Bill Bumpus's blog

Just happened to be glancing at a story on the AFL-CIO blog and noticed that comments have now been enabled - I'm pretty sure they weren't the last time I checked!

Anybody tried posting a comment yet? I'm going to sign up for an account and try it out when the inspiration strikes me.

Folks might also be interested in the comment guidelines from http://blog.aflcio.org/guidelines :

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Union One of Indianapolis has posted a number of pro-union videos on YouTube. As of this morning, 19 videos have been posted on such subjects as "Do Yourself a Favor, Join a Union", "How to Survive Wage Cuts" and "Union Busting 101", most between one and five minutes in length.

Here's another little project I've been working on lately (though perhaps not worthy of front page treatment at this point) - I'm polishing off a BA in Labor Studies at UMass at the ripe age of 49 and as part of my "senior project" I'm working on three proposed Drupal installations.

The first two will be used to store and index PDF archives of Labor Notes and The Labor Page (its Boston equivalent, presently in hibernation).

The third site is a bit more interesting. I'd like to help set up a central respository for people to share links to online labor images, including any known copyright info, for use in (primarily) web sites and multimedia.

I've made an attempt at creating - well, mostly stealing - a taxonomy for sorting contributed images. I'd be interested to hear what CoDers think of the format and of the project in general.

At the Labor Notes conference, there was discussion of using flickr.com as a repository for labor images. But I see that they're a subsidiary of Yahoo, which makes me wonder if the service is going to be free forever.

Seems to be some interest percolating out there in having a Labor and Technology conference in Boston sometime over the next year - and the Labor Resource Center at UMass Boston has indicated that they'd be interested in hosting such an event.

I'd be interested in hearing the ideas of folks in the CoD community about possible workshop topics. What do folks think of the agenda of the San Francisco conference?

There's also a list of workshops in formation for for the next Organizers' Collaborative on June 17th. Which of them might be of interest to a labor audience?

I recently came across some 1996 figures about consumer goods in low-income vs. all (in parenthesis) households:

Refrigerator 99% (99)
Color TV 97% (99)
Car 70% (90)
PC 13% (35)

Has anybody come across any more recent figures? I'd be especially curious to know how the figures might change if there's a teenager or younger worker in the household.

I found
an interesting piece on the SEIU site about a locals in NY and LA that have made subsidized computer/internet access into a contract provision.

I've been working the last several weeks as an organizing intern for SEIU 2020, signing up personal care attendants (aka home health care workers).

This is a low income workforce for the most part, and the workers we find at home tend to be older ones. Still, I've been struck by the fact that perhaps 1 out of 30 workers who sign has an email address.

As most visitors to this site are no doubt aware, the single best source of breaking news about the union movement in the US originates from England! I'm referring of course to LabourStart's US news feed.

I think one of the big challenges for online labor communicators is to provide content that'll attract a much larger audience than currently exists.

The internet truly has revolutionized communications my making information accessible to users worldwide on a 24/7 basis. In particular, the LabourStart and WINS provide a constant, almost-real-time source of labor news.