The Long and Unconventional History of Industrial Action
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0:39 Walton’s impressed with the site stats
- Thanks for your visits! We’re set to run out of bandwidth again
- Some interesting subreddits have been directing traffic to cyberunions
- Check out r/HackBloc, r/AnarchistNews and r/Cyberunions
- Our audience is split – one third use FOSS and seem very tech savvy
- One third use Windows and Internet Explorer
- Let’s bring them together and build a community of practice
03:10 Stephen geeks out over Minecraft
- Minetest is a GPL version
- Linux install #fail on some old hardware
- David Rovics was at the Free Hetherington in Glasgow
- David shares his experience of the student occupation with a Boston audience
07:45 Walton reads Little Brother on his phone
- Cory Doctorow’s book deals with online security and the surveillance state
- The book explains Tor well – we’ve covered it in a previous show
- ParanoidLinux is a great idea – why not check out Tails
- Debian + Tor = information security
14:19 The UK faces its biggest strike since 1926
- 3 million people may strike on 30 November
- They’re striking over pensions – why?
- Under UK labour law you need to have a trade dispute with your employer
- UK labour law doesn’t comply with ILO Conventions
- In South Africa and many other countries, political and solidarity strikes are legal
- Industrial action in the UK is legalistic and bureaucratised. This is a deliberate attempt to hamstring unions
- If unions strike illegally they become liable for the costs of industrial action
- There is no legal way for unions to mount proper political resistance – workers need to use civil disobedience and wildcats
19:00 Some US unions use minority unionism to get around limitations
- Instead of winning recognition and being held liable, members act in solidarity outside on contracts
- United Electrical Workers in North Carolina use Minority Unionism
- NC is a Right to Work State
23:30 The pub quiz strike trivia question
27:00 Tech update
- Free Software Foundation’s Software Friday
- Miro is a great FOSS tool for building a web channel
- Do we need a #cyberunions IRC channel?
- Email Stephen or Walton with your idea
- Or leave an audio comment on Soundcloud
- Unions need to use the appropriate technology – maybe we need IRC to recruit programmers
33:00 Some labo(u)r news podcasts that are worth a listen
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