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.

JetBlue aren’t unionised, so Steven wasn’t a union member. But luckily it seems AFA are prepared to fight his corner, with an AFA rep telling TMZ “We want to advance the profession no matter what. Sometimes in order to do that we must help people who may not necessarily be members”. He’ll need it as he’s currently facing charges on reckless endangerment, criminal damage and criminal mischief (a charge usually reserved for Batman villains).

Good on AFA. There’s a lot of public sympathy for Slater, and helping what’s likely the highest profile case that’ll ever come up at JetBlue can only help in getting more interest there and pushing for unionisation, and conditions which hopefully won’t mean so many staff feel they have to press the nuclear button like Steven.

Anyway, the above is Jonathan Mann’s (as per usual) excellent take on the affair, and how a lack of respect for your hard work can drive you to extreme lengths.

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.

This is really interesting stuff. It’s been picked up pretty widely in just 2 days now, and it will be fascinating to watch the stats and see how far it goes. My betting is that a union protest vid like this will have a far greater reach than a more traditional one of a march of thousands of trade unionists – but crucially far more viral potential with the audience it’s aimed at (pride visitors), rather than with those already converted.

All done with 30 people by the look of it. Admittedly 30 people including talented improvvers, musicians and video makers, and who met I guess for a couple of rehearsals, but still much less effort than putting on a march through town. It’s the flip of a union march: thousands (of whoever happens to be passing) see that on the street, but it never gets reported unless there’s a ruck. With this, only a couple of dozen see the actual stunt, but the edited up message goes online to thousands of more revelant eyeballs.

What this does need though is an idea that is this good. For every viral that works, many don’t. What will unions’ fail to win ratio look like? My guess is that this kind of thing will be the preserve of creative collectives like Pride At Work rather than the unions they support like (in this case) UNITE-HERE, for some time. Too often, unions produce something that we think is stretching our boundaries, but we fail to realise that what we think is externally focused is still only speaking to where we hope the audience are, not where they actually are (eg here’s a hotel boycott video from the same union that gets the message over well and helps the workers tell their story, but the SF one is getting the same traffic per half-hour that it’s had in 2 years) . That’ll change though with time, as good practice like this builds up to help us better understand the challenge.

And in the meantime – here’s how you find out which hotels to avoid for San Francisco Pride.

Nice little video roundup of some IBEW locals in the States, who are using MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter in their campaigns.

Hat tip AFLCIOnow