Thanks to the tenacious Lancaster UAF blog for this story about the BNP-linked union Solidarity’s latest campaign.

A County Durham teacher and former BNP candidate, Mark Walker, has been suspended for something related to computer misuse. Solidarity claim it was the innocent popular past-time of visiting the BNP’s website. The head claims it was something else. Lancaster UAF’s rumour mill suggests looking at far-right sites whilst he should have been teaching.

A nice illustration of the personal surfing in the workplace story from last week. It’s not unreasonable to be allowed to use the web in your own time at work, and a good employer will have a policy to support this, albeit with a couple of important caveats:

• So long as it’s your *own* time. That means breaktime, downtime, however your employer defines it. Their definition is unlikely to include “on the clock” or whilst you’re really supposed to be teaching for example.
• So long as what you do on the web isn’t something which could damage your employer or cause offence, like, ooh erm I don’t know… accessing racist and offensive material online maybe?

Unfortunately for Walker, as a member of Solidarity, rather than one of the proper (and recognised) teaching unions, his support is coming from the presumably rather overworked Pat Harrington and in lieu of sympathetic colleagues from the union branch, a motley crew from the BNP, their front groups, and adverts on nazi chatrooms, who popped down to hassle the school on the first day of term.

Fortunately for the rest of us, Walker’s alleged activities put him in a rather different boat from the rest of the nation’s lunchbreak surfers, so if he goes (deservedly) down, he shouldn’t spoil the office daily poke for everyone.

Loads of coverage today for this. Hopefully stop a few more knee-jerk Facebook bans. Whilst an employer is obviously well within their rights to stop personal use of their own kit, it’s a bit silly to just stop Facebook because of the hype, and ignore the others, or whatever comes next. Do the nation’s managers really want to all have to become IT geeks, and spot whichever new technology has the potential to waste time?

Better surely, to work out in advance with staff what they can do and when, so that time wasting stays in the employees’ own time, and nobody needs to get disciplined for anything.

And for those who still think it’s a laughing matter - check out this worrying development.

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.

Off to debate union blogging (amongst plenty of other stuff) with UNI’s Communicators’ Forum in their Asia Pacific region next week, so I’m sort of practicing what I preach and have made them a nice group live-blog for everyone who will be attending the conference (www.unicommunicators.org).

If you’re interested in what UNI-affiliated unions from other countries are up to online, then have a look from Wednesday-Friday next week, as I’ll be attempting to keep any interesting bits* of the dialogue reflected on the site for the folks back home.

* - Interesting for union geeks, that is. I admit this is stretching the usual definition of ‘interesting’ a little

Bonus joke:
My wife went to a very bad concert in South East Asia.
Singapore?
Terrible. And the rest of the band was even worse.

Thanks to Roger for pointing out this piece in the Graun today about Alan Johnson’s political twitterering.

I can see the attraction of microblogging for putting your worthiness about, without the efforts of writing a full-on short-term leadership blog. As Alan’s e-Campaigner Stuart Bruce says:

“Being secretary of state for education and employment is a critical job and there is no way Alan could do a blog properly. It’s better to not blog than to do it badly. Most people don’t have a clue what senior politicians do. Using Twitter gives a real insight and clearly shows that he’s an ordinary guy.”

I’m not so sure about his other suggestions on how Twittering is a more inclusive format than blogging:

“Only 60 % of UK households use the internet regularly. Mobile phone penetration is nearly 100 %. Twitter is a way of making the campaign much more accessible to most people.”

In principle, sure, Twitter is great for letting those of us without a computer keep in the loop. But I’d question not just how many people have ever heard of Twitter in the UK that don’t already have internet access too, but how many people outside of the bloggerati - that least representative group of Labour members - have the faintest whit what all this is about in the first place.

This is where I think the lovely democratic potential of web2.0 often falls down. It can spread like lightening through people who are already linked in to it, but new services lack the marketing money or revenue shares to get into the places they need to be to be seen by Jo/e Punter - on the sides of London buses, or integrated into the phone networks’ portals.

Any hint of a glorious dawn of 1-1 communications with our elected leaders should be grabbed at whilst we can though - it looks to be winding down already in the USA. Facebook have a special category for US politicians now. You can’t be a friend of John Edwards (Alan’s comrade in twittering) any more, but instead get the chance to register yourself to support him - something a fair way different!

However it’s good to see that Alan & Stuart are taking their gimmicks seriously and are on the ball on keeping things updated - my facebook friend request was reciprocated much quicker than from most of my real friends

My gimmick tip to Stuart (tho he’s most likely doing it already) - a well-touted MyBlogLog profile. Most political bloggers would be disproportionally well flattered if it looked like Alan had been reading their pages!

Slick YouTube-style campaiging from a Belgian union. Their Equal Pay Day (31 March was the second of these annual campaign days - bit late, sorry!) is similar to the UK Work Your Proper Hours Day in terms of using dates to really bring home work-related statistics to people who may be affected by them but not fully aware. In this case, it’s the end of March, as the average Belgian woman would need to work an extra 3 months of the year to earn the same as her male colleagues.

The online delivery may be cheap enough to do, but filming this and the other 3 slots they’ve done with a professional ad agency will have cost a fair bit (even on favour rates if they got them - unions don’t tend to in the UK!). Nice to see examples of unions really investing in online campaigning, and hope it did well for them.

Hat Tip: I’m sick of your insane demands

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?

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.