johninnit

Nice news today, that Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who walked out of his job in a way that captured the imagination of the interwebs (via a foul mouthed tannoy tirade against the treatment he’d put up with for 28 years, grabbing a beer from the trolley and deploying the emergency chute to slide out and walk away – if you spent yesterday with your computer turned off) has been offered assistance by the American union AFA. (more…)

The government are plotting another round of regulations on unions’ industrial action rights, if today’s Daily Mail article “Tories plot to curb unions to prevent second winter of discontent over spending cuts” is anything to be believed.

Winter of discontent? That sounds pretty serious – apocalyptic even. We haven’t had one of those since the 70’s – no wonder the Government are spooked.

But what’s this? Consulting the Daily Mail’s own search engine, we seem to have already experienced a ’spring of discontent’ this year, oh, and a ’summer of discontent’. And they confidently predict an ‘autumn of discontent’ to match the currently threatened ‘winter of discontent’. (more…)

Cory Doctorow has a new young-adult novel out, and it’s something that union organisers and communicators very much need to read.

For The Win meshes together the lives of people working in and around MMORPGS, the massively multiplayer online role-playing games which grow in size and value every year. Set about ten minutes into the future, it shows how these virtual worlds have developed virtual economies, with people who work in them, legally and illegally. (more…)

This will put a smile on your face for Thursday morning! Workers at San Francisco’s Westin St Francis Hotel have been locked in dispute with managment over their contract and healthcare provision, and things have gotten so bad, that they’ve come to the drastic step of calling for a boycott of their own employer until the situation improves.

Here are San Francisco LGBT activist group Havoq & Pride at Work staging a fantastic flashmob in the hotel lobby, aimed at highlighting the boycott to the thousands flocking to SF (and needing a hotel room) for the annual pride march. (more…)

I was thinking today about why trade unions don’t make a bigger deal of Open Source software – not just to use themselves more often, but as a model for the businesses their members work in. We like co-ops well enough, for example, or social enterprises.

I guess there could be an element in some quarters of resistance to the intially strange idea of amateurs voluntarily taking on work that’s been traditionally done by paid staff in formal companies – the same issues we see wherever the internet is perceived to be pitting people’s leisure interests up against the work of professionals. More likey though is that it’s all a bit new to us. I don’t know many unionised coders myself, let alone union Open Source coders. (more…)

I haven’t been a member of a Labour affiliated union for nearly ten years now – my current union don’t even have a political fund, let alone one that affiliates to Labour, but something really irks me about the latest Tory billboard – criticising Labour for taking union money (no, the one above is my take on it, not the original, which you can see here). (more…)

I’m not too proud of having been a lousy student. I don’t think I ever got an assignment in on time, and really found it a struggle to get much information out of libraries or lectures and into my head. Of course, since leaving uni for the world of work, I’ve found a big sop for my wounded pride in managmenty self awareness tests. It’s all because I’m an activist learner you see (not my fault whatsoever, honest!), and find it awkward to learn something unless I’m actually in the process of trying it at the same time.

So when I was asked to do an essay on union activists and social media for US academic journal WorkingUSA, I was a bit panicked. Luckily I managed to work it out by developing a presentation on many of the themes I wanted to cover, so I could test it out with different audiences first. The final essay “Connecting Activists” is now published in the current issue of WorkingUSA – go buy/loan a copy now! (more…)

We’ve seen a whole bunch more union related blogs over the last year, at all levels of the movement (check out the lists at TIGMOO.co.uk for many of them). But one thing I’ve noticed has impressed me in particular, and that’s the first attempts at cleverly using other people’s blogs to talk to members. I’m not talking about the Gen Sec posts that pop up on Comment Is Free every now and then, or the more mainstream political blogs, but something much closer to unions’ membership – the online trade press. (more…)

If you’re involved in trade unions, you’re likely hearing a new buzzword right now: “Just Transition”. My guess is that if you’re like me, the frequent repetition of this neologism doesn’t help clarify anything whatsoever, but it’s worth sticking with, as it’s an interesting concept, and one where unions may really be able to make a contribution. (more…)

Looking over this year’s TIGMOO.co.uk league table of UK union bloggers, it’s clear that the last year has seen a lot of new activity. Now over a third of the top 25 union blogs are new entries for 2009.

Union and political blogs in the USA continue to point the way, with insider commentary from LaborNerd, effective online campaigning from SEIU blog, or comprehensive and timely labour movement coverage from AFL-CIOnow. But things are growing over here too. (more…)