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.

Andy Stern
Free Press, 224 pages

America seems like a worrying place to be a leftie, and SEIU President Andy Stern lays out a formidable list of obstacles to progressive politics in this book. Global forces have changed the American economy to the point where the American dream that hard work can be valued and rewarded just isn’t a possibility any more. Income inequality has rocketed, job security is a distant memory, pensions and healthcare are imploding. Stern believes that the natural way to tackling this breach lies in trade unions, but that they will need to change themselves dramatically too in order to seize the opportunity.

Stern is well placed to tell us about change in unions. He talks at length about the transformation of SEIU from 7^th placed “SEIwho?” to become the largest AFL-CIO affiliate – a process started by his own mentor John Sweeney, now President of the AFL. The union was reorganised to focus on clear industries – transferring members in illogical sectors (such as utilities workers) into other unions that could better represent them. Coherent branding was adopted across a very diverse organisation. Union dues were ramped up to double, and staffing numbers in services provided to locals cut dramatically, building Stern a huge war chest to spend on growth - organising new workplaces and new sectors. Stern doesn’t flinch from detailing some of the difficulty of this process – including the protests of the large numbers of SEIU office staff he laid off. In the end though, the numbers tell the story, and SEIU’s rise (albeit aided by sectoral mergers) makes for a compelling case.

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!

Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain has found himself well and truly pwned, after setting up the now obligatory candidate page on MySpace.

Unfortunately McCain got a rather lazy assistant to make page, and they just pinched a designer’s template, without crediting him. Worse, they kept using the designer’s original image files, direct from his server, breaking the unwritten law that you ‘never mess with another man’s bandwidth’.

++unfortunately for McCain, the designer he unwittingly ripped off was Mike Davidson, CEO of the rather popular news aggregator Newsvine.com. Davidson thought that if he was being tricked into serving up images, he might as well serve something funny, so he changed the picture file to a ’signed’ statement from McCain that he had reversed his hardline stand on gay marriage, and come out in favour, “particularly marriage between passionate females”.

He then wrote up the story on Newsvine, and unsurprisingly it got out far, wide, and quickly. In the 13 hours before McCain’s team twigged and pulled the plug on the image, it was on TechCrunch & Slashdot, all round the world and even made it onto telly.

McCain isn’t out of the woods yet, as he now has a very messed up MySpace page with no template, and a sneaky commenter has pulled the same trick on him again by posting positive images and switching the remotely hosted files after moderation.

A very cautionary tale to any of our own politicians trying to tick the yoof box on the cheap with half-hearted dabbling in social networking.

Move over Ming… Facebook is *so* 2006.

John Edwards is letting us know what’s he’s up to minute by minute (or at least a couple times a day) at Twitter. Not sure of the *exact* point of this but, man, it’s current!

He seems to be trying for the ‘internet candidate’ vote that Howard Dean took last time. Obama started off a slouch on the web, but has quickly slapped up a pretty good looking site to rival Edwards’ - though he doesn’t yet seem to have his wife and kids slaving away in the blog comments for him.

Our left blogohemisphere is getting quite excited about Sen Barack Obama’s race for the Democratic presidential nomination over the pond. It’s like Howard Dean never screamed, hurrah!

And there’s quite a lot to get excited about - as this video shows (thanks, parburypolitica!): Top orator, Impeccable community politics CV, all career moves covered by good altruistic reasons. He’s a kind of fantasy football candidate, and if he loses will have a great potential career playing inspirational presidents in disaster movies.

Naysaying seems to be focused around good old fashioned racism (including his rather unfortunate middle name of Hussein), his lack of cash and national campaign team, and possibly more tellingly that he’s new kid on the block, without the Washington experience of Howard Dean, let alone Hillary Clinton.

Anyway, watching the vid confused me a little. He does a great spiel on breaking down false divisions between red & blue, though I wondered a bit who he was trying to reach out to. The hardcore religious right deal in moral absolutes, so might be pretty immune to the shades of grey involved in trade-off politics and coalition building. For every one he won over with talk of worshipping “an awesome god” in the blue states, he probably alienated them again straight away by acknowledging the mere existence of “gay friends” in the red states.

As a tack for uniting those on the near right, with self-hating liberal tendencies though, I think it might work very well!

Maybe he is actually Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest character - trying to sucker the two sides into something which will make them both look silly.

Jak sie masz?

Yes indeed, in this week’s top ‘believe it or not’ story (here on Al Jazeera), capitalist running pig-dog lackeys Wal-Mart are now trading in China. Apparently it’s going well, and they’ve even celebrated by setting up their own branch of the Communist Party for staff.

Yes, you read that right - Wal-Mart are digging into their pocket to do their bit in helping spread Communism. We know from the US that they’re keen on state provision when it means they can avoid paying themselves for little extras like their healthcare obligations to staff, but this is a pretty hefty about turn
And it doesn’t stop there. There’s a Chinese Wal-Mart union too. The firm that does so much to avoid unions at home hasn’t been able to get around Chinese laws requiring employers to let employees form a union if there are more than 25 of them that wish to. Let’s hope that’s one more ‘made in China’ that makes it back to Wal-Mart’s shelves in the States.

A very apt book to kick off the tigmoo bookclub, this is at once a very illuminating peek into the world of working for a dotcom, and a hilarious satire. Stand-up comedian and story-teller Mike Daisey spent three years (21 dog years) working at Amazon in the US during the early days, and wrote up his experiences.

The memoir well captures the enthusiasm, bordering on obsession, of the headquarters staff - even those like Mike exiled to Customer Services. It must have been a rollercoaster ride - big projects, massive staff parties and a social life totally revolving around the firm, dogs in the office and mass idolisation of CEO “Jeff”, and his brave new vision for the retail industry. Only towards the end of Mike’s time there, when the organisation grows far too large to feel like a family (or treat each other like one), and staff are becoming burned out from keeping up with the company’s long hours culture, does the shine start to come off the party.

It also explains partly why Amazon management chose to portray the GPMU’s organising attempt at their UK branch as a roar of the dinosaurs - something totally irrelevant to the shiny new future of fully-engaged working - miles away from a sense of alienation with your work and company.

Mike is a fantastic performer and if you get the chance to see one of his shows (I think I managed to see his only ever performance this side of the pond though!) you should jump at it.

Buy “21 Dog Years” now at Amazon.co.uk here.

(Buying from Amazon? WTF? No, I’ve not lost my marbles, click here to find out more about the tigmoo bookclub).

Well, it looks like a reasonable result over the pond, but thought I’d share something from yesterday which caught my eye. This, via the AFLCIO’s blog, is a very scary account culled from US blogs about last minute Republican dirty tricks.

Some absolute (evil-) genius stuff here - Why not set up one of those automatic phone message machines to cold call with a broadcast from your opponent? Yes, stick with it, it does make a twisted kind of sense… Then auto-call the same broadcast again, again, again and again, till you manage to get everyone in the phonebook heartily pissed off with your opponent, for supposedly intruding into their privacy. Apparently this kind of stuff is actually illegal in some states, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping them.

Also nasty is fake opinion polling. Ring your opponent’s voters, saying you’re conducting an election opinion poll. Then ask them a set of loaded questions, trying to shake their faith in their candidate. “Would the knowledge that Sen X eats babies change your perception of them for the better or worse?”

Worrying in that it’s cheap and very easy (if you have no scruples). So when the GOP spent nearly $42 million on negative campaigning (the Dems were no slouch either with $18m), this is making a mockery of the whole election, especially when the Senate result is still running so close. More if you can stomach it at AFLCIOnow.

New from the AFL-CIO (American Unions) is this rather amusing new campaign, where beleagured wage slaves post in their tales of bad boss woe, and other users get to vote on them. The winner gets an expenses paid holiday (presumably to find a new job after their boss reads the story).

Admittedly this is in the States, the Land Before Employment Law, where people only get 2 weeks’ hols and bosses are almost legally bound to be as evil as they can, but some of the stories do make me very grateful for the number of (mostly lovely) bosses I’ve had in the past.

http://www.workingamerica.org/badboss/