A cause close to my heart this week, with a campaign from the CWU to tighten the Dangerous Dogs Act, to spare the nation’s posties from the jaws of the nation’s best friends. Up to 6,000 UK posties are attacked by dogs every year on their rounds, and many injured seriously, just so dog owners can get their junk mail and ebay purchases. Read the rest of this entry »

I noticed something I liked a lot today. A bunch of CWU members, the dodgyclaimers, made a pop video parody to promote the union’s dispute with Royal Mail, and stuck it on YouTube. To say it’s not very polished would be a bit of an understatement, but it more than gets the point across - real people telling their story in immediately human terms. It’s set to the tune of the Proclaimers’ 500 miles:

“And we all walk 500 miles,
but Royal Mail want 500 more.
We’re going to be the men that walk 1,000 miles,
then fall down at your door.”

A couple of hours (and most likely a couple of beers) of an evening, with a cheap digital camera, free editing software (Yes Mac fiends, you get it on Windows too…), free hosting on YouTube, and 16,032 people have seen it. That’s 16,032! Loads of favourites and a string of comments that show it managed to motivate strikers all over the country.

So they did another, “The Posties” - sung to the Monkees, and another, a skit on “Brick in the wall” with the genius chorus “We don’t need no Alan Leighton”.

And the remixers are at it too. This isn’t new on social media - For every OK Go routine, there are a squillion kids who’ll make tributes (I even saw the treadmill dance acted out with Lego), and this phenomenon has already happened to dodgyclaimers’ Floyd cover. It is new for unions though

I’ve seen a few activist video skits from the US, but these are the first examples I’ve seen from the UK. Some unions are  doing well investing in swishy video reporting (Amicus) or quality campaign ads (PCS) but this kind of grassw00ts activism has every bit as much power to get the message out fast and wide - the scattergun approach means it only takes on to be funny. Unions might find it scary to deal with loose cannon communications during sensitive disputes, but there’s a lot to be gained from going with the flow of this creative individual activism. I’m hoping this is only the tip of a very big, and very funny, iceberg.

A gift-horse “unions in political correctness gone mad” story for the tabloids today. Call centre staff will now no longer be obliged to issue a greeting in Welsh when they answer the phone for Vale of Glamorgan Council. Call me a linguo-fascist, but I think the CWU have a point here – though not just the one being made in the story.

Staff are understandably trying to cut down voice strain, and for some non-native speakers, the phlegmy rasp that is their best approximation of the lilting tones of their fathers is apparently doing their vocal chords no good at all. As a keyboard jockey, my 6 months of RSI a while back were only a small glimpse at the huge problems that damaging your voice could have for people who speak for a living.

Dave Joyce, CWU H&S officer, said: “Call centre work can be very intense and target driven and workers spend a large proportion of their day on the telephone. Vale of Glamorgan council call centre staff undoubtedly have a justified case which deserves support.”

Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, the Welsh Language Society, are protesting the decision, as going against the council’s obligations. A spokesperson said (presumably in translation): “The Vale of Glamorgan council has a Welsh language scheme, which requires them to deal bilingually with any correspondence with the public.”

Except, how much help precisely is a chirpy “Bore da” going to be when a Welsh speaker wants to order a new hywellybin? Everyone likes a friendly greeting, but people don’t tend to ring the council to just say hello in passing. If the call centre staffer can’t actually deal with the whole enquiry in Welsh, isn’t it just a little bit (a rare bit even) of window dressing, and probably more likely to annoy than help?

The council’s proposed solution, to include Welsh in the normal recorded greeting people hear, would seem to make sense – Hopefully though also employing more Welsh-speaking CWU members to deal with the Welsh questions, and giving people a chance to press 1 for English, 2 for Welsh.

Have you had a go at LabourSpace yet? It’s a sort of Big Brother for NGO campaigns. Every month there’s a new theme, and relevant lobby groups add their favourite campaigns. Users to the site vote on the campaigns, and the winner gets to have tea with Tony and Hazel and bend their ears a bit.

Anyway this is ‘work month’, which means unions are up for the prize. And so far there are 3 union campaigns in the house, two from the CWU and one from the TUC. They are:

Give Safety Some Teeth! (TUC)

Fines for work safety breaches are stupidly low in comparison with other corporate offences (compare £980,000 for Nationwide’s slip up in potentially revealing customer information with Granite Ltd’s £10,000 fine for not securing slabs which crushed an employee to death). Hundreds of people are still being killed at work in the UK every year, for want of some very simple safety measures. But bad employers will look at the tiny fines they might get and decide they can swallow lots of those rather than just pay up to play safe. Raising the level of fines will be simple, quick, uncontroversial with any decent employers, and save lots of lives.

Justice for Agency Workers (CWU)

Labour has done a lot of good in upping the UK’s stautory minimum working conditions, but there’s a gaping hole in this otherwise excellent work, which temp workers often fall through. A lot of people like agency work, but it’s also the case that many do it because so many companies are shirking their employer responsibilities by outsourcing that they can’t get a full time job. Whatever the reason, people working as temps shouldn’t be forced to take a huge hit in rights that everyone else now takes as a minimum standard. The Government has put back legislation on this recently, so this is an opportunity to keep up the pressure.

Save Gloucester Mail Centre (CWU Gloucestershire)

A reminder that unions are about standing together to protect their members in local disputes comes from the third campaign, which is seeking to get Royal Mail to reconsider plans to close a mail centre that would affect 400 staff working there. Instead they want to see the company conduct a proper study into the stated reasons for the closure, which look to be a smokescreen for cost cutting, or at least provide more serious support than is currently proposed for affected staff. The branch fear that this could be the start of a round of cutbacks in regional mail provision.

So if you’d like to see some tanks on the No10 lawn (or at least some union campaigners in the Cabinet Office), pick up your mouse and get clicking at LabourSpace.com