Eric Lee

A few years ago, LabourStart starting featuring a photo of the week (sometimes, of the day), just to liven up its front page a bit. As its editor, I'd see photos of strikes or picket lines or jailed union activists and put them in a little corner of the front page.

As with most things, after a while it became more work than I had time for, so I asked one of our senior correspondents, Derek Blackadder from Canada, to take on the job of ensuring that we had fresh photos on our front page, at least once every week.

Little did I know that Derek would turn this little project into what may be the largest collection of union photos on the web.

As a result of his initiative, we now have our very own movement photo album with over 2,400 photos and some 286 individuals contributing – from all over the globe.

We're using the photo-sharing service Flickr and the collection is located at http://flickr.com/groups/union/

Anyone can contribute photos, though Derek has asked that all submissions should be photos “of work, trade union actions, and trade union members”. He also invites those submitting photos to let him know if they would be appropriate as a LabourStart photo of the week. (We may have to go daily if we're deluged with suggestions.)

This week's photo on LabourStart is typical of the kinds of things we've shown recently. It's a photo of Arab and Jewish women celebrating International Women's Day in Tel Aviv. In a march organized by WAC-Maan they wanted to draw attention to the 81% unemployment rate amongst Arab women in Israel. They're carrying a banner reading "Open Jobs for Women in Agriculture". That's not the kind of photo you'll find on the cover of Newsweek, but it's exactly the kind of image – trade unionists leading the fight for a better world – that we want to see more of.

You might say that getting 286 trade unionists to contribute their photos and amassing a collection of over 2,400 images is not really that impressive considering that LabourStart regularly mails to tens of thousands of people and does huge online campaigns in support of workers' rights. But here's the thing – we never publicized the Flickr group to our list.

We never asked people for help. People have been joining the union group on Flickr probably because they have seen our photo of the week and clicked on the little link there. Or maybe they were already using Flickr and stumbled on our group. (After all, millions of people use Flickr for their personal photos.)

In other words, the growth has been spontaneous and unplanned. People want to share their photos, and want others to see – not just read about – what their unions are doing.

A glance at some of the work submitted to the group reveals this deep desire to spread the word using photos. The biggest contributor is someone at the NDU, a union in New Zealand, who has posted no fewer than 692 photos to the group. Another New Zealand union, Finsec, is responsible for some 124 photos. Blackadder himself has contributed 130 photos. And a user calling himself “Karl Marx” is responsible for 153 photos. And no, I don't think it's that Karl Marx; this one is based in Taiwan.

The potential of this group is enormous – if without any real publicity it has already grown so large, what happens when we start talking it up? We'll have at our disposal a fantastic resource for anyone doing trade union work – for education, communication, campaigning. Need a photo for the newsletter, leaflet or website? You'll find something here.

I encourage all those who read this to check out the group, and to submit their own photos. Spread the word!

Posted by Eric Lee at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

March 6th 2008 has been declared a global day of action in support of Iranian workers by two leading international trade union bodies. The International Trade Union Confederation, which unites national trade union centres such as the TUC, and the International Transport Workers Federation, a global union whose UK affiliates include Unite, the RMT, Unison and Aslef, are behind the call.

A glance at how those unions are using the Internet in support of the day of action reveals just how far we have come in a few short years.

The ITF set up a special website some time ago -- www.freeosanloo.org -- in support of the Iranian trade unionists, focussing attention on the case of Mansour Osanloo, leader of the Tehran bus workers. Those workers walked off their jobs a couple of years ago, virtually shutting down the Iranian capital city -- and triggering a wave of repression that has not yet ended. The website is available in both English and Farsi.

In addition to the website, the ITF has also launched a Facebook group in support of the day of action. It has produced a short film which is viewable online, both on their website and on YouTube. There are numerous campaign materials available for download, including posters. There's a mailing list you can sign up to get updates.

The ITF and ITUC have brought in allies, too. Amnesty International is fully involved in the campaign and aims to mobilize its hundreds of thousands of members in support of jailed Iranian unionists. LabourStart has launched an online campaign to send protest messages to the regime in Tehran, at www.labourstart.org/iran.

The ITF and ITUC seem to have made a checklist of basically everything you can do online, all the tools that are available. And they've crossed them off their list one by one -- mailing list, social networking site, online protest messages, YouTube videos, and so on.

It seems such an obvious thing to do -- to utilize every tool available -- and yet many unions stop far short of this, and seem happy to use only one or two of the tools used in this campaign. This might make sense if any of this was costly, but it's not. The problem is almost certainly not cost, but a lack of awareness.

The effective use of the new tools by the ITF and ITUC should serve as a model for unions anywhere that want to campaign effectively online.

Posted by Eric Lee at 01:38 PM | Permalink

Meet "Robbie", the newest member of our family.

Robbie is a Roomba household robot, a product of the iRobot corporation, and something I've wanted to own for a long time. It costs about the same as a decent vacuum cleaner, so I thought -- what the hell.

I bought Robbie home on Friday and charged it (him?) overnight. Yesterday, I set Robbie loose in my carpeted bedroom, went out to do errands, came home and found the robot had shut itself off -- and the floor clean. Wow.

When I emptied the robot's bin (bagless of course), I found a ton of dirt, cat hair, all kinds of stuff that I didn't realize was even on the carpet.

This morning I cleaned the robot's brushes -- it comes with a special tool to cut the hairs which have gotten entangled in the brushes -- and set it to work in our living room, which has a wooden, not carpeted floor.

When Robbie begins to work, it makes a kind of trumpeting charge sound, which is very cute.

I didn't realize that iRobot had further "humanized" it by having it call for help when there's a problem.

Robbie got tangled in a cord -- actually a very thin wire that served as an FM radio antenna -- and stopped, and called out with fairly loud beeps.

I went into the living room when I heard this and didn't see the robot anywhere.

I was tempted to call out -- as one does for a cat or dog -- but I'm not yet totally insane.

Then it beeped again and I realized that it was underneath a piece of furniture, a place which (to be completely honest) I'd never vacuumed before.

It had shut itself down. I removed the bit of wire, placed the robot back on the ground, and it resumed work.

As I write this, it's cleaning the rest of the room.

For those of you who own, or have used, dishwashing machines or any other machine that does household chores, you may be asking yourself what's the big deal. Machines have been saving us work and time in our homes for many years now.

The difference is that this a robot -- it behaves with a kind of intelligence. As you watch it start in a room with a spiral search pattern, as it maps out the room, you realize that it's not like one of those battery operated toy cars that simply goes around in circles.

Robbie pauses when it spots a particularly dirty location and stays there, going around in circles until its sensors tell it that he spot is clean.

The company says that Robbie will also know to stop at the top of a flight of stairs and not go tumbling over -- I haven't tested that yet, and with a jealous cat in the house, I'm not sure that I will.

After one day of use, I'm delighted to have Robbie here.

And I wait eagerly for iRobot's next product -- whatever it will be. (A robot cook would be nice, or perhaps just a robot that likes cleaning toilets? Or maybe one that nags teeenagers to clean their rooms or eat vegetables?)

Posted by Eric Lee at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)