US occupation forces raid Iraqi union headquarters
This story can now be found here.
Searching for ‘labour’
What happens when you search for the word ‘labour’ on the world’s leading search engines? The results are as you’d expect from Google and all the rest — with one amazing exception.
Britain needs a Powells
Way back in the early days of the Internet (in December 1996, to be exact), I noticed something new on the Amazon.com website. It was called an “affiliate program”. It offered websites something extraordinary: the…
What to do when email campaigns no longer work
For more than a decade now, trade unions and others have used email as a powerful tool for online campaigning. Despite some notable successes, it is now becoming clearer by the day that this tool…
Defense in depth: A strategy to stop spam that actually works
Spam is killing off email and threatening the very future of the internet. Surveys are showing that current net users are switching off to get away from unsolicited commercial email. Millions more are reluctant to…
Iraqi unions: a new beginning
I was recently invited to attend the general conference of the International Federation of Workers Education Associations (IFWEA), which was held in Albufeira, Portugal in early October. I knew what the highlight of my two…
The problem with Internet Explorer
A few years ago, when some of us noticed that Microsoft had essentially taken over the Internet, we were worried. Among other worries, we feared that a near-complete monopoly by Microsoft would mean that technological…
Throw-away websites
They are what the Dutch web activist Oskar van Rijswijk calls “throw-away websites”
Online campaigning and labour education
The following article was submitted to Workers Education, the quarterly bulletin of the International Federation of Workers Education Associations (IFWEA), at the request of the editor, at the end of June 2003. It did not…
Behind the times: IFWEA’s website, once a pioneer, now lags
I’ll be speaking on Friday at the congress of the International Federation of Workers Education Associations (IFWEA) — which was the first international labour institution to have a website, back in 1994. Unfortunately, the website…