As predicted in this blog, the Iranian regime has indeed used the holiday season to crack down on Iranian trade unionists. Just days after labour writer Mohsen Hakimi was seized, bus worker union leader Ebrahim Madadi was arrested too. Meanwhile Channel 4 in the UK chose to broadcast a ‘Christmas message’ from Iranian President Ahmadinejad. [...]
Here’s a story you don’t hear very often. On 16 December, global private services union federation UNI and one of their UK affiliates, the GMB, signed an ‘International Framework Agreement’ with the global multinational security firm G4S. G4S has 570,000 employees around the world, which makes it a big player in global employment terms. And [...]
It’s Christmas Day, so I really shouldn’t be writing this. But not all trade unionists will be having the day off - emergency services workers, for instance. And in some parts of the world, they have it even tougher than that. Like Guinea, on the West coast of Africa, where three days ago on 22 [...]
For most union activists, Christmas is a welcome break - time, thanks to union campaigns over the decades, to spend on you and whatever you want to do. And unfortunately, some regimes around the world know that, and do terrible things over Christmas in the hope that trade unionists won’t be around to protest. This [...]
We have been told by our good friend Rory O’Neil, Editor of Hazards magazine, of a major union recognition victory in the Deep South state of North Carolina, USA, where employer antogonism to trade unions runs deepest.
In what unions are hailing as a crucial victory in the South, United Food and Commercial Workers Union prevailed in [...]
It seems that no campaign is complete these days without someone setting up the ubiquitous accompanying Facebook group. Some of these have been really successful, some really haven’t. I’m a big fan of anything that can help unions organising but I think there are a couple of potential pitfalls in using Facebook so liberally.
The first is that Facebook [...]
In the OR Team we are always looking for case studies to illustrate the work of unions and what this has meant for union members and working people. Recently I’ve been developing a guide for non-union members about the benefits of joining a union (look out for it in the New Year) and I’ve come across some [...]
I’m grateful to union-friendly academic John Logan for alerting me to a report on Bloomberg (and there’s another on the union web page) that the UFCW is claiming victory in a unionisation campaign for workers at the Wal-Mart store in Weyburn, Saskatchewan - a struggle which began FOUR years ago!
A few days ago I posted on what I thought was a rather oddreport on the Politics Home website that (to me at least) seemed to go to great lengths to reassure readers that unions hadn’t had any influence on the governments recent decisions to negate the the worst effects of the downturn.
Reading the post back [...]
