Blogs

SEIU Local 615, a 17,000 member local out of Boston, MA, has proposed webcasting its upcoming negotiations with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). See the story here.

 Big news hit the New York Times yesterday that the AFL-CIO and the National Labor College were joining together to launch the "first and only accredited degree-granting online institution devote exclusively to educating union members."

On October 16th and 17th, I organized a Digital Media Conference at Northeastern University under the auspices of the National Writers Union Boston Chapter - and my online metro news publication, Open Media Boston - to address a growing list of changes in the creative industries that are making it increasingly difficult for creative workers like writers to make a living. The situation is even worse for those many creators that are freelancers. Or to put it in labor terms, those creators that are contingent workers. Because one major problem that the labor movement has not yet been able to deal with in a comprehensive way is the resurgance of contingent work (a.k.a. contract work, indpendent contracting, temp work, day labor, etc.) in the modern economy. As labor's power has waned over the last 4 decades, our movement has lost the ability to control core labor markets enough to ensure basic labor standards for most workers. And we are being pushed to return to 19th century labor conditions by large corporations in ways that are very hard to defend against.

Many of the technologies I've discussed here at Communicate or Die over the last year are primary accessed as online services - available for free or cheap for use by the general public. This may seem like an odd thing to do on a company blog. Even one run by a unionized and pro-labor technology company like Prometheus Labor Communications. But the main mandate that my boss, Steve Dondley, gave me for CorD was to explore technologies of interest to the labor movement. And it's virtually impossible to do that without talking about various online services ... some, but not all, of which offer functionalities that compete with some of the services we offer our clients on the Drupal website we build for them. And most of which are owned by large corporations that we have serious problems with as a group of folks with strong labor backgrounds.

For several years, Google - the search engine giant - has been scanning books in major libraries around the world, converting the scans to searchable text, and allowing users around the world the ability to scan the content of what is now millions of books for free. Great you might think. More power to them.

But not from the perspective of union writers. Yes, you heard me right. Union writers. Many of you may not be aware that writers of all kinds have had a union in the U.S. since 1981 - the National Writers Union - which has been part of the United Auto Workers since the early 1990s as Local 1981.

The NWU is the main American writers organizations that approaches the publishing industry as an industry and writers as working people. As such, it takes positions sometimes at variance with other writers organizations. The Google Books situation is precisely one of those issues.

from http://ibew2222.org/ :

From Union Democracy Review, #180 www.uniondemocracy.org

The U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia has upheld a union rule that places new burdens on candidates who want to use their own independent web sites to campaign for union office. The court's decision gives the green light to those nervous union officials who hope to develop new ways to limit the potential of the internet as an instrument for union democracy.

The Communication Workers of America just released their 3rd annual Speed Matters report on broadband upload and download speeds by state across the U.S. Like their last report - that I wrote about in these pages a while back - this year's report makes the rather obvious case that America needs better and faster broadband internet coverage. They indicate that we're only number 28 in the world in average internet connection speed - still a shockingly low number considering that the internet was primarily created by the American military together with American research universities with public money.

Just a note to the Communicate or Die community that we're cleaning up this site, and trying to get back to a regular publishing schedule. The growth of this blog's sponsor, Prometheus Labor Communications, has meant that all staff - including me - have been busily building websites for unions around the U.S. ... to the detriment of our ability to write regular commentary on labor and the internet. We'll see if we can get things back on track in the next few weeks. If our regular contributors are interested in kicking some posts in that would be great. There are certainly plenty of developments to discuss.

Recently the AFL-CIO launched a new site called Unemployment Lifeline that uses modern social media to provide a place for laid-off American workers to get some help and to connect - often for the first time - to the labor movement.

The surprisingly colorful and attractive site (sorry, but as someone involved in building labor websites, I notice that many union leaders ask for, shall we say, plain design concepts) offers a variety of ways for people to get involved with actions for national health reform and against giveaways to big business. It also provides forums where unemployed folks can talk with each other and compare notes, a calendar of relevant events nationwide, and a resource page where people can turn for human services and legal advice.

A recent article from Union Democracy Review on efforts by SEIU and MEBA (Marine Engineers Benevolent Association) to block "objectionable" and "irresponsible" speech raises the question: what's really objectionable?

Diigo: A Web 2.0 tool to get user input on your website

Last month, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters made cutting-edge use of the free streaming video service UStream - which I believe we here at Prometheus Labor Communications had turned them onto last fall - to a live broadcast of a debate between their aircraft industry organizers and leadership of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Organization. The event was called to help inform workers in an Oregon-based unit that is trying to decert from AMFA (translation for non-union folks: leave their old union) and join the Teamsters. Very interesting from both a technology perspective and a union democracy perspective.

Here's a site that's posting videos of its members - a nice idea, as it'll encourage their workmates to visit the site too!

http://www.seiu888.org/news/channel888/Default.aspx

The web is a funny place. For the first time in history all sides of pretty much any debate you can think of are present in the same medium with similar ability to ascertain what every other side is up to strategically at any given time. In English, I mean that for the first time in human history it is possible for working people to watch the watchers ... or more to the point, the bosses.

So as I trolled around my various social networking sites I happened upon an alert about an upcoming event at nearby Harvard Law School. It said that a bunch of corporate and military types descend on the place every few months for a special two-day session called "Dealing with an Angry Public" sponsored by Harvard Law's Program on Negotiation.