Strikes and Twitter

A plea from rail company Southern for beleaguered passengers to tell the RMT union how they feel about ongoing strikes appears to have backfired.

Southern tweeted: "Time to get back on track. Tweet @RMTunion & tell them how rail strikes make you feel."

Dozens of passengers immediately responded, but not in the manner rail bosses might have hoped.

Marianne Powell tweeted: "You brought this on yourselves. We, your customers are suffering."

Another passenger, Simon Cox, posted: "I dislike unions but I dislike incompetent management more."

For more information see Southern rail's 'tweet RMT' plea angers rail passengers (BBC News).

Restriction of social media during a strike

Striking unions could face restrictions on their use of social media, the TUC's general secretary has told the BBC.

A consultation document linked to the proposed Trade Union Bill suggests unions involved in industrial action should give two weeks notice if they plan to campaign via social media.

Frances O'Grady said an attack on trade unions was "unfinished business" for "some elements within governments".

Ministers said any restrictions would not apply to posts by individuals...

See Trade Union Bill: TUC fears over social media restrictions (BBC News) for more details.

Private investigators and strikes

British Airways paid £1m to hush up the details of a spying operation in which the phones and emails of its own cabin staff were allegedly improperly accessed during a bitter dispute with Britain’s largest union...

 

See British Airways 'spying' scandal: How the world's most famous airline spied on its own staff (James Cusik, The Independent) for more details.

A role for Facebook during a strike?

An article that appeared on Personnel Today about a recent civil service strike makes reference to Facebook and how employees who did not strike may do so if this continues to be the course of action taken by the PCS trade union.

Here are details of what is really supposed to have happened during the strike:

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) civil servants in Carlisle have alleged they were ordered to imitate answerphones between 12pm and 2pm on Monday, so that when callers got through, the workers would say: "Due to the high volume of enquiries we are currently experiencing, we are unable to take your call".

And here's how details of this management tactic became known to strikers and the media:

The claim, widely discussed on social networking site Facebook, is said to have made non-strikers consider joining the strike – which lasted two days between 8 Monday and 9 Tuesday March – over changes to the civil service redundancy terms.

For more details see Non-striking civil servants 'pretended to be answering machines' to handle volume of calls.

Internet McCarthyism?

Internet McCarthyism - this is the term used by the Unite trade union towards British Airways, who have recently suspended 15 flight attendants for writing Facebook comments and sending private emails about a "name and shame" list of pilots who volunteered to help break possible upcoming strikes.

It seems a very messy affair that is perhaps best understood by reading the following article - BA suspends cabin staff in Facebook row over list of strike-breaking pilots (by Caroline Davis, The Guardian).

A very different kind of striking...!

For once this isn't reference to an article or story describing a new way for employees to protest against the actions of employers.

It's actually about a (so far, anyway) fictitious form of striking (a mass lockout would probably be a more appropriate term) written about by Ayn Rand, and commented on in yesterdays' Guardian.

The article details a surge of interest in Rand's (a key writer on radical individualism, extreme self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism) book called Atlas Shrugged.

The book itself is (according to the article as I've read one of her books before but not this one) about:

A vision of a world in which the "men of the mind" - inventors, entrepreneurs and industrialists - withdraw their labour from a society intent on bleeding them dry with taxes and regulations.

Furious at being exploited by the government on behalf of the masses, who are described as "parasites" and "moochers", the striking capitalists retreat to a camp in the mountains of Colorado, protected by a special holographic shield.

Starved of their genius, society collapses and wars break out until eventually bureaucrats are forced to beg the rebels' leader, John Galt, to take over the economy.

It's hinted in the article that this could become a reality given the dire state of the global economy.

For me it's just what big capitalists want everyone to believe - that they are indispensable and we owe them everything.

The truth is somewhat different and it'll be some time before anyone goes begging to the so-called captains of industry!

See Look out for number one - America turns to prophet of self-interest as crash hits (by Oliver Burkeman) if this one takes your fancy.

Strikers use YouTube

The screen writers strike out in the USA appears to have taken a curious twist - the use of YouTube to canvass support for their campaign.

An article on the BBC News website (Entertainment) has several YouTube videos embedded in the story.

The videos are believed to cover:

- a mock news bulletin from a New York picket line

- what striking writers are doing to make ends meet - activities that range from flipping burgers to male prostitution

- a strike-breaking member of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) is accosted in a coffee house by two members of the non-existent "Writers Guild Police".

Further analysis in the article suggests what purpose the messages serve for the strikers, i.e. a new and creative way of communicating a sense of grievance to anyone who is willing to listen:

So what are the studios and producers themselves saying? Not much. Nothing at all, in fact.

No doubt they would be happy to answer the strikers' claims with viral videos of their own - if, of course, they had anyone to write them.

In fact, it is the writers themselves who are putting their point of view across - in as satirical a fashion as possible, naturally.

For more details and to see a selection of the protest videos see Striking US writers get creative by Neil Smith.