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

There’s a petition doing the cyber-rounds at the moment, encouraging people to press for a ballot on reversing the NUJ conference (ADM) decision on boycotting Israel. I’ve been thinking about this for some time, as I oppose the boycott, and was pretty dismayed when it went through. The case against the boycott, and the similar boycotts by UCU and Unison has been passionately argued by people from all over the political spectrum from Rory Cellan-Jones to Eric Lee to the AWL.

I don’t plan to sign it though. Not because of my support for the boycott, but because of my deeply unfashionable opposition to a major part of what the petition is calling for - going back on decisions made through the union’s democratic process. I’d sign a petition that said “not in my name”, to help make it clear the majority of union members were opposed to the boycott, but not to appeal against a done decision.

This opens up wider questions on exactly what union democracy is. For better or for worse (generally better), we have structures which govern how we work (the NUJ is one of those unions which are *very* keen on structures, with rules about what can be discussed in what years and so on). A common complaint is that we have a situation where a small number of people are very engaged in the workings of the union, and a good section of those people are from a far left political viewpoint not so widely represented amongst the union’s diverse membership.

I saw David Aaronovitch give an explanation of why he wouldn’t engage with the NUJ at a practical level, despite his theoretical belief in the importance of democratic trade unionism. To paraphrase him, you go to branch, and find four trots and a loony, who outvote you. So you have to persuade your friends to go along and outvote them, except none of your friends will thank you for this evening’s entertainment, and the trots are in any case happy to stay much later into the night than you to outvote you. Not only that, but once you’ve finally had your victory, you then need to do it all over again next time, as the trots (and presumably the loony) are always guaranteed to be there.

This is maybe less sinister than it sounds I think. It’s partly entryism, but probably more likely just because activists will be activists, and the kind of people who will volunteer for union work are also the kind of people who volunteer for political or community work too. It’s easy to knock our trotty cousins for using the union to reflect their concerns, but if they’re journalists too they have as much a right to membership as I do. And if I can’t be arsed to go to branch and they can, then I don’t have so much grounds for being miffed about it, when they’re the ones who end up shouldering much of the thankless, mundane and non-political work that the union needs doing on behalf of all our members.

We should look at what is turning people off engaging with branches. Is it the length of meetings (yup), the locations (yup), the format (yup), the publicity (yup), or the medium (yup)? Can we do more for people who can’t get along to the meetings? Can we do more online, or spread decision making over time? We complain about the political nature of the meetings, but that’s just a function of the natural interests of the people who turn up - Refresh the people and you’ll refresh the agenda. Problem is it’s stuck in a vicious circle at the moment, where new people are alienated and leave, and so there’s no-one there to support the next new people. None of this is unique to the NUJ - or even to unions - it’s a dangerous trait in the nature of democratic voluntary organisations.

Anyway, on the narrower boycott issue, maybe a good focus for the campaign could be working within NUJ structures instead. Co-ordinate people who are concerned at the boycott to go en-masse to their branches, opposing motions in hand, when it’s time to debate ADM, and then again when the motions are revised and submitted, and delegates to ADM elected. It should only take a dozen people to swing the vote in most branches and send a different crowd off to the seaside next year - in total 4 hours out of a year for anyone who is concerned. If it’s a single issue campaign, it’ll be considerably easier than Aaronovitch’s trots and loony puzzle.

The downside to this approach obviously is that it’ll take another 9 long months, and during that time, UK journalists are losing credibility with the international profession and with the people they want to talk to - of obviously especial concern to colleagues working in the Middle East. I don’t see a way around this though. If we ballot on a motion, do we also take petitions on any motion the SWP disagreed with? Do we put in a formal right of appeal to ADM decisions? This could leave us tied up in endless yapping, and uncertain on what we were agreeing to do at any point.

I agree to a large degree with our VeeP on this one. Plus I think it boils down though to being ‘tough luck’. We (the majority of members) screwed up and let this happen - through our own omissions. It happened by the rules, so we should change it by the rules. I’m making it a resolution to go at least to the next ADM motion branch meeting - see you there!

However, I fully acknowledge that my own position on this isn’t really any more coherent than the ballot petition position. I don’t want to change the rule that’s been decided, but I have no intention of obeying it, so am making myself a rebel against the union. If everyone just disobeyed all the rules, then there wouldn’t be much point in having them - so what am I playing at?

Well, I’m prepared to take centralised democracy some way. For example, I bought a Vauxhall car last month, rather than a Citroen, largely because of the Unite Peugeot/Citroen boycott - even though I don’t agree with the tactic of that boycott myself. But this one is a step too far. Maybe there’s something in that though, that the rules of the union will only work in practice as far as the membership will allow, and the union will gradually learn from its own mistakes in this way.

I’d (honestly) like to hear more from colleagues where I’m going wrong on this!

Unexpected tribute to Tony on the RMT’s website. Their latest poll: “Will you be glad to see the back of Tony Blair?” resulted more than two to one against, with 71% of people saying they’ll miss him.

Are Bob and his members mellowing now that he’s named the date, or is it maybe just that in time honoured RMT fashion they’d rather Blair saw their backs, than they his?

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.

Congratulations to the drivers (though not the management by the sounds of it) of Eddie Stobart’s haulage firm. The Edinburgh Evening news reports that they refused extra payments of £500 each for a special assignment, when they found out that it was to strike-break against the UNITE-T&G distribution members at Tesco in Livingstone, Scotland.

UNITE-T&G’s Tony Trench said: “We think that this is an appalling way to do business - throwing large sums of money to get people to strike-break instead of sitting down and negotiating with us in an orderly fashion. We are humbly grateful to these guys who have turned down such large sums of money to support their comrades.”

Eddie Stobart always used to demand the highest standards of conduct from his drivers, wanting them to be ‘knights of the road’, to help him build a brand as industry leaders (and collect a huge fan club of strange people who like to count lorries along the way). It looks like they’ve passed the conduct test with flying colours, though maybe not in quite the way he intended.

All together now… “I want to be an Eddie Stobart driver…”

PS - Indisputedly the most useless bit of trivia I know (after ringing Stobarts’ unneccessarily helpful customer services for a bet 15 years ago) is the reason Stobarts lorries display a small Italian flag on their side. Apparently, their main contract was an Irish run when they were a small firm, and they wanted to put an Irish flag on the side, but didn’t have any orange paint, so they used red, and stuck to the wrong colour ever since out of quirky tradition. There - now don’t go saying there’s no exclusives on this site…