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.

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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.

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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.

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