Xmas time again, and another outing for the old family favourite where a trio of ghastly apparitions from days gone and yet to come shock a wayward soul into repudiating his acts of miserly cruelty to those worse off than himself.
Well, if the cameo samples from Maggie, D-Cam and the ghost of future electoral catastrophe, Nick Clegg, in Captain Ska’s Xmas #1 candidate song, Liar Liar, don’t scare Ebeneezer Osborne from his skinflint path, I don’t know what will…
If you haven’t heard the good Captain’s oeuvre yet, check it out in this youtube vid, tell all your friends, and go buy a download of it, to help it storm up the charts.
Imagine if this could make it to the number one spot for Christmas, brandishing two fingers very publically to not only Osborne but chart nasty Simon Cowell as well. Wouldn’t that be the best 79p you ever spent?
I’ll be helping out at Netroots UK, a big event for progressive online activists on 8 Jan in London. It’s shaping up to be a very exciting looking day, with practical training sessions running alongside movement strategy stuff, and plenty of neworking opportunities.
I’m particularly interested in a session looking at how bloggers and online activists can group together to boost each other’s efforts and reduce their organsiation overheads. From my experience with Tigmoo.co.uk, a little can go a long way, and the more “infrastructure” projects we can get in the left blogohemisphere the better for all concerned. Read the rest of this entry »
Oh dear. I’d been under the impression that Steve Jobs had been “all over” the Foxconn worker abuses issue, and things were getting better. Two new stories challenge all that though.
Firstly there are reports of mass arrests at Foxconn India, where workers have been striking for 18 days over pay, disputed sackings and the recognition of their union. 320 workers have been arrested along with union officials. And in China a new academic study, where teachers and students appear to have infiltrated the company for their research, threatens to lift the lid on working conditions. Apparently in some plants, interns (on vastly inferior working conditions) make up 50% of the workforce, the promised wage increases have been much smaller than claimed in public, 38.1% of the workforce claim management have invaded their privacy, and a shocking 16.4% have experienced physical violence at work.
So the shine appears to be coming off iPhones just as quickly as before.
World Day for Decent Work today is even glummer this year than usual. 34 million jobs have been lost worldwide since 2008, due to the financial crisis, and 64 million have been pushed into extreme poverty.
Yet the austerity measures that so many governments have adopted to respond to the crisis will only make things worse. Growth and decent jobs are the way out of crisis. Cutting too much too soon will stall recovery, actually harming our private sectors and decreasing the tax take our countries need to pay off their deficits. Read the rest of this entry »
When I lived in Germany, I bought this slim volume of side-by-side translations of English jokes, explaining them and their underlying principles to curious Germans. The main lessons I think were that the English were fond of puns and mean to the Irish. This piece of comedy Eirophobia in particular stuck with me…
An Irishman was working on the railroad when he heard a train coming along the track he was fixing. In panic, he jumped up and started sprinting down the track as fast as he could go, but he’d only managed a hundred yards when it caught up and ran him over. When he came to in hospital, the foreman asked him “Paddy, why didn’t you just run up the side of the track?”, to which he replied “Don’t be silly. If I couldn’t beat it on the level, what chance would I have had going uphill?”
Political correctness luckily means Irish jokes are now less vogueish than when I was a yoof, so how surprised was I to see the self same joke in today’s Guardian? Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a video from the unrecognised union at Taiwanese touchscreen supplier Young Fast Optoelectonics. Their members make the high tech display panels for mobile phones for several companies, including up and coming iPhone rivals HTC. And their members allegedly face harassment and sacking for union membership, poor safety and enforced overtime. There are even allegations of child labor at YFO.
I have a phone using one of these screens, and as it’s due for upgrade and I’m an unreformable smartphone geek, I’ve been looking into the gobsmackingly clever new Desire HD as a replacement for it. I’m concerned though that I really don’t want (another) phone which has been made under such terrible conditions for the people who produced it.
I’ve heard good things of HTC in the past on CSR – even saw one of their managers present a communications industry award to a union strike comms project ferchrissakes. But they don’t seem to be engaging at all over the very serious allegation that the key component of their flagship products is sourced from a sweatshop. Read the rest of this entry »
This amused me today. Spanish union federation CCOO are hosting a contest for user generated 40 second ads to get the word round about the upcoming General Strike (29 September). Don’t know if this one is from a supporter or CCOO themselves, but it’s jolly, memorable, and slightly surreal. Todo fuera, hermanos!
Nice news today, that Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who walked out of his job in a way that captured the imagination of the interwebs (via a foul mouthed tannoy tirade against the treatment he’d put up with for 28 years, grabbing a beer from the trolley and deploying the emergency chute to slide out and walk away – if you spent yesterday with your computer turned off) has been offered assistance by the American union AFA. Read the rest of this entry »
The government are plotting another round of regulations on unions’ industrial action rights, if today’s Daily Mail article “Tories plot to curb unions to prevent second winter of discontent over spending cuts” is anything to be believed.
Winter of discontent? That sounds pretty serious – apocalyptic even. We haven’t had one of those since the 70’s – no wonder the Government are spooked.
But what’s this? Consulting the Daily Mail’s own search engine, we seem to have already experienced a ’spring of discontent’ this year, oh, and a ’summer of discontent’. And they confidently predict an ‘autumn of discontent’ to match the currently threatened ‘winter of discontent’. Read the rest of this entry »
Herewith HMG’s bold master plan to fully seize the opportunities offered by new technology in government, whilst simultaneously heavily reducing actual websites, staff and cash. In one stroke this policy shall put an end to waste, open up brave new possibilities, and compeltely eliminate confusion. Read the rest of this entry »
When I lived in Germany, I bought this slim volume of side-by-side translations of English jokes, explaining them and their underlying principles to curious Germans. The main lessons I think were that the English were fond of puns and mean to the Irish. This piece of comedy Eirophobia in particular stuck with me…
I have a phone using one of these screens, and as it’s due for upgrade and I’m an unreformable smartphone geek, I’ve been looking into the gobsmackingly clever new 
