Wal-Mart, Workers and the Web
The battle over workers’ rights at Wal-Mart is increasingly being fought in cyberspace.
American unions discuss their future – online
For the first time in memory — perhaps the first time ever — American unions are discussing their future. And that discussion is taking place, in large part, on the web.
Educate, Agitate, Organize, Sell Books Online
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…
Health and Safety Newswire
Most unions that have websites have sections that are devoted to health and safety issues. But frequently those are among the more static parts of a website. Once set up, they are rarely updated. To…
Virtual worlds, real exploitation
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…
Menshevism in Iraq – Response to Sacha Ismail
Sacha Ismail’s response to my article on Menshevism confirms my belief that even in the very best Trotskyist organizations, members remain ill-informed about the very foundations of their politics.
ILO Core Conventions. the web, and global trade union organizing
Back in the 1930s, CIO organizers in the American South would go to factory gates and hand out leaflets with pictures of President Roosevelt, decorated with the national flag. And the leaflets would proclaim in…
Report on TUC Iraq Solidarity conference
Approximately 70 trade unionists from Britain and Iraq attended an all-day conference organized by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), held in its headquarters in London.
Programming as an activist skill
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…
Menshevism in Iraq
Having now completed reading the third in Sean Matgamna’s series on Iraq, I want to return to a point he makes several times in the first of the series, the one published in early December…