A most unexpected burst of sunshine made Saturday’s demo for the NHS into a pretty enjoyable way to spend a few hours. It wasn’t your run-of-the-(trouble-at)-mill union demonstration either - the attendance of a whole bunch of carnival artists really jolted people out of the traditional slump you’re likely to get halfway round a march. It’s hard not to be jolly when you’re walking next to a couple of giant lobsters on stilts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Greetings earthlings from the world’s first virtual reality picket line. It’s spread over a huge are of IBM corporate campus in virtual world Second Life. I’ve seen quite a lot of people, flown around some fun places, and had a chat to some nice IBM staff who were clearing up the 80 foot “Oi IBM, No!” sign I made for their sandbox. Read the rest of this entry »

Italian union members at IBM are taking a novel form of action, to highlight their current dispute over pay cuts. Later this month, they’re planning on mounting the world’s first virtual reality union demo, in trendy 3D world Second Life.

IBM put great stock in their lovely corporate headquarters in Second Life, which makes them a a good target for a virtual campaign, publicising the dispute to IBM customers and clients visiting SL. The novelty angle too should get lots of publicity for the dispute.

The action is going to take place, flash mob style, at a currently secret time, date and place. If you’d like to join the picket in solidarity with the IBM workers, you can sign up to the mailing list at the UNI Global website (which also has a helpful “absolute beginners’ guide” to using Second Life), and they’ll keep you in touch.

Then pop over to the UNI virtual office to pick up your kit (also available at Tigmoo Corner and several other union Second Life hangouts). The kit has a virtual T-shirt for you to wear, virtual banners for you to wave, a giant rotating fish for you to… well, I’m not sure what that’s for, but I hope it’ll become apparent later, and instructions on what to do next.

Should be a fun event to get involved in (for union webby trainspotters like me), and an interesting development in global solidarity. Great if you speak some Italian I guess, but no worries if you don’t - there should be a good number of people there from around the world, trades unionists, activists and international IBM employees. Indeed, this could be the first steps in building an international union network at IBM, from union members from this multinational employer’s locations all around the world.

Hope to see you there - if only because this is one union picket that definitely won’t get rained on!

UPDATE: Wagner James Au at the excellent New World Notes has a short interview on the action with union avatar UNIglobalunion Oh - the first virtual union press interview I’ve seen so far!

Stung by their employer’s decision to ban access to Facebook during their work breaks, staff at Medway Hospital have voiced their protest by, you guessed it, starting a Facebook group.

On a slightly less arch note, you can also join a Facebook group to support the staff at Fremantle Trust in their dispute against an employer who have slashed pay and conditions after taking over the public sector care contract from Barnet Council. Unison rep Andrew Rogers has been sacked in the latest twist to this long running dispute, so please join the group and take this online action.

I remember writing an email of complaint to their Chief Exec Carole Sawyer many months ago, and getting back a remarkably snotty reply, so it’s not a great surprise that they’re trying to intimidate LabourStart, who are running the action. The LabourStart activists aren’t backing down, but their ISP got cold feet after a letter from Fremantle, and told them to remove the campaign, which is now back up on another server. Sign up now - they can’t sue us all

So there I am getting pissed off with Vodafone after they monkey with my contract terms mid-contract, and refuse recognition for Connect in the UK and CWU in South Africa, and my contract comes up, so I ring them and say I’m off to nice unionised O2 in protest. They say they’ll put a PAC code in the post and I think no more of it.

And then this happens, and this. Result! And then the retentions department ring up and really professionally grovel to ask me to stay, knock a third off my bill and offer me a swanky new HTC 3G/SatNav/WiFi blogo-phone for free (iPhone, schmiPhone). Result!

Congratulations to the Connect and CWU teams on two excellent results, but I think we all know who it was that really dragged them to the table…

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.

I’ve just finished reading Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”. I don’t really recommend it - he spends 232 pages repeating a good idea for a magazine article - this one in fact ( but of course, don’t let that put you off buying a copy via the tigmoo book club). Basically he suggests that a new business model is on the verge of becoming mainstream - that of the eponymous “Long Tail”.

Up til now, commerce and (hence) culture were governed too much by hits, rather than niche interests. A distribution curve in any market shows most of the take-up clumped in a few products on the left of the graph (Head), and a large number of niche products with hardly any sales (Tail).

This is because of the physical difficulties involved in connecting the supply to the demand - it’s only worth doing it on a big scale. However, new technologies have democratised the tools of production (eg: YouTube), democratised the tools ofdistribution (eg: eBay), and connected niche interests with niche products (eg: blogs). The Tail is now longer and fatter as a result, and makes a very viable proposition, with the total number of niche sales from many products eclipsing the total number of hit sales of a few products.

Chris claims there could be a Long Tail for pretty much every market if you look hard enough and find an appropriate product, an appropriate variety of options for the product, and an appropriate channel to distribute, so it set me thinking about the Long Tail of the labour movement.

Unions have pretty stumpy tails. Getting a lot of people together to do the same thing is pretty fundamental to their makeup. I think if we’re to take on a lot of these ideas, we might end up with something rather different - perhaps something like the soonish-to-be launched SEIU (the US Service Employees International Union) web community Qvisory.

Check it out - not a lot on the site so far, but what I’ve heard is pretty exciting (for a union tech nerd like me…). SEIU are trying to engage young non-members - people who currently have no interest in unions and don’t see a relevance. They’re planning to do this by not trying to control it too much, and playing to the areas where SEIU’s interests and their interests overlap, which includes stuff on how hard it is to be yoof in the US today - things like like financial (especially debt management) and health care (SEIU campaign hard on the woeful state of US healthcare) advice.

Qvisory will be a forum where these people can engage, contribute and help themselves and each other, without being overly pressured to join a traditional union. Indeed, SEIU see the potential benefit as being popular youth engagement with their national agenda (big win things like fundamental pensions and healthcare change), rather than a straight organising drive.

Qvisory will be something that users make and mould for themselves, along with SEIU, an appropriate product, with flexibility for everyone’s interests, and with a democratic and scalable distribution model. Not a union, but an application of similar principles to a different situation. I think (and hope) it could do very well.

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!

Sad news today - the Sheffield Wool Shear Workers’ Union has folded after 117 years representing people working in the manufacture of sheep shears in Sheffield.

I never met any of them, but like a lot of unionists had a bit of a soft spot for SWSWU, as they gave the UK union movement a Guiness record for being the smallest union in the world, with just 9 members.

All their members were employed by steel firm Burgon & Ball, whose shear department boasts of making the finest and most popular shears in the world, with craftsman hand-set blades and four different configurations of hot-rolled bow. They also supply Sheffield-steel sheep shear sharpening steels, which are probably easier to use than to say.

SWSWU put out a statement after the 1997 election that 100% of their membership had voted Labour. Would that a few other unions could say that!

The baton of smallest union in the TUC now passes to the Card Setting Machine Tenters Society, who have a whopping 88 members - though don’t ask me what they do.

Solidarity, the right nationalist ‘trade union’, might not be nearly as much use to their members as a real union, but they are at least excelling in one area - splits and squabbles.

Over the past week, a very entertaining story has been emerging. It seems that Pat Harrington, General Secretary (and occasional commenter to this blog), has been suspended from his post by the President Clive Potter and Vice-Prez Tim Hawke, amidst allegations of financial irregularities. Apparently, the accounts the union needs to supply to the Certification Officer are delayed, after Potter believed the version of the accounts Harrington showed him was too unclear, and refused to sign them without seeing the full accounts. Hawke claims that an un-named Merseyside BNP member has been appointed Acting GS, until a new GS is found, and that the BNP are planning a hostile takeover of the union.

Harrington unsurprisingly has a different take on this, and as he still has the keys to the website, he’s letting everyone know about it by calling for an EGM in July to appoint a new (and larger) executive (Hawke is amusingly reduced to getting his message out via the Lancaster Unite Against Fascism blog). Harrington says that he and the BNP leadership believe that the troubles, and a leadership challenge, are being orchestrated by well organised far-left undercover saboteurs within the union. The BNP has in the meantime stopped recommending members to join the union.

What is going on? Both these explanations sound a little fishy. If there’s been any embezzlement going on, it’s rather cheap stuff, given the union has at most 100 subs paying members and can’t have any cash to speak of. Otherwise, Sherlock Holmes’ maxim could have us believing that any far-left groups are well organised enough to have done this.

And what does this bode for Harrington’s claims that Solidarity are BNP independent? If the BNP are now considering a takeover, maybe they were indeed more separated than most people thought (though won’t be very soon if the EGM goes ahead). Though how to square this with his claim on the union’s site that the accounts were audited by Kenny Smith (head of BNP admin) yet not shown to Hawke and Potter, and Harrington’s objection that the new AGS is not a BNP member of good standing?

Hat tip: Lancaster UAF
Bonus entertainment: Clive Potter is in the news again - from Unity