Unfortunately I don’t have enough clear space on my messy desk for yoga, but otherwise happy to know that I work in a state of 80% Zen as regards my employer’s attitude to work / life balance (albeit with a 20% tendency to working 8 days a week).

You can find out your own workplace style at the Work Your Proper Hours Day site (and put yourself on a neat-o google map mashup for a prize). Yes - it’s that time of year again. If you add up all the unpaid overtime people do in the UK, the average long hours worker works for free until this Friday - 22nd February. Read the rest of this entry »

Woke up with a cold this morning, and thought “wouldn’t it be nice to have a bank holiday today and get up a bit later?”. Fat chance though with our miserly quota of public days off, and a dreary 16 week run without hols between August and Xmas.

The Bank of England used to recognise more than 30 holidays and saints’ days, which were whittled back to a miserly four in 1834 (a bad thing). These were then increased to six (in practice) in 1871, when the cricket-mad Liberal MP John Lubbock introduced the Bank Holidays Act to include two traditional village cricketing days, but we then had to wait over 100 years for another day off, with the last two coming in the 70’s as a result of union campaigning.

But that’s still nearly 20 years ago, I reckon another couple are very much deserved. Especially so as in the Euro holiday league tables, we’re right at the bottom, and probably about to be relegated - The average European enjoys three more public holidays. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, that’s another Congress over. I watched a pretty empty looking hall on telly for the last words, which this year went to David Hencke of the Guardian, with the traditional less-than-serious “Reply from the Media”.

He proposed a new round of Union Modernisation money to be spent entirely on high-tech innovations. The upcoming “Winter of Discontent”  would be replaced by a “Summer of Fun” Wi-Fi beach festival instead of next year’s Congress, with motions downloadable as podcasts for a individually customisable event, and unions would go entirely online to conduct their disputes through hacking and phreaking.

Might work. In fact online might already be how they’re organising the GC elections, given the results 

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.

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!

Scary article on unionbusting in the States on afl-cioNOW.  According to a survey by a union-friendly lobby group, 91% of US firms faced with an organising campaign will make employees attend one to one meetings with their managers about the union, and a whopping 82% engage a “union avoidance consultant” (the dreaded unionbusters). Worse still, 30% fire union activists during a campaign, and 49% threaten to close the plant if the union is recognised (though tellingly only 2% actually carry this out if they lose).

The AFL estimate unionbusting to be a $4bn a year business - a conservative estimate apparently, because it’s often very hard to prove the consultants were engaged for that purpose.

So far this is a far cry from our own situation in the UK, though the unionbusters are popping up over here too now, both home-grown and imported. US firm The Burke Group have been engaged against union campaigns at T-Mobile, Amazon, Virgin Atlantic and Calor Gas.

The TUC have a novel new approach to countering this, and are publishing a leaflet today, which outlines the actual benefits that an employer could be throwing away by not engaging with a union organising campaign. You can download a pdf here.

Yes - that’s right, benefits. Many of them in the tangible form of lovely cost savings. The Government reckons union reps are worth at least £3.5bn to the economy in increased productivity. 3000 workplaces have union funded (including through Government money) learning projects, which provide job related training to over 67,000 workers a year. Safety reps save firms millions through accidents and work related illness, and dealing with problems through a union means less tribunal cases, and hence much less money to lawyers.

…and of course, that’s before the cost savings in not employing a firm of extremely expensive unionbusters!

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

I’m normally very good at minding my hours, so shall make a point of being down the pub on time this Friday for Work Your Proper Hours Day.

I tried this quiz for myself as I am now, and again as I was in my last job, where I did do some silly hours (and ended up giving myself RSI, which wasn’t very clever). I’m currently a “Chaos Theorist” (in other words, when I do unpaid overtime it’s often my own fault for being disorganised), but that’s a big improvement on my previous life as a wretched “Desk Junkie”.

Have a go, and see who you are and what problems you need to fix. It gives you some quite good advice on where you’re going wrong and what you need to tackle about it.

There are loads of different reasons for overworking, which combine to make a pretty whopping £23bn of free overtime done in the UK every year. Don’t make yourself one of the thousands who suffer every year from stress, broken relationships, work related illnesses, or even just a miserable social life. Even the best job in the world shouldn’t take up your life to the exclusion of everything else. See you in the pub 5:30 sharp on Friday!

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).

At the TUC in Brighton yesterday, we heard a powerful speech from Thabitha Khumalo, 3rd VP of the ZCTU, the TUC’s equivalent body in Zimbabwe. She spoke frankly about the personal harm she had already faced, and was willing to face in the future, to help bring stability and democracy to her country, things we take very much for granted. You can read her speech here.
One bit that struck me was when she told us her instinctive initial reaction had been fear when she heard people heckling Tony Blair on Tuesday, worrying that the police would storm in to break Congress up for insulting the leader, as would happen in Zimbabwe.
It made for especially uncomfortable listening, when we’d spent several days bemoaning our own trade union problems, which now seemed slightly trivial in comparison with the terrible abuses suffered by colleagues in the Zimbabwean labour movement. To close her contribution, she led us in a rendition of “We will overcome” - something which the TUC hasn’t heard in a while. The conference was obviously deeply moved, but seemed so shocked that the song came out quietly and reverentially, more of a hymn than a protest.
Just hours after Thabitha left the stage, word started to come through that the police in Zimbabwe had started to round up trades unionists - ahead of a planned peaceful national demo for today. Over 400 are now believed to be in custody, with many of the leadership beaten badly and denied medical aid or legal representation. Thabitha is now the most senior labour movement figure outside of prison. This story shocked me especially, mentioning Grace Kwinjeh (the MDC’s Deputy Secretary for International Affairs), another very brave woman who I had the privilege of meeting last year at a meeting when she was part of a delegation to the UK.
The TUC has written to Robert Mugabe, though as he’s not the biggest fan of Britain’s unions or politicians, I doubt their outrage will cause him to lose much sleep. Please read Thabitha’s powerful speech, and help spread the word.