so hope there are going to be a lot of livebloggers to let us follow the fun (luckily I think MarshaJane has already volunteered, and Judy McKnight will hopefully have her laptop in the hall for a third year). Hey, at least NASUWT’s motion (p79) on “Abuse of technology” will mean you shouldn’t get sacked for blogging it!

Prospective mayoral candidate Boris Johnson is no fan of health and safety regulations, apparently regularly declaring his hero to be Larry Vaughn, the fictional mayor in Jaws, who refused to close the beaches after expert testimony and evidence of the first shark attack, leading to another free lunch for the film’s eponymous anti-hero.

Apparently the odd gobbled bather here and there is a small price to pay for the business freedoms that come with under-regulation. The latest gaffe from London’s would be gaffer is taken from a speech he gave last year at Lloyds of London:

“The real hero of Jaws is the mayor. A gigantic fish is eating all your constituents and he decides to keep the beaches open. OK, in that instance he was actually wrong. But in principle, we need more politicians like the mayor - we are often the only obstacle against all the nonsense which is really a massive conspiracy against the taxpayer.”

Wonder how many more safety reps are going to be out canvassing for Ken now?

Hat tip - Mars Hill

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen seems to be on the defensive this week. It looks like someone asked him why he doesn’t have a blog just one time too many, and his latest weekly article is about how a real expert should set themselves apart from the madding crowds of the blogosphere and focus on quality content.

This is an approach that’s done him well over the years, and seen him crowned King of all things web 1.0. I’m not so convinced he’s on the money with this though, or that anyone setting out to be an ‘expert’ like him would be best served following his lead.

I stopped actually reading his Alertbox column about a year ago, when I noticed his feature articles were sometimes just repeating themselves from previous years. I just never got around to unsubscribing from it.

Nielsen believes that your expert quality comes out best in serious articles. Even the best expert writes bad blog posts from time to time, so effort put into this (and all the trackback-slapping to build buzz) is wasted and gets you lost in the morass of mediocrity out there. I think this is all very well & good if you were in from the beginning, and have a mailing list the size of Nielsen’s one, but for new would-be experts, it maps out a very slow path to recognition, if you actively choose not to use the networking capabilities of Web2.0 to engage with your peers/fans.

Another expert who I do read a lot more now is the Chad-like guru of permission marketing, Seth Godin. He takes the opposite track to Nielsen and posts whatever he’s pondered on the drive to work (in his Prius, natch) or happened to see on the back of a milk carton. The idea is that he’s still the expert, but he’s having a conversation to develop new thinking. And a conversation gets you talked about.

His scatter-gun epistles are sometimes wrong (often getting him more links than the less controversil ones), so then he posts equally speedy updates, keeping the conversation going. Overall, I disagree with him more than often with Nielsen, but I read him much more as his little insights have more variety and are fun as 30 second thought provokers.

But who’s right? Well, I convinced a former boss to part with £150 for a conference place to see Nielsen’s ‘98 tour, but have only dipped far enough into my pocket to buy one of Godin’s books (1999’s Permission Marketing) - I can’t afford his live appearances! So on the balance sheet, Nielsen is winning.

The time honoured method of a FIGHT! is inconclusive, but the lines never lie - Nielsen is slumping on the links, and Godin is growing, which I think is a good pointer. I’m aware that I’m hardly the target market (£250k consultancies), and also aware that Godin’s armies of trackbackers are also probably not going to do more than download the ebooks he’s generous enough to give away (a way of doing Nielsen’s serious articles even more seriously, but very rarely), but he does seem to be propelling himself into überexpertness faster than Nielsen did.

Yes - this year’s Tolpuddle Festival has SOLD OUT of tickets for the camp site, which must put it on course for a record attendance.

I won’t be going. Mainly because of family committments, but officially I’m not going because I’m boycotting this year’s headliners, Chumbawamba, who I well & truly despise.

Mrs is a big fan, and because our musical tastes are fundamentally unreconcilable (and she would always win the argument) the relentless drone of Chumba’s self-righteous left-negativism used to befoul the flat’s atmosphere on a far too regular basis. Luckily now, Jnr’s musical tastes trump even hers, and we listen to nothing but “The Cat in The Hat” on autorepeat, which I think is a mercy of types.

Anyway, don’t let that stop you going - the wondrous Billy Bragg will be there, like the ravens in the Tower, and there’s Mark Thomas, The Men They Couldn’t Hang, and so much other stuff (and more than enough beer) to help you ignore the gaggle of oafish Prescott-dousers chanting “Can’t hear you, cos your mouth’s full of sh*t”, whilst failing to notice the turds in their own maw.

And hey, it might even be sunny!

Eek! Spotted at Charing Cross this morning - an advert for a new Kent housing development, with a logo I’m sure I’ve seen somewhere before.

Indeed, a quick shufty at their website seems to confirm it. “The traditions of yesterday”, “cricket green”, “all the benefits normally associated with a exclusive country club.” The pub is called the Spitfire, and the photos in the brochure aren’t exactly multi-cultural. Plus of course there are the whopping great gates at the front to “engender a private community”.

A gated village? In the Tory heartland of rural Kent? Egad! It appears that Cameron has given up all hope of winning the next election and instead is working on an emergency plan B - The construction of a top-secret Tory fortress, where the Cameroonies can hole up and plot their sinister revenge on the nation.

Sad news today - the Sheffield Wool Shear Workers’ Union has folded after 117 years representing people working in the manufacture of sheep shears in Sheffield.

I never met any of them, but like a lot of unionists had a bit of a soft spot for SWSWU, as they gave the UK union movement a Guiness record for being the smallest union in the world, with just 9 members.

All their members were employed by steel firm Burgon & Ball, whose shear department boasts of making the finest and most popular shears in the world, with craftsman hand-set blades and four different configurations of hot-rolled bow. They also supply Sheffield-steel sheep shear sharpening steels, which are probably easier to use than to say.

SWSWU put out a statement after the 1997 election that 100% of their membership had voted Labour. Would that a few other unions could say that!

The baton of smallest union in the TUC now passes to the Card Setting Machine Tenters Society, who have a whopping 88 members - though don’t ask me what they do.