{"id":163,"date":"2006-04-10T14:23:20","date_gmt":"2006-04-10T12:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=163"},"modified":"2006-04-10T14:23:20","modified_gmt":"2006-04-10T12:23:20","slug":"towards-a-new-labour-media-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/towards-a-new-labour-media-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"Towards a new labour media movement?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” — this well-known quotation from Karl Marx was chosen by one speaker to open his presentation at an extraordinary conference which has just taken place in Cape Town, South Africa.
\nThe conference, sponsored by the International Federation of Workers Education Associations (IFWEA)<\/a> and one of its South African affiliates, Workers World Media Productions (WWMP)<\/a>, was entitled “Workers’ Education and Workers’ Media in a Global Economy<\/a>“. Participants came from North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. They represented some of the most innovative projects in the labour movement today.<\/p>\n


\nAmong them were, for example, Myoung Joon Kim and Jiyoung Lee, whose Labor News Productions in South Korea have produced nearly 90 videos in the last few years — and have specialized in training workers to make their own videos. Shanta Koshti and Namrati Bali came from the Self Employed Womens Association (SEWA) in India — and presented their extraordinary video project which has empowered many women who are members of the 800,000-strong movement, providing them with equipment and training. And Martin Jansen of WWMP presented the group’s weekly one hour long labour news radio program which is aired on some 40 community radio stations in South Africa as well as the South African Broadcasting Corporation, reaching a potential audience of some 15 million listeners.
\nThey came together with trade unionists, worker educators and other activists for three days of workshops and plenaries, as well as Cape Town’s first-even Labour Film Festival, but they did more than just talk. For the conference aimed from the very beginning to produce concrete results — in fact, to create the beginnings of a new movement.
\nAs the conference’s final draft statement concluded, “there is an enormous wealth of knowledge and experience” among he participants but “until now, the diffusion and awareness of this knowledge and experience has been largely limited to the national or regional arena.” The group set out to “establish an international network” uniting “workers’ media and educational organisations” to carry out four tasks: Distribution of workers’ media; Co-operative production of new media;
\nDevelopment of new cultural forms and tools in the new media; Training in the development of skills and confidence.
\nHaving attended a number of labour and technology conferences over the years, mostly in Britain and North America, I have to say worker-activists in the developing world — are not usually participants in such events — are not even remotely lagging behind. In some areas, they are actually far ahead of those in the developed countries.
\nNevertheless, one major theme of the conference — possibly because its location in Africa and the presence of activists from Nigeria, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Angola, Tanzania and elsewhere — was the so-called “digital divide”. Conference participants were constantly being reminded of the fact that in many parts of Africa, it was not so much a question of Internet access as access to electricity.
\nIn light of that, it was particularly interesting to hear the WWMP report that in creating its weekly radio show, which could be heard on battery-powered portable radios in the most remote areas of South Africa, they always choose three local news stories and three global ones. The global ones are taken off the LabourStart website. This was one example of many showing how the technologies, both new and old, could be merged and how something utterly new could be created. Workers living in villages without electricity, possibly unable to read or write, are benefitting from a global website created by other workers using the very latest in the new communications technology. This does give one hope.
\nThe ruling ideas of our age may well be the competitive and individualistic values of our ruling classes — but this group of determined media activists and educators give hope that alternative ideas might well reach audiences too. I was honored to be elected a member of the preparatory committee, so I should be able to report in a few weeks and months and progress. Until then, stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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