A bit about me, vol 2: Floods of feedback (well, ok 1 comment) following on from vol 1 last week. So due to popular demand here is a photo of me, my brother John and mate Steve outside 'Cheers' in Boston.

Which one is me? Well, our John describes himself as the 'tall, dark, handsome brother', making me the 'short fat one' by default - that should be enough of a clue!

Jeremy Clarkson.....tosser.

Haven't won you over by the power of persuasion? Read this and tell me I'm, wrong.

Away under canvas this weekend - and so no blogging for a couple of days.....

Abnormal service will resume on Monday!

In London today - met with Barbara Pocock, an Aussie academic and all round good sort who has done lots of work on union organising as well as work/life balance.

[P.S A hectic round of meetings etc in London today has helped me forget about the misery of last night - how the hell can any side give away 3 goals in 6 minutes in a Champions League Final???]

Are you a union rep or steward? If so the TUC needs you!

The Department of Trade and Industry has written to the TUC to seek views on the support, facilities and time-off available to union reps. In order to ensure that our response is as comprehensive as possible, please take 5 minutes to complete and return this short survey.

Please pass this survey link on to as many reps and stewards as possible - ta!

Rare full-day in the office today, before going to Halifax tonight for the first meeting of a 'Citizens Jury' being organised by, among others, Tom Wakeford at PEALS.

We are hoping to use the Jury process to talk to union members about why they are/aren't involved in the democratic life and structures of their unions. Should be really interesting, and if nothing else it means I have an excuse not to watch Liverpool FC (no chance of a hyperlink I'm afraid), in the finals of the Champions League! Go Milano!!

A bit about me, vol 1.

For the last couple of years I have lived in Bebington - where I grew up a a kid.

We live about 5 minutes walk from Port Sunlight - which is a model village built by William Lever for the workers he employed at the Sunlight Soap Factory at the end of the nineteenth century.

Another gripping installment next week!

X Marks the spot - Chez Nowak from the air, courtesy of www.multimap.co.uk . 

Program makers or pencil pushers?

War of words broke out this morning between the BBC and it's unions after yesterday's 24 hour stoppage.

NUJ, BECTU and Amicus officials are claiming that 95% of the BBC's total production was affected. The BBC is disputing this, though its case looks a bit shaky - according to the Guardian, the BBC are trumpeting the fact that, 'more than 90% of staff in the marketing and human resources department worked through the dispute'. Errm, exactly how many marketing and HR staff are involved in actual programme production then? Link is here.

Breaking news is that both sides have agreed to speak under the auspices of ACAS on Thursday.

Proof positive we need the BBC!!!

Watching C4's 'expose' of Labour's election campaign - which makes Tonight with Trevor Macdonald look like Panorama.

'New Labour in use of modern media campaigning' shocker! At one point the reporter breathlessly told us that the people attending a Labour Party poster launch were Labour Party supporters and staff, not ordinary passers-by. The Party, shockingly, even provided model press releases for local candidates!

What next - Dispatches exposes 'Catholics only' rule in Papacy leadership contest?!

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber was on the BBC picket line today - you can read his comments here.

'How goes the work....?'

Delighted to see that 'Farmer Duck', is LabourStart's book of the day.

For those who haven't read it, Farmer Duck is a kids book about an animals revolt against a 'fat, lazy farmer' who basically spends all day lying in bed eating chocolates (think 'Animal Farm', without the Trotsky/Stalin allegory).

My kids love Farmer Duck, and I love reading it - its a really great story, and if nothing else its allowed me to explain to them what I (sort of) do for a living. Only drawback is that my middle son Johnny now thinks I do literally spend all day hunting down misanthropic agriculturalists - if only life at the TUC was that simple!

On strike tommorow?  

Tomorrow we find out what happens when you try to make world class television, at the same time as kicking thousands of production staff, technicians, and creative staff out of the door.

As the 24 hour strike by the NUJ, BECTU and AMICUS looms its also a good way to find out which of the BBC's star presenters are people you'd be happy to have a pint with, and which are the spineless ladder climbers willing to cross the picket line at the expense of 4,000 of their colleagues.

If the strike is solid expect plenty of TV movies, and young regional presenters hoping to impress as the next Paxman. You can read more about the dispute here.

You can read the messages of support to comrades Kaplinsky and Naughtie here.

In Newcastle today to meet Gaye Hutchinson who is taking over the college department which leads on links with the TUC Organising Academy.

We were supposed to meet yesterday, but this was the date chosen by NATFHE for their second day of strike action against the college, so for pretty obvious reasons we asked for the meeting to be rescheduled. You can read a Northern TUC press statement on the dispute here.

The train service between Liverpool and Newcastle is pretty poor (4 hours each way or thereabouts), so I ended up getting back home too late for the Barbeque being held at my kids school - and had to settle for a burger standing in the wind at York station (hardly a fair substitute) instead! Can't beat this job for pure glamour sometimes...

If you had £15m quid what would you do with it?

Thats how much the Confederation of Ship Building and Engineering Unions (snappy title I know) has in its campaign 'war-chest', and Amicus is lobbying for that money to be released to support a campaign aimed at extending collective bargaining across engineering.

For modern HR types the return of collective bargaining would be about as welcome as the return of flares and mullet hair cuts - mainly because, as Amicus general secretary Derek Simpson comments, it, '...will help to restore better employee pay, skills and pensions'.

The decline of collective bargaining coverage is one reason why the pay-gap between boardroom and shopfloor has risen so dramatically, and why wages in growing sectors such as retail and hospitality remain so low - so I think this would definitely be £15m well spent.

Last Everton post for a few months. The average Premiership player earns more in a year than many fans will earn over their lifetimes, and leads a life completely removed from those who watch them. But it wasn't always like this - here's a picture of a true gentleman and Everton legend, Dave Hickson, with my two boys Joe and Johnny. Dave now works at Everton, greeting fans and hosting the stadium tour.

I posted the AFL-CIO's proposals for changing the US labour movement a couple of weeks back - and said it remained to be seen whether or not it was far-reaching enough to satisfy the former NUPster unions.

It obviously wasn't - here's a counter-proposal from a group of unions including the SEIU, UNITE-HERE and Teamsters.

In London today to speak at a small seminar event focused on the Government's proposed review of facilities and support for union reps.

Had a bit of a change of pace at the weekend, spending a couple of days camping in Wales with the kids, here.

I've never really fancied myself as the outdoor type (this will not come as a surprise to those who know me), and I know a couple of days cooped up in a tent with 3 kids and a wet dog isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I'm actually beginning to enjoy myself on these weekends away.

This must be something to do with age (I turn 33 on Wednesday), I'm sure. I even fashioned my own tent peg from a stick this weekend - I'm quickly turning into sort of a trade union Ray Mears ...now if only I could sort out a beard...

Last week (seems like months ago), Natascha Engel became the first TUC Organising Academy graduate to become a Member of Parliament - when she held Derbyshire North East for Labour with a majority of over 10,000. While most politicians struggle to find babies to kiss on the campaign trail, Natascha had no problems on this front having a one and a half year old son and being 8 months pregnant!

For a few years after graduating from the Organising Academy, Natascha was the national trade union liaison officer at the Labour Party, before she moved on to work for The Smith Institute. While she was at the SI, she and John Healey MP co-wrote a pamphlet, Learning to Organise, for the TUC's New Unionism project (which I used to helped co-ordinate). The key thrust of the pamphlet was that unions needed to use their growing work on learning and skills to help build membership and extend union influence - it sounds worthy and dull, but it was actually a really good piece of work, and one that has gone on to inform a lot of the work the TUC has done in this area.

I spoke to both Natascha and John Healey this week, about possible links between the work of the TUC's Organising Academy into a project they are developing with Northern College, aimed at building community activism, and skilling up local activists - and I'll post more info about this project here as I get it.

I think anything which can bring union, political and community activists together has to be a good thing - and the reality is of course that many of the 230,000 union stewards and reps don't stop being activists the minute they leave the workplace; quite often they are school governors or active in their local community, church or voluntary organisation as well. Linking together these different strands of activism has all sorts of possibilities, and can only help unions extend their membership, influence and relevance.

If you are a union rep, you can exchange ideas, experiences and resources with other reps at the TUC's unionreps web-site, which is here.

In Britain its rare, but not exceptional, for people to lose their job or chance of promotion because of their trade union activity.

But in some places around the world the price of trade unionism can be death, torture, or in this case of three leading Eritrean trade unionists, imprisonment.

Show your support for the IUF's campaign to secure the release of Tewelde Ghebremedhin, Chairperson of the IUF-affiliated Food, Beverages, Hotels, Tourism, Agriculture and Tobacco Workers Federation, Minase Andezion, secretary of the textile and leather workers' federation, and Habtom Weldemicael, who heads the Coca-Cola Workers Union, by visiting Labour Start's action page.

In London most of this week.

One thing I'll be doing later today is getting an initial report from Opinion Leader Research who have carried out some joint work for the TUC and TGWU looking at non-unionised workers in the logistics sector.

This work will hopefully act as a bit of pilot for work in other sectors looking at how non-members perceive the union, why they don't join etc.

Although I've been a bit sceptical about the use of 'focus groups' and similar techniques in the past, the results should be interesting, and I'm hoping will allow us to do more of this sort of work in other key poorly unionised sectors.

Today is Everton's last home game of the season, and it really couldn't be much bigger than this.

After two decades of fighting relegation at the wrong end of the table, Everton are today playing for a place in the European Champions League.

Thanks to the wonders of statcounter, I know that a disproportionate number of the regular readers of this blog (they do exist - but you can count them on your fingers!) are from the US, and so to put this game into perspective think World Series, Superbowl and NBA play-offs all rolled into one...Come on You Blues!!!!

You can read TUC general secretary Brendan Barber's response to the election result here.

So the final votes are being counted - and it looks like Labour have been returned with a much reduced, but still significant, majority (68 is the latest reckoning). Tony Blair has secured a genuinely historic third term, but inevitably a lot of the media focus is now on how much longer he will stay on as PM.

There were a few surprises on the night, as there always are, but from a personal point of view I was disappointed to see Oona King lose her seat. While my politics differ significantly from hers, I think the campaign fought in Bethnal and Bow Green was a pretty disgraceful one - watch George Galloway's post-result interview with Jeremy Paxman and make up your own mind....

Tomorrow Britain goes to the polls. If you've got a vote use it, and vote Labour. Whatever your reservations, just think how you'd feel if you woke up on Friday morning and Michael Howard was in No 10....

Lets make Friday the day that the
Tories internal recriminations start! (courtesy of www.deadbrain.co.uk)

In a few minutes time I'll be watching the final episode of 'The Apprentice' - BBC's take on the US Donald Trump show.

'The Apprentice' is pretty vacuous telly - reality TV's homage to capitalism, but I have to admit to guiltily enjoying it all the same!

For those who haven't seen the show its basically a business 'talent show' presided over by Sir Alan Sugar of Amstrad (does anyone still own an Amstrad Computer?!). Each show ends with Sir Alan telling another hapless contestant 'You're fired' with tonight's winner going on to become his 'apprentice' (hence the name of the show).

The best bit about the show is the contestants who are basically the bits left over after the barrel has been well and truly scraped - 14 self-described 'high flyers' who nonetheless have managed to find 3 month gaps in their busy schedules to star in a cheesy reality show!

If you fancy finding out if you too have what it takes to climb the greasy corporate pole, you can take the BBC's on-line Careers survey. Good luck - and remember lunch is for wimps!!!

Interesting comment piece by Tony Woodley, General Secretary of the TGWU, in today's Guardian.

Referring to the closure of Longbridge, which I've blogged about before on this site, he asks, '...why was it plausible for trade unionists to campaign for what would in effect have been a takeover of the Longbridge factory by the Chinese state when it would be treated as lunacy to call for intervention by the British state?'

In many ways this question reveals how much the political landscape in the UK (and indeed the world) has changed over the last two and a half decades. 'Public-private' partnerships are now the norm but, as this piece points out, always involve leveraging private sector involvement into what were previously directly delivered public services - never the other way around.

While I wouldn't overstate the point, I think the use of language plays an important role in how these political issues are framed. Instead of public 'investment' , 'stake' or 'ownership' any government attempt to invest in MG Rover would have been characterised as a return to the 'bad old days' of 'nationalisation' - and all of the baggage associated with it.

But public ownership needn't be synonymous with poor or inefficient management. Indeed, a cursory glance at the state of our privatised rail system proves the point that the public sector doesn't have a monopoly on poor management, inefficiency and waste!