If you ever want to be a best-selling author, take my advice: don’t write books about and for trade unionists. Our movement with its millions of members does many things very well but one thing…

This article has now been published in Swedish. *** “A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.” — Groucho Marx Seriously, if you were born before 1985, you…

Long before there was LabourStart, long before unions were using the Internet, I was a computer programmer. I worked in a worker-owned and democratically-run wire and cable factory, and my job was to maintain the…

The torture and murder of Hadi Saleh marks a turning point for trade unions around the world. The question is now posed — to quote the famous American trade union song, “Which side are you…

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,…

Every once in a while, an innovation comes along on the web that’s truly useful for trade unionists. One of these is something brand new that you’ve probably never heard of and it’s called “Live…

A couple of days ago, I got some great news. Raffles Hotel workers in Cambodia who have been involved in a bitter dispute with their employers, had won a huge victory. Their union now recognized,…

A decade ago, many of us were enthusiastic about the Internet in part because we believed that it opened up extraordinary opportunities for the left. The Internet could not be censored, we argued. Censorship would…

I returned a few weeks ago from a month-long journey to Australia and New Zealand, countries in which the trade union movement has taken some huge steps forward in its use of the new communications…

You can also read it this essay in print in next month’s issue of Industrial Worker. One of the great things the Internet allows organizations to do is raise money. Any organization can easily and…