Shaft Workers, Get an Award for Corporate Social Responsibility
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Five months after Roger Agnelli, CEO of Vale Inco, provoked a strike by nearly 3,500 miners, mill workers and smelters at three mines in Canada, an employer group is honoring Agnelli—for demonstrating corporate social responsibility.
Brazilian-based Vale, the second-largest mining company in the world, recorded $13.2 billion in profits last year. But the company is demanding the workers, who are members of three United Steelworkers (USW) locals, give back hard-earned benefits and accept an inferior defined-contribution pension plan and take cuts in profit-sharing.
USW President Leo Gerard says the striking workers and their families have struggled since the strike began July 13. One of the mines is located in Sudbury, Gerard’s hometown.
LabourStart’s Photo of the Year: Child Labor in Bangladesh
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Subscribers to the global online labor news service LabourStart selected K.M. Asad’s striking photo of a Bangladeshi boy working in a shipbuilding plant as the Labor Photo of the Year. These factories employ young boys as apprentices without pay for the first few years. They work in extreme conditions without safety tools or other protective gears.
The photo contest is designed to encourage and recognize the talents of worker-photographers around the world while encouraging activists to tell the stories of workers’ struggles in photos. This is the group’s second photo contest. Click here to see the 2009 finalists.
The first prize is a two-year pro account on Flickr.com. The runners-up received a one-year pro account. The finalist photos also are displayed in the art gallery on the Union Island in Second Life.
One Week Left to Enter LabourStart Photo Contest
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There’s still time to enter LabourStart’s 2009 Labour Photo of the Year contest, but you’ll have to act fast: The deadline is Sept. 30. Click here for entry rules.
LabourStart, the global online labor news service, says the contest is designed to encourage and recognize the talents of worker-photographers around the world, and at the same time encourage them to tell the stories of workers’ struggles in photos.
The group’s first photo contest in 2008 drew several thousand entries. (See the winner accompanying this story and click here to see the 2008 finalists.)
First prize is a two-year pro account on Flickr.com. Four runners-up will receive a one-year pro account. The finalist photos will be featured on LabourStart and announced to news service’s 60,000 trade unionist subscribers. They also will be displayed in the art gallery on the Union Island in Second Life.
LabourStart and the U.S. Union Movement: Making Connections
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This week, at the first LabourStart conference ever held in the United States, one of the most important topics of conversation centered around strategies for connecting the United States and global union movements and the active, energetic community that LabourStart represents.
It’s an important question, participants agreed, because of how workers across the world are increasingly tied together by globalization. Workers in different countries, but working for the same company, could have much more in common than they realize, and workers across the world are facing many of the same issues that workers in the United States face, as is obvious from a look at LabourStart’s headlines.
LabourStart: AFT Reaches Out at Home, Around the World
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On the second day of the LabourStart conference, participants got to hear from AFT this afternoon about the challenges facing teachers in the United States and around the world.
David Dorn, director of the AFT International Affairs Department, said the AFT long has been interested in reaching out around the world. One of the most important projects in which AFT has been engaged is the AFT-Africa AIDS Program. African teachers unions with which AFT has built relationships have been affected by the AIDS crisis, as their members, their students and their students’ families and communities have been devastated by the spread of HIV and AIDS.
AFT is using organizing techniques to educate teachers in South Africa and other countries about AIDS, primarily through teacher-to-teacher education aimed at breaking the silence that surrounds AIDS and connecting people to information, counseling, testing and treatment.
LabourStart: What Do Unions Need to Do Online?
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At this week’s LabourStart conference—much like at last week’s Netroots Nation conference—union communicators, activists and bloggers are taking a close look at how the union movement is approaching new media. Where are we doing the right thing, and where are we lagging behind?
LabourStart attendees agreed we as labor communicators need new studies of what the union movement—in the United States and around the world—is doing online. Today’s morning session highlighted the healthy debate about how to go forward—do we need a scholarly study or a practical handbook to use on the ground? Do we need to focus on broad, large-scale campaigns that attract a lot of attention, or do we concentrate on small, focused local campaigns where we can have more of an impact? And how do we utilize new media tools to get people engaged and get leverage in campaigns?
Sweeney Thanks LabourStart for Pioneering Role
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Today marks the start of the annual conference of LabourStart, the online news network for the international union movement. Dozens of bloggers, union staffers and labor communicators from the United States and around the world will be meeting at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., this week to meet and discuss online tools and strategies and issues affecting union members around the world.
The conference includes union communicators from India, Canada, Finland, Switzerland and Australia as well as writers and activists from across the U.S. union movement. They’ll discuss how they’re mobilizing, connecting and communicating online and how to expand LabourStart’s wide variety of resources, including customizable newswires in 15 languages, e-mail outreach campaigns, the Radio LabourStart network and Unionbook, an online social network for union members and activists that has grown to thousands of members in just a few months of existence.
Welcome LabourStart
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LabourStart, the global online labor news service, for the first time is holding its annual conference in the United States. The conference, which begins today at AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., provides a unique opportunity for union members, staff and leaders to discuss key worker issues with hundreds of LabourStart’s volunteer correspondents around the world.
The Aug. 17-19 conference will be filled with briefings on U.S. labor issues as well as discussions of the latest strategies and technologies to better communicate online with workers worldwide.
AFL-CIO Now will provide coverage of the conference over the next three days.
Labor Website of the Year
The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America has won LabourStart’s 2009 Labor Website of the Year. LabourStart, the labor news service, has sponsored the competition every year since 1997. Trade union websites from around the world compete, and individual union members vote online to decide which is the best union website
As trade union use of the Internet grows, the competition grows as well. This year, 170 sites were nominated, nearly twice as many as last year. LabourStart’s volunteer correspondents from around the world voted for the best ones and winnowed the list down to 12 finalists.
The runners-up, in order, were Union Songs, Our Times, USLEAP and New Unionism Network.
UnionBook: A Social Network for Labor
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Union activists are, well, active. Sometimes that’s a problem on social network sites like FaceBook, MySpace and others that tend to limit an individual’s activity if it exceeds their arbitrary limits.
Our friends at LabourStart have an answer—UnionBook, the just-launched social networking website for trade unionists. Already with some 1,300 members, UnionBookis free of advertising—unlike other sites—and specifically designed for trade unionists around the world. Now, that’s a heck of community.
Says LabourStart Editor Eric Lee:
If you’re too active doing the kind of networking that we trade unionists do all the time—recruiting friends, sending out messages, and so on—FaceBook can blacklist you and close your account. This has already happened to a number of union activists.
