As Sean Bamford wrote last week, the Turkish state’s war on the KESK public sector union entered a new phase with the opening of the trial in Istanbul of dozens of activists arrested in early 2013. I had the privilege of joining with trade unionists from across the European Union as well as a representative…
In the labour movement we’re often fond of our history. We preserve certain traditions, we celebrate some holidays, we even have museums displaying our union banners and old pamphlets. Our past inspires us. We don’t tend to think of union-busters sharing in some kind of nostalgia, but they do – and it sometimes shows up…
Unions that want to communicate with their members using the new technologies face a problem. And the problem is that we don’t actually know very much about how our members use the Internet. Of course there are general surveys and studies which show that masses of people use Facebook and Twitter, that smartphones and tablets…
South Korea’s progress from dictatorship to democracy has not been an easy or straightforward one, as the recent Presidential election has shown. The good news was that for the first time in history, the Koreans had elected a woman, Park Guenhye, to lead their country. The bad news is that she’s the daughter of the…