The following paper was presented at the “Global Companies – Global Unions – Global Research – Global Campaigns” conference organized by Cornell University in New York City.
According to reports coming out of Tehran, security forces last weekend began arresting hundreds of striking bus workers employed by the state-owned Vahed bus company.
The majority of the union leadership is already in jail, and have now been joined by large numbers of ordinary bus workers who refused to return to work.
Most of the detainees are being held in the high-security Evin Prison, notorious for its torture chambers and for the execution of thousands of political prisoners.
In my view, these developments mark an extraordinarily important moment not only for Iran, but for the entire Middle East.
With nearly 7,000 votes cast, a winner has emerged in the 9th annual Labour Website of the Year competition — and for the third time, it goes to a British website.
The 200,000 member NASUWT won an easy victory over hundreds of other union websites from around the world. This represents a considerably better performance for British union websites than last year, when not a single one of the top 10 sites was from the U.K.
The process by which the NASUWT was chosen revealed a few things about how the Internet has changed since the first competition was held in late 1997.