2009 Labour Website of the Year Contest

Voting is open. Simply go to the page below, vote your fave (after checking them out of course):

http://www.labourstart.org/lwsoty/2009/

They Do It Too

I think we're sometimes surprised when an employer or some other anti-union type uses the not-so-new-anymore media to organize against us. Something about still being stuck with the idea of the internet as an insurgent medium I think; somehow more ours than theirs.

Silly. A good way to get caught with our pants down.

This week CBC and SRC are reporting on OCTranspo's use of YouTube in trying to get their final offer through a forced vote.

http://www.radio-canada.ca/regions/ottawa/2009/01/07/008-oc-transpo-youtube_n.shtml
and
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2009/01/07/ot-090107-transit.html

Meanwhile, back at the York U. strike, anti-union students are doing all kinds of interesting, if wrong-headed, things with Facebook, blogs and such.

LabourStart for Your Phone

http://m.labourstart.org/ - LabourStart formatted for your mobile phone.

Free Membership Records Management Software

Newunionism.net is a website recommended here in the past for a bunch of reasons. Here’s another: a free open source membership records management system for unions with less than 5,000 members.

The system is being developed by two Newunionism.org members. Discussions on the site had identified the need for local unions with smallish memberships to have access to an expensive way to manage member records.

MemBrain should be ready for release by the end of the year. The developers are looking for volunteers to test the software before then. If your union has about 5,000 members or less, how'd you like to become a guinea pig in helping them develop the system? In return, you get a fully-registered copy of the membership system and the code access necessary to developing it further. For more information on the MemBrain project, and how it might help you in your work, contact membrain@newunionism.net.

And if you’re not ready to become a beta tester, look for the first wide release of MemBrain in early 2009 at http://www.newunionism.net/.

Me and Facebook: An Update

Since the review of FB appeared in Our Times, I snuck back on to keep in touch with a grandkid who had moved to the UK for work. It wasn’t long before the bug got me though, and I got booted-off for the third, and last (I swear!) time.

This time it was support for the striking eggheads at York U. I posted info about a the CUPE e-campaign on the walls of as many union-related groups as I could find.

Facebook figures that was me spamming, even though the groups on whose walls I posted the info were all union-focused and they received no complaints. So gone I was.

Speaking of the Bad Book, we’ve been reminded that Facebook is as good an organizing tool for the anti-union folks (in this case business students at York U) as it is for us. Aside from the groups themselves, there have been several (thankfully small) anti-strike rallies organized using FB. As well as a couple of technically impressive blogs.

Podcasting Intro for Trade Unionists

[Appeared first in print in Our Times]

Podcasting is probably the online tool we’re least likely to use in our union work. But that also means that when we do use it, we get a lot of attention. Here’s a podcast starter’s kit for you.

PODCAST STARTER’S KIT

Podcasts are audio files that are made available on a regular (daily, weekly, monthly) basis. You can register your podcast with a service like iTunes, and then each time you post a new edition to your website (or rented space elsewhere), the people who have subscribed to it through iTunes will automatically get a copy of it.

Think of podcasts as radio shows that come at you from your computer rather than your radio and you won’t go far wrong.

There are union pods out there, but they’re pretty few and far between. Podcasts require a lot of work and an ongoing commitment, so they have tended to come and go. They disappear either because they were created for a specific situation (the wonderfully creative lockout pods produced by Canadian Media Guild members at the CBC for example), or because the volunteer producers just ran out of steam.

A notable exception has been the audio pod produced by a member of the Electrical Trades Union in Australia called, inevitably, The Spark. But even The Spark is, after three years, being produced much less frequently now. (See www.etu.asn.au/rss/podcast.xml.) Still racing along with as many as four video episodes a month is the Union Show, produced by Phil Cleary in Victoria Australia as a TV show and then podded via iTunes. (See www.etu.asn.au/2007/union_show.html.)

Less ambitious have been the pods that pop up for a specific purpose and which are intended from the get-go to disappear once the need for them does. Podcasts to do with bargaining, strikes/lockouts, campaign, conventions and elections (union and otherwise) are all doable. And they are easy and cheap as far as technology goes: all you need is content. Still, it’s best to have a team rather than relying on one person to do it all.

Is there anyone who doesn’t own an MP3 player these days? Nothing like taking a bargaining update to the gym or a picket line or listening to it on the bus on the way to work in the morning. Especially if it’s blended-in with some interviews with co-workers, maybe some music for the line, a cheering line or two from the national president, and a Q&A segment for members on what the new collective agreement means to them.

Think of it as a membership meeting members can turn on and turn off at their convenience over the course of a day. Just make sure you pay enough attention to the format and content that it doesn’t get turned off and left that way.

For more details on webcasting of various kinds check out the Webcast Academy at www.webcastacademy.net. You’ll find free information, tutorials and discussion forums, lots of open source software reviews and links, and even live online tutorials.

Once you’ve browsed the academy and have an idea what your podcast will sound like (or even look like: a video podcast is an option for the ambitious), you’ll want the software needed to get started; something that allows you to manage the recording as it is taking place, and then to edit the results.

Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/)is open source software, free and with a large community of users who can provide tips and tricks when you start to push the limits of what it’s capable of. The developers even provide free online tutorials for using Audacity at http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Tutorials.

Like much open source software these days, this isn’t a second-best option to a commercial product. Audacity has won awards for “best product” in its class in direct competition with commercial software.

Once you have the software, all you need is a decent microphone (average cost about $20), and a laptop (desktops are a little awkward for those “streeter” interviews) or an MP3 recorder.

One obvious use that podcasts haven’t been put to by unions is education and training. If you know of an experiment along these lines, please get in touch.

Farzad May Hang Today

This morning we received news that jailed Iranian teacher union activist Farzad Kamangar may be hanged within the next few hours.

According to the Education International, he has been taken from his cell in Tehran's Evin prison in preparation for execution. The guards have told him he is about to be executed and they are making fun of him, calling him a martyr.

LabourStart's urgent action is now live, here:

http://www.labourstart.org/farzad

UPDATE: we (LabourStart) have been having some technical problems as a result of the hight volume of traffic to our site in response to this appeal.

You can also send a message via the EI (the global union federation for education workers) website at:

http://www.ei-ie.org/en/urgentactionappeal/show.php?id=12&country=iran

CUPE 3903 Strike Site Sideswiped

Chris Lawson at CUPE sent the following along. Lesson: grab all the domains you can that might be used against you, while you can.

Please help CUPE 3903. They're in week two of a strike and they've been sideswiped by someone who registered cupe3903.ca and pointed it at the university web site.

While they pursue their complaint with the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, they're looking to improve their ranking on Google, so that people searching for information about the York University strike find their information, not the university's, or the anti-strike student groups'.

>> Additionally, another way to boost search engine ranking is from
>> inbound links. The more websites that link to http://www.blogger.com/www.3903strike.ca the
>> better... and even more than quantity of links are quality. If we
>> can get a couple of very popular sites to link to us the more google
>> will like our new page! So get the word out!

Please put a link to the real CUPE 3903 site (http://www.blogger.com/www.3903strike.ca) on your website, using "York University strike information" as the link text. Not sure how to do that? Take the following code:

York University strike information and get your web worker to put it on your page.

Thanks for your help!

Yanks Love Labour Photo of the Year Contest

The AFL-CIO has some very nice things to say about the Labour Photo of the Year, and everything behind it:

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/11/06/global-labor-photo-of-year-uk-strike/

The New CAW Website

The CAW has recently (5 years or so) been a bit of a trend-setter in its use of the web. Website-based video for example.

So the new CAW website is worth pondering over: www.caw.ca

A major shift in a number of ways. Take a gander.