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…
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…
Imagine this as David Blaine’s next trick He stops a person on the street, stares into the stranger’s eyes and says — “Your web browser is . . . Internet Explorer!” Instead of being amazed,…
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,…
These days, when you want to communicate, you have a real choice. It used to be that you’d either phone or send a letter. Then came fax machines, then email, then text messaging. These days,…
In the old days (before the Internet) there was clear separation between reading about injustice and acting on it. One could read about dozens of cases of violations of human rights in the newspaper, or…
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…
A couple of years ago, I attended a meeting with the staff of the IT department of one of Britain’s largest trade unions. We were discussing a plan for me to train union officials to…
Several months ago, a local union affiliated to the Canadian Auto Workers waged a successful strike against a major employer. Email and the web proved essential to their success. According to an internal 16-page report…