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Success at Work

The DTI have today published their long awaited labour market strategy paper, 'Success at Work'.

The TUC have welcomed this as, 'a recognition by government that a significant minority of the UK workforce faces real exploitation at work', and I am really glad to see a few lines in there committing the Government to a review of how union reps can carry out their role - with a view to seeing 'their contribution maximised'.

You can read the whole paper here.

The title of the strategy paper reminded me of my (short and very unsuccessful) tenure as a budding estate agent many years ago. Our manager at that time decided to do a little staff development, which involved 5 of us huddling round a flip-chart in an upstairs office in Chester. I knew the session was doomed when he opened up with the immortal words

'Who here thinks I am a success? Come on, who thinks I am a success?' - glances round room and checks who has been embarrassed into raising their hand, 'Well, today I'm going to show you how you can be as successful as me'...

This was a good 10 years before 'The Office', but the 'Brent-meister' would have been very, very proud!

Any similar examples of excrutiating work-place behaviour from a 'high-flying' boss?

Quiet day today...

Nothing much happened today...oh except 1 million plus local governmemt workers took strike action to defend their pensions.

And just to show that anything we can do they can do tres-bon the French had a general strike.

You can read more about the joint union action today here.

Reasons to be slightly worried about the state of the planet, the future of humanity and all that...(no 1 in an occasional series)

Pilot: 'Sorry for the slight delay ladies and gentleman - just waiting for our load data to come through. Because of the increased load we are carrying tonight we'll either have to wait for a space on the other [longer] runway. Alternatively we'll have to wait another 10 minutes or so while we burn off some fuel...'

10 minutes later - 'Quick update ladies and gentlemen. Over the last 5-10 minutes we've managed to burn off some 1000-2000 litres of fuel so we are able to take off in the next few moments...'

Energy crisis? What energy crisis?

Take one of the Earth's most precious (and unrenewable) natural resources; expend a huge amount of financial resource getting it out of the ground (not to mention the environmental costs of extraction); ship it half-way round the world (more financial and environmental costs); refine it (few nasty chemicals I'm afraid); slap it in a road-tanker for a few hundred miles; pump it into the plane and then...ermm burn it off because you packed a few extra suitcases....it makes perfect sense doesn't it?

All of a sudden my little pile of newspapers and cans in the corner of the kitchen seem a bit pathetic!

Unions and the Internet at Harvard

Unions and the Internet at Harvard
Originally uploaded by unionblue.

The future of unions and the internet

Eric Lee from LabourStart kicked off today's first session - speaking about some of the successes (and potential pitfalls) of on-line campaigning.

LabourStart now has over 37,000 subscribers - supported by 400 volunteer correspondents, posting 250 labour stories a day in 21 languages. Most importantly it is actively supporting (and helping win!) a whole range of international labour campaigns - in a whole range of countries including New Zealand, Indonesia and the USA.

Other speakers today included Arthur B Shostak, John Hogan, Peter Nolan, Eszter Hargiattai and Richard B Freeman - so its be a long (but interesting) day.

I spoke briefly as well - which I reckon means I'm the first Urban Studies graduate from Liverpool Poly to ever speak at Harvard Law School!

Using the web to build unions

In Boston for two days to participate in a seminar organised by the Harvard Labor and Worklife Program looking at how unions can best use the web and new technologyto organise and represent the next generation of union members.

Tomorrow I'll be talking about two TUC supported initiaitives to support the development of on-line communities - UnionReps and the Union Ideas Network.





Over the next 2 days I'll be posting links and reports from the seminar, so watch this space for more info.

Why football doesn't work anymore

Great Martin Samuel article in the Times today about the G14 clubs in European football.

The G14 is made up of some 18 self-styled 'elite clubs', including such world beaters as Bayer Leverkeusen - who as Samuel points out are included in the G14 neither on grounds of support or past achievements but because they have won an incredible '...two trophies (the 1993 German Cup and the 1988 Uefa Cup) and were quite good five years ago' - and Paris St Germain (one French title in 20 years).

The G14 is not about improving the standard of European football, or delivering a better game for the paying punters, its about money - pure and simple. More than that, its about making sure the select few who pulled up the ladder being themselves, aren't inconvenienced by outsiders taking a slice of their TV revenues. As Samuel puts it,

'This racket is necessary to shield the inadequacies of the self-appointed elite. Without a freak set of circumstances, Everton would have taken Liverpool's Champions League place last year [I'll declare an interest here naturally!] and there is still time for Bolton to nip ahead of Arsenal over the next two months. This would be a financial disaster for any big club. So the G14 cartel is not truly about the desire to progress, but the need to thwart that progress in others. The well-run small club must be shut out: in the qualification process, at the draw, by rearranging the format to the benefit of the select few.'

The end result? Falling attendances across Europe as crowds get bored of watching the same old faces play the same old faces; and threats to the integrity of international football (one of the G14's aims is to get national FA's to pick up the wage costs of players on international duty).

Am I simply being old codgerous about this; am I the only one who feels football has lost its way? Let me know in the comments section.

How much does your Company's top dog earn?

And more to the point how much faster has his (and he probably is a he) pay risen in comparison to yours over the last few years?

You can find the answers to these questions and many more using WorkSmart's new super-clever 'My Company' feature, which includes information about hundreds of thousands of UK companies.

Why not have a go - and let me know in the comments section if any interesting factoids pop up about your particular place of work.

The end of history (again.....)

Part of the problem with the ever expanding Sunday newspapers is that I rarely get through them (if at all) until the middle of the week. The only exception to this rule is Michael Winner's restaurant reviews in the Sunday Times 'Review' (Winner's Dinners), which I read with the same feeling of self-loathing with which I watch 'The Apprentice'...

Anyway, ploughing through the Sunday Times this week I saw this interview with Neocon fellow traveller Frances Fukuyama. Fukuyama was the academic in the late 1980's/early 90's who claimed, to widespread acclaim, that humanity had reached the end point of history with liberal democracy as "final form of human government". Of course such claims had been made regularly before - "Yes sire, feudalism is the absolute apogee of human government. The peasants with the torches and pitchforks? Oh I wouldn't worry about them..." - but that didn't stop his "The End of History" selling by the proverbial bucket-load.

Anyway, thought this interview - one of a number to coincide with the launch of his new book "After the Neocons" - was interesting for a number of reasons including:

• Fukuyama is no longer a supporter of the war in Iraq - "wrong in theory and in practice" - which is a bit of a volte face for a man who wrote to Clinton in 1998 urging Saddam Hussein's overthrow, and who in 2001 "wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal noting that the fall of Saddam was 'justly celebrated' ".

• He is terribly disappointed by Bush's record on foreign policy, which too be fair is a bit like being terribly disappointed that you really haven't won £50,000 in a Readers Digest prize-draw which you never actually entered - if your hopes were really that high you probably weren't starting with a full shovel.

• He's actually a Marxist, "in the sense that I believe in a general process of economic and social modernisation", which from a lay-man's perspective seems a bit like saying "in the sense that I'm actually not really"

Also some pretty fascinating stuff in there about the rise of the Neocons and their roots in the US Trotskyist movement - and about the some of the raging debates in fashionable US academic circles. which gave me , and I am sure anyone who has any experience of left politics, a certain sense of deja vu ("You're a Leninist", "No, you're a Leninist", "No you are" ad infinitum, etc etc ).

Anyway if anyone does bother to read the book (and I know I will at some stage when I'm stuck in the WH Smiths at Newcastle station and its a choice between that and '15 steps to managing in a highly effective and not at all patronising manner" or the latest Andy McNabb). then please feel free to post a review in the comments section. Go on Steve you know you want to!

Back home

On my way back to Liverpool after a couple of days in London for the final module of this year's 'Leading Change' programme.

Had a great couple of days - looking at issues around union resources, mergers, and how unions influence the political process (was more interesting than it sounds, promise!!).

Why union membership is worth £72 a week

You can read the TUC's take on the 'Trade Union Membership 2005' figures published today by the DTI here.

The figures are a bit of a mixed bag - but on the positive side, they show an increase in union density for only the second time since 1989. They also show that union members earn 18% more an hour than non-union workers, which is worth some £72 over a 40 hour week (roughly 30 pints of Warsteiner on the 'RCI', or Rose and Crown Index to give it it's full technical title) ...

City short-sightedness leaves us all short-changed

Here's Guardian article based on the TUC's 'Investment Chains' report which shows that city 'short-termism' is having detrimental effect on both businesses and employees.

Chasing a quick buck often means UK companies don't invest in research and development, and make the wrong long-term investment decisions - with potential negative impacts on employment, and the sort of investor behaviour which saw the collapse of the new technology bubble in the late 90's.

You can read a TUC statement on the report here.

Back to the Blog

Pressures of work, home and everything else mean I've been neglecting this blog over the last couple of months. As I'm now reading the diaries of Samuel Pepys, I'm resolved to get back into the groove for posterity's sake- though I'm not sure that they'll still be selling copies of these posts in 400 years time, but worth a try! (If you haven't read Pepys by the way you should. Shows you how much, and how little, things have changed in 400 years - this is a man who went to Church for the express purpose of checking out the women in the congregation, and who constantly complains about his inability to fart...). Those of you who still read this blog can be assured that I'm not intending to keep you up to date on the state of my bowels.

While I've been a bit quiet on the blogging front there's been lots of interesting stuff on the unions front - including this article (and ripostes by Tony Woodley and Peter Kenyon) in the FT. One of the immediate points that jumped out of me when I read the original article was the claim that '[union]membership halved in the last 25 years'. While this is factually true, the reality is that membership nearly halved between '79 and the mid-90's, and has in fact since then been fairly static. This may seem a small point but its a significant one, because its simply not true to try and characterize trade union membership in such negative terms. The LFS survey figures out next week are again likely to show that union density is at last beginning to stabilise - an achievement in itself after year on year decline. Of course this doesn't mean that unions can relax or have any room for complacency - but I think its does mean we can have a bit more grounds for optimism than the Coats and Milburn article suggests. (I'm also not sure you can connect membership revival with breaking the union/Labour link - but maybe that's one for another day.)

All this matters because I think that just as its important for trade unionists not to walk round in rose tinted specs, its equally important that we don't talk ourselves into a sense of despair. Yesterday I was in Taunton for the latest B2O briefing with a group of 3o or so union officers, organisers, reps and stewards from across a range of TUC affiliated unions - all working day in day out, doing what they can to make things better for their colleagues and work-mates. While everyone at the briefing was well aware that unions face challenges (not least about how we reach out to younger workers and into the private sector) I didn't pick up any sense of 'doom or gloom' or that unions are somehow fated to decline.

6.5m people still think we have a job to do - and I agree with them.

Joanne Delaney - back to work

A few weeks back I blogged about Joanne Delaney, the MANDATE shop steward sacked by Dunnes Stores for the heinous crime of wearing a union badge to work.

Now thanks to the efforts of MANDATE, and an international campaign built with the support of LabourStart, Joanne has been offered her job back. Proof positive that there still is 'power in the union'!

You can read about Joanne's reinstatement here.

Did you know there are 6 million cat owners in the UK?

If you didn't you obviously didn't watch the television car-crash that is 'The Apprentice' last night.

Last night pharmacist Nargis was 'fired' after her team failed to sell as many charity calendars as their male rivals 'Invicta' (think of the worst golf-club bar you can think of, and then multiply this by a factor of 10 and you will have some idea of the sheer awfulness of the Invicta 'guys').

It perhaps wasn't surprising that Nargis and her team lost this particular challenge - asked to design a calendar for world famous childrens' hospital Great Ormond Street, they decided to give their calendar a 'cute kitten' theme...errm, yes the connection obvious isn't it? Childrens hospital, kittens, geddit?! No,. neither could anyone else either, but Nargis's team ploughed ahead no doubt mindful of the old team-working adage that 'None of us is as dumb as all of us'.

Of course, 'The Apprentice' is pretty monstrous TV, with absolutely no redeeming features or greater worth - I shall therefore be watching avidly for the next couple of months!