It’s that time of year again — voting has begun the Labour Website of the Year. This annual competition, which began in 1997, allows trade unionists around the world to vote for their favourite union websites.
The Labour Website of the Year is the only global competition open to all trade union websites and aims to encourage excellence in website design in the international trade union movement.
I encourage everyone reading this page to donate to one of the disaster relief funds now collecting to support the tsunami victims. Here in Britain, I recommend giving to the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), a coalition of many aid groups including ActionAid, British Red Cross, Cafod, Care International, Christian Aid, Concern, Help the Aged, Merlin, Oxfam, Save the Children, Tearfund and World Vision.
From the perspective of the international labour movement, probably the single most important event in 2004 was the re-election of that rotten, anti-union government — and I’m not referring to the Australian election either.
LabourStart may not be a typical website. It caters to a large international audience working in some 15 languages. Its readers are trade unionists. This may not mean much, but in December 2004 (the first half of the month), Microsoft Internet Explorer is the browser used less than 63% of the time by our readers. The Mozilla/Netscape browsers get a combined 29%. In other words, for every two users of Internet Explorer, we have one Mozilla user.
This is considerably higher than what is being reported from such US-based services as Web Side Story (around 4% market share for Mozilla).
More than a century and a half ago, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels drafted a document on the subject of what we now call “globalization.” They called their little pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. In it, they pondered the rise of a new kind of society — capitalism — which was at that time spreading throughout the world. They were particularly interested in the emerging struggle between workers and bosses, and noted that while workers were sometimes winning these fights, their victories were always temporary.
“The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers,” they wrote. “This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another.”
By “improved means of communication” they meant railroads. Now, let’s fast-forward 157 years.