User involvement in digital product design is fundamental to success. Human-centric and design thinking approaches make a huge difference to a digital project’s chances of achieving product/market fit. Testing and refining every interaction in a system improves its performance, and ability to solve an identifiable user need. Taken together those small improvements really add up.
OMG how cool is this? A little video about unions that I shot in my lunchbreak 7 years ago has just been remade by trade unionists in Croatia – in Croatian!
This really surprised me as I know colleagues in Spain and the Netherlands tried to translate it into their languages, but found the grammar rules made it a little tricky. Much respect to the guys at SSSH (Union of Autonomous Trade Unions of Croatia) for trying it. Made my day!
My Dad, who died 18 months back, had home care help in the last years of his illness. My Mum moved mountains to keep him at home, where he needed to be, but what she achieved simply wouldn’t have been possible without the daily help of agency home care workers.
It really isn’t possible for me to say enough about all of the carers who I met. They were amazing people, doing a really complex job with huge diligence, compassion and enthusiasm. They cared for Dad’s needs in a job that could be physically as well as emotionally demanding. They spotted health concerns and made sure things we wouldn’t have noticed were followed up properly. They took it upon themselves to help smooth out some of the bumps in the healthcare bureaucracy for their clients, in their own time.
But the most remarkable thing is that they managed to maintain this professionalism day in day out, whilst their employer consistently treated them like shit…
Via a rather pissed off AFL-CIOnow today, I came across a Gawker article about Californian clothing company Unionmade Goods. They sell upmarket priced downmarket looking clothing to the good hipster folk of the Bay Area. All quite pleasant looking, if rather on the pricey side, and topped off with a woolly commitment to ethical sourcing, …
Whodathunkit? A labor-sympathetic judge has used a technicality to strike down Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s bill to remove collective bargaining rights for his public sector workers. Makes a nice change from the kind of court intervention in industrial disputes that we’re getting more used to on our side of the pond, where bizarre balloting technicalities …
World Day for Decent Work today is even glummer this year than usual. 34 million jobs have been lost worldwide since 2008, due to the financial crisis, and 64 million have been pushed into extreme poverty. Yet the austerity measures that so many governments have adopted to respond to the crisis will only make things …
Random LOLs whilst reading this month’s GMB magazine. Kevin Maguire has done a nice feature on GMB President (and patron saint) Mary Turner, now Mary Turner MBE, with some great stories about her contributions to the labour movement. Best quote though is saved right to the end: Mary Turner MBE is happy to retell how …
Hey, did I ever mention I’m a big screen film director? 🙂 Well, after making a little lunchbreak video with our office photocopier a couple of months back, it’s now been picked up to feature this month at the Washington DC Labor Film Festival, at the TUC/Philosophy Football’s Rhyme Rhythm & Reason event this Wednesday, …
…starring our photocopier, as it can act a whole lot better than me. Thanks to Moby for allowing me to use the splendid track “18” on this, and to Lianne for clicking repeatedly. BTW: As Mark Twain would likely have tweeted – had I more time, I would have uploaded a shorter video. If you …
Thanks to AFLCIOnow for a tip on a new US union blog. LaborNerd (no relation) is a nicely digested version of labor gossip & big stories, just right for transatlantic nerds – and finding its way straight onto my RSS reader. Anyway – this video on union labels is worth the price of admission alone. …