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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/" > <channel> <title>johninnit</title> <atom:link href="http://johninnit.co.uk/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /> <link>http://johninnit.co.uk</link> <description>occasional scrapbook of a labor geek</description> <lastBuildDate>Fri, 17 Aug 2018 14:09:54 +0000</lastBuildDate> <language>en-GB</language> <sy:updatePeriod> hourly </sy:updatePeriod> <sy:updateFrequency> 1 </sy:updateFrequency> <generator>https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.2</generator> <item> <title>Testing times? Trade unions should be natural partners in digital co-design</title> <link>http://johninnit.co.uk/2018/07/02/testing-times-trade-unions-should-be-natural-partners-in-digital-co-design/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[john]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Mon, 02 Jul 2018 12:18:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[#digitalunions]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unions]]></category> <category><![CDATA[user centred design]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://johninnit.co.uk/?p=1589</guid> <description><![CDATA[<img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-1594" src="http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/userneeds-1024x576.jpg" alt="Post-its" width="700" height="394" /><p>User involvement in digital product design is fundamental to success. Human-centric and design thinking approaches make a huge difference to a digital project’s chances of achieving product/market fit. Testing and refining every interaction in a system improves its performance, and ability to solve an identifiable user need. Taken together those small improvements really add up.</p>]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-1594" src="http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/userneeds-1024x576.jpg" alt="Post-its" width="700" height="394" srcset="http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/userneeds-1024x576.jpg 1024w, http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/userneeds-300x169.jpg 300w, http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/userneeds-768x432.jpg 768w, http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/userneeds.jpg 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" /></span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">User involvement in digital product design is fundamental to success. Human-centric and design thinking approaches make a huge difference to a digital project’s chances of achieving product/market fit. Testing and refining every interaction in a system improves its performance, and ability to solve an identifiable user need. Taken together those small improvements really add up.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">(BTW unions should do way more user testing than we currently do on our own systems, with some honourable exceptions, like UNISON’s great recent work on organising tools, but that’s not the point of this particular piece.)</span><span id="more-1589"></span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Modern companies love user testing, and are often willing to pay external consultants or employ in house digital teams with experience of running codesign programmes. It lets them improve customer service in very measurable ways.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">How much better would things be if systems that affected work were genuinely designed in partnership with workers, involving them every bit as much as customers? I’m not just talking about whether workers are able to use a company’s new systems effectively to meet the employer’s goals, but also whether feature ideas that workers need can get incorporated too.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Take shift rostering for example. When a company is looking at designing a new rostering system, how about researching the variables that workers would like it to use, on top of the company’s needs? </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Whitbread are the parent company for Premier Inn. They’ve become a hugely lean and computerised operation, reducing staffing at their headquarters to a bare minimum and shifting the national and regional management load onto IT systems and (a very under-rewarded) local management in each branch.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you’ve ever stayed at one of their hotels, you often find reception staff running the late shift and the morning shift straight after, getting a really pinched break to get home and sleep before work again. I’ve never yet met a receptionist who didn’t sigh and shrug when I mentioned it. For a company that’s so efficiently managed, it seems to be one that’s very badly managed.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Here’s a thought. Rather than just getting the shifts you’ve been assigned to make things easy for the company, such a system could also let you tailor your own preferences to a hugely personal degree. How much notice do you need to arrange childcare? What days do other commitments mean you are less likely to be able to take another shift? What’s the furthest you’d be willing to travel to cover a shift at a different branch? What are the longest hours you’d want to work during the month of Ramadan? How do you mark a temporary change to your availability – like doing a short course at the union learning centre?</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The insights you could gain from talking to workers about their own aims & situations would make that system so much more useful to the workers themselves. But these things that wouldn’t normally occur to the business to build in would lead to happier workers, and ultimately improve productivity. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It’d help deal with the favouritism and discrimination you often get in shift management, in locally and informally squaring the problems of a system that doesn’t fit its workforce. That’s something that came out as a big concern in the research for our young workers’ project.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Now, companies are already pretty handy at conducting user testing for their interactions with their customers. Nobody wants to spend a year building a new service that people won’t buy. Even a tricky form, or missing some key customer concern, could result in an increase in dropped carts – something that’s easy for the company to quantify.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">And that’s where unions could come in. Who else is good at getting to the bottom of issues at work, helping workers name and discuss them in a supportive atmosphere, and devising solutions that can win widespread worker acceptance? We’re great at tackling problems when they arise, but here’s a way we could tackle them beforehand too.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Unions are good on the power analysis of the systems that make work work. But whether it’s ride-hailing, stock control, or business intelligence systems, too often we’re seeing basic decisions made by a bunch of white guys in California, with all the privilege implications that brings with it. AI is going to take over more and more employment decisions, but what’s the effect of design privilege that we need to challenge before it gets baked into the systems that will govern our lives?</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Union branches could be an ideal channel to recruit user testers from amongst the workforce and conduct meaningful codesign work on our employment systems. They’ve already got mechanisms for convening workers in a trusted and independent space, and collating and representing their views to management. Let’s just update their methods to fit, and view member input into systems design the same way we currently view a process of negotiation with the employer on how those new systems are introduced.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Union learning centres could make great workplace test environments. Bigger unions could run their own, with facilitators provided by the union, or even shared between smaller unions. Training reps as facilitators could be really valuable to the employer (and the union), helping to mainstream digital transformation efforts in the company.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">And where systems are bad but management unresponsive or hostile, unions could find their own independently conducted worker user research a useful way to pinpoint the workforce’s problems and run a clear campaign around workers’ own user needs in work. It could give clear evidence of a problem, that comes packaged with a validated pathway to a solution. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">There’s obviously a heavy investment needed here for this to be done properly, training reps and staff in service design methodologies. But there’s a win there for improving the systems that impact so heavily on our members’ working lives. And the new ways of working could rub off in unions too, improving our own systems for a current and future generation of users.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A right to co-design, anyone? I can see the slogans already. “What are our user needs? When do we want them?”</span></p><p> </p><p><em>PS – Thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/johnchadfield">John Chadfield</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/wrklsshrd">Sam Jeffers</a> for sensible pointers & inspiration in this.</em></p>]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Why I’m voting remain: Like you wanted to know…</title> <link>http://johninnit.co.uk/2016/06/23/why-im-voting-remain-like-you-wanted-to-know/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[john]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 22 Jun 2016 23:12:53 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category> <category><![CDATA[EU referendum]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://johninnit.co.uk/?p=1577</guid> <description><![CDATA[First up, I obvs have a day job which involves trying to stop people from getting screwed over by bad bosses. So if I have to declare a personal interest in the outcome, it’s that leaving and letting this lot go through our employment rights with a big red pen would mean a LOT of …]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>First up, I obvs have a day job which involves trying to stop people from getting screwed over by bad bosses. So if I have to declare a personal interest in the outcome, it’s that leaving and letting <a href="http://touchstoneblog.org.uk/2016/05/10-top-brexiteers-explain-theyre-danger-rights-work/">this lot</a> go through our employment rights with a big red pen would mean a LOT of grief for me (if only a fraction of the grief for those people who end up losing the right to refuse excessive hours, or with fewer safety protections).</p><p>But main reasons the referendum touches on my life, and the main reasons I’ll vote, are to do with my family.</p><p>I was lucky enough to study and work in Germany. It was a great time and a fantastic opportunity. I want my kids to have that. One will make a natural scientist or engineer – how cool would it be for him to be able to study somewhere like CERN, coming from a country still stuck properly into the biggest science collaboration in the world? One would be a great coder, and I want London still to be a tech leader when he comes out of school, a place that attracts the best from the continent to build a world leading sector, and offers our people the best opportunities.</p><p>Okay, to be fair, my third son would probably want to be a reality TV star, and we’ll still have those even after Brexit.</p><p>But as the most prominent of the Leave side’s handful of economists, Patrick Minford, seems happy to jettison our manufacturing industry, and the way they trot out people like Zero Hours king Tim Martin of Wetherspoons to represent them on industry, it looks increasingly as though a Brexit economy would be a diverse mix of hedge funders, freed from the EU’s responsible finance regs, and nearly everyone else serving them coffee on “flexible” contracts.</p><p>They are taking the most colossal risk with our kids’ futures, and they’re doing it so they can “take back control” from unelected bureaucrats.</p><p>Okay, EU decision making is crap in many ways, but I have no interest in taking back control to then give it to a Tory government hardly anyone voted for, thanks to our bobbins electoral system, with an unelected second house (providing unelected minsters in government too). Yes, the EU has an unelected executive. Have you noticed our own civil service and spadocracy anybody?</p><p>Most of what I dislike about Britain is to do with Tories, not the EU:</p><p>TTIP – Tories<br />Ideological inaction on steel – Tories<br />Bosses undercutting with migrant workers – Tories<br />Overstretched schools and housing – Tories<br />NHS in crisis – Tories</p><p>All Brexit does is turn the Tories up to 11.</p><p>Remain has been dubbed “project fear”. Frankly I’m engaged in a one man “project shitting myself”.</p><p>Vote Remain. Pretty please.</p>]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Hrvatski Zvučnici svugdje, pridružite se sindikatu!</title> <link>http://johninnit.co.uk/2016/05/04/hrvatski-zvucnici-svugdje-pridruzite-se-sindikatu/</link> <comments>http://johninnit.co.uk/2016/05/04/hrvatski-zvucnici-svugdje-pridruzite-se-sindikatu/#comments</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[john]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 04 May 2016 08:00:43 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Unions]]></category> <category><![CDATA[video]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Croatia]]></category> <category><![CDATA[trade unions]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://johninnit.co.uk/?p=1567</guid> <description><![CDATA[OMG how cool is this? A little video about unions that I shot in my lunchbreak 7 years ago has just been remade by trade unionists in Croatia - in Croatian! <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hfgAKhWLCgc?rel=0" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe> This really surprised me as I know colleagues in Spain and the Netherlands tried to translate it into their languages, but found the grammar rules made it a little tricky. Much respect to the guys at <a href="http://www.sssh.hr/hr/">SSSH</a> (<a href="http://www.sssh.hr/en">Union of Autonomous Trade Unions of Croatia</a>) for trying it. Made my day!]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>OMG how cool is this? A little video about unions that I shot in my lunchbreak 7 years ago has just been remade by trade unionists in Croatia – in Croatian!</p><p><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hfgAKhWLCgc?rel=0" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p><p>This really surprised me as I know colleagues in Spain and the Netherlands tried to translate it into their languages, but found the grammar rules made it a little tricky. Much respect to the guys at <a href="http://www.sssh.hr/hr/">SSSH</a> (<a href="http://www.sssh.hr/en">Union of Autonomous Trade Unions of Croatia</a>) for trying it. Made my day!</p><p>So far I’ve had 280,000 Youtube views for the original version, which has been frankly more to do with networks than with me. Labourstart.org picked up on it early on, pushing it to about 40,000 views, and getting me requests for offline copies, which have now been shown at union training sessions in the States, UK, Australia and Pakistan, put on cable TV in Australia and put in a shorts section of labour film festivals in the US and Canada. Then after a couple of quiet years on it I got a knock from Upworthy, to run it in their former Workonomics section. Overnight it put on another 200,000 views, mostly in the States, where the typo I failed to spot (grr) confused people less than the lack of a ‘z’ in organisation.</p><p>But this is probably my favourite experience from it so far. I’ll raise a glass of sljivovica to our Croatian colleagues, and hope it works out useful for them. If you’re reading this in Croatia – go <a href="http://www.sssh.hr/hr/">join an SSSH union</a> now!</p><p>PS – here’s the original for those whose Croatian is as rusty as mine…</p><p><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LLGoKqPAhSk?rel=0" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p><p>(and continued kudos to Moby for very kindly making so much of his music free for indy/amateur films at <a href="http://www.mobygratis.com/">mobygratis.com</a>)</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://johninnit.co.uk/2016/05/04/hrvatski-zvucnici-svugdje-pridruzite-se-sindikatu/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>1</slash:comments> </item> <item> <title>Home care workers. Caring, professional and treated like shit</title> <link>http://johninnit.co.uk/2015/01/22/home-care-workers-caring-professional-and-treated-like-shit/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[john]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2015 12:07:54 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Unions]]></category> <category><![CDATA[care]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unison]]></category> <category><![CDATA[zero hours]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://johninnit.co.uk/?p=1542</guid> <description><![CDATA[<img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-1544" src="http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/10918928_838322562877836_5892056049956910045_o-1024x512.png" alt="This is how we treat care workers" width="700" height="350" /> My Dad, who died 18 months back, had home care help in the last years of his illness. My Mum moved mountains to keep him at home, where he needed to be, but what she achieved simply wouldn't have been possible without the daily help of agency home care workers. It really isn't possible for me to say enough about all of the carers who I met. They were amazing people, doing a really complex job with huge diligence, compassion and enthusiasm. They cared for Dad's needs in a job that could be physically as well as emotionally demanding. They spotted health concerns and made sure things we wouldn't have noticed were followed up properly. They took it upon themselves to help smooth out some of the bumps in the healthcare bureaucracy for their clients, in their own time. But the most remarkable thing is that they managed to maintain this professionalism day in day out, whilst their employer consistently treated them like shit...]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-1544" src="http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/10918928_838322562877836_5892056049956910045_o-1024x512.png" alt="This is how we treat care workers" width="700" height="350" srcset="http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/10918928_838322562877836_5892056049956910045_o-1024x512.png 1024w, http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/10918928_838322562877836_5892056049956910045_o-300x150.png 300w, http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/10918928_838322562877836_5892056049956910045_o.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" /></p><p>My Dad, who died 18 months back, had home care help in the last years of his illness. My Mum moved mountains to keep him at home, where he needed to be, but what she achieved simply wouldn’t have been possible without the daily help of agency home care workers.</p><p>It really isn’t possible for me to say enough about all of the carers who I met. They were amazing people, doing a really complex job with huge diligence, compassion and enthusiasm. They cared for Dad’s needs in a job that could be physically as well as emotionally demanding. They spotted health concerns and made sure things we wouldn’t have noticed were followed up properly. They took it upon themselves to help smooth out some of the bumps in the healthcare bureaucracy for their clients, in their own time.</p><p>But the most remarkable thing is that they managed to maintain this professionalism day in day out, whilst their employer consistently treated them like shit.<span id="more-1542"></span></p><p>Over the time they were visiting Dad, their working conditions went from bad to worse. The company were a national agency, better known as a construction firm. I looked into it and found the company had got into care in a roundabout way. After doing construction for councils, they started taking on building management contracts for those buildings too. Then they noticed local government had an increasing number of outsourcing contracts in other areas – and they saw a healthy profit that could be made by hiring in casualised workers instead and taking a big slice off the cost of their conditions.</p><p>Here’s are some of the employer tricks I found out when I was visiting (in between passing round UNISON membership forms):</p><ul><li>Not paying travel time. Carers had to cover clients in three towns, and their rotas routinely had them sitting in traffic in the area’s clogged arterial roads. In rush hour they could spend longer between visits than they did at the clients. But their zero hours contracts treated them as working only once they’d arrived at the client and clocked in by phone. A full day at the employer’s beck and call could count for much less in paid hours.</li><li>Underpaying car costs. For their unpaid travel time, they were paid a per-mile car allowance that didn’t always cover petrol costs, let alone other car costs.</li><li>Not paying for cancelled visits. This could be quite often as they were dealing with people who could be in and out of hospital at a moment’s notice. They could turn up at a client’s door to find there was no shift needed. The agency still billed the council. Just they didn’t pass it on. It might work out that they lost a daily visit for a whole week this way, which could be a significant pay hit.</li><li>Not employing enough staff to organise rotas properly. Some jobs were one carer only. More intensive ones like Dad needed two. But the rotas seldom lined up. Often a team would come after two separate single jobs, but were given arrival times 15 mins apart. The one who was told to come first had to wait outside for their partner before they were allowed to come in and clock in by phone. Unpaid time of course.</li><li>Making drivers pick up non-driving colleagues. Those who had cars were often on rota to give lifts to their shift partners. They got the same mileage exes for it, but the detours needed all added to the unpaid travel time.</li><li>Having systems that were designed around the business, not the workers. Rotas changed from week to week, but they’d not know until the end of the week what their times were for the next. It generally stayed the same, but they could never count on it, making planning their personal lives difficult. This even extended to little things. Often the agency had notice of changes that they could have given much earlier but just didn’t. The agency wouldn’t even email out the next week’s rotas, as the carers would have liked, so they had to travel to the office in the next town to pick them up every week in person. Unpaid.</li><li>15 minute visits. This was a new stipulation from the council. Some time and motion study found the job could be done in that time. But a job like that doesn’t always go to plan. Often they’d clock out and then stay on unpaid time to help with a sudden problem. They often worried there just wasn’t the time for them to give the intensely personal care they’d come into the job to do.</li></ul><p>All these little slices at their terms and conditions just piled up and up. Losing paid hours from a day on a low base rate meant most of them ended up on less than the national minimum wage. Yes, that means they were being <strong>illegally</strong> badly paid, not just badly paid.</p><p>And what’s most annoying is it doesn’t have to be that way, even under the current regime of funding cuts for social care. Carers from another agency helped give Mum a few hours off every week. Their agency was a non-profit, set up to provide social care. The carers got more stability on shifts and a better pay rate (tho still not quite the Living Wage). The agency were commissioned through the council in the same way, and billing the council the same amount per shift. It’s just that they were evidently spending more of the money on the staff who did the work, and taking a lower profit.</p><p>There are a few sparse signs that carers are organising themselves. I heard of UNISON recognitions here and there and the GMB also represent many carers, but none of them told me they’d joined in that time. It’s easy to see why it’s so hard to organise. Good care workers are being driven out of the profession every week by the conditions, and the fragmented network of small agencies providing care since the council direct employed teams were outsourced means that there’s a lot of staff churn between agencies. Plus of course when you’re on poverty wages, with no income security from week to week, even lowest tier union fees are a big hurdle.</p><p>But there’s one quick win that might help to turn the tide a little. HMRC used to inspect the care sector, and brought cases against many agencies, helping to keep lots of the others a little more honest. This has now stopped, and it needs to be brought back again as things are getting worse. There are big name companies and small agencies alike that could be clobbered for systemic non-payment, but that are going unpunished for the lack of ministerial direction.</p><p><strong><a href="https://campaign.goingtowork.org.uk/petitions/catch-the-criminal-care-employers-end-the-scandal-of-illegally-paid-care-workers">UNISON are petitioning Vince Cable to give that direction and restart HMRC inspections for non-payment of the minimum wage in the care sector. Please sign it!</a></strong></p><p>This one is personal for me. I can put names and faces to each of these abuses and I owe them all a huge debt for the difference they made to my family. Please do take just a minute to sign up and help UNISON do something more about this and bring a small degree of stability to the sector and to many good people’s lives. I’d really appreciate it!</p><p>PS: For the story from the sharper side, <a href="http://touchstoneblog.org.uk/2014/12/decentjobsweek-i-love-being-a-home-care-worker-but-i-hate-the-insecurity/">this piece by a care worker</a> tells it in her own words.</p>]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Not missing Amazon this Christmas</title> <link>http://johninnit.co.uk/2014/12/10/not-missing-amazon-this-christmas/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[john]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2014 22:58:22 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Amazon]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Amazon Anonymous]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Xmas]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://johninnit.co.uk/?p=1520</guid> <description><![CDATA[<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1524" src="http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/amazon.jpg" alt="amazon" width="640" height="300" /> Like tens of thousands of others, I'm avoiding Amazon for Christmas <a href="http://www.amazonanonymous.org/" target="_blank">with Amazon Anonymous</a>. I got an email from them today, asking me to write to Amazon Customer services with my reasons. Here they are...]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1524" src="http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/amazon.jpg" alt="amazon" width="640" height="300" srcset="http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/amazon.jpg 640w, http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/amazon-300x140.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /></p><p>Like tens of thousands of others, I’m avoiding Amazon for Christmas <a href="http://www.amazonanonymous.org/" target="_blank">with Amazon Anonymous</a>. I got an email from them today, asking me to write to Amazon Customer services with my reasons. Here they are:</p><blockquote><p>Dear Amazon.co.uk,</p><p>I’ve spent thousands of pounds at Amazon over the last fifteen years, on books music, electronics, kids’ toys and a lot of printer ink, so I thought it would be much harder to do the Amazon Christmas challenge than it actually turns out to be.</p><p>This year I’ve spent my money online with a lot of different smaller retailers instead, rather than starting my searches at Amazon. It’s been a bit slower than usual but worth it I think to help make a really important point.</p><p>I do like the idea behind Amazon a lot – you’ve been a consistent force for change online and a track record on innovation means you’ve pioneered so much of what now are conventions of online shopping. One-click ordering, affiliate marketing, multiple merchant inventory, long tail shopping, wrap round packaging, and fast delivery even on the slowest options. I remember building my first online store in a previous job, wondering how our “wait 28 days for delivery” policy would stack up against Amazon. It didn’t.</p><p>I just wish the good side of relentlessly innovative Amazon didn’t come with the relentless innovation on the dark side too. Innovations like:</p><ul><li>Working out it’s cheaper to <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons-very-hot-warehouse/?_r=0">hire ambulances</a> to sit outside your US warehouses in summer months to cart workers away if they collapse from heatstroke, rather than to make working conditions more bearable.</li><li>Deciding the loss of goodwill and respect from your US staff for making them wait hours a week unpaid <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-06/amazon-workers-take-security-line-woes-to-supreme-court.html">to be searched</a> for stolen stock before they can go off shift is a trade worth making.</li><li>Seeking out areas for new distribution centres where you can get local government infrastructure subsidy on the promise of bringing jobs, but then delivering only jobs so short term and insecure that you can just cycle them in and out of unemployment, to avoid giving them employment rights.</li><li>A three points discipline system that’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXWJ4GfQ22E">so easy</a> to trigger you can keep firing and rehiring people as you need them.</li><li>Technologically monitoring people working for you <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_sick_brutality_and_secret_history_of_ruthlessly_intimidating_workers/">so closely</a> you can justify sacking them for being unproductive for “several minutes”, regardless of the fact the majority in the UK report walking more than 10 miles for you in a shift.</li><li>Spotting the opportunities of the economic downturn to offer desperate people an even smaller slice to do work you would have paid more for years ago. What did it for me was Amazon deliveries made by parents in their private cars late into the evening, with the kids trying to sleep in the back.</li><li>The double tax subsidy – Paying your people so little that the taxpayer has to make up their wages, whilst finding new ways to duck corporate taxes – £4.24 million tax on £10.82 billion sales in the last 3 years on record: a tax rate of less than 0.5%</li></ul><p>Amazon is a beautiful digital front on what is the retail equivalent of strip mining.</p><p>Fundamentally, the dark side of your business is about cutting everything to the bone, running a low profit company for years in order to kill off any older and more established competition and form yourselves an unbreakable monopoly in publishing and in retail – maybe in broadcasting next, who knows?</p><p>This is a relentless drive that doesn’t care that the older ways of doing things have sometimes become ‘established’ precisely because they’ve been found over time to work out a little better for everyone in society.</p><p>But ultimately if your drive for innovation isn’t going to be useful for society, then what’s the point?</p><p>I know people at Amazon aren’t bad – you have some fantastic people working for you in developing all the neat stuff. I understand you’re looking at solving some big questions, and making things work better.</p><p>Just please put a bit of that talent into seeing where the dark side is leading you. Hey, even Anakin Skywalker came good in the end…</p><p>Best wishes for Christmas – without me as a customer this time,<br />John</p></blockquote><p>If you can write your own Christmas letter to Amazon, please do. <a href="http://www.amazonanonymous.org/xmas-wish-list/">Here’s where you can do it, via Amazon Anonymous</a>.</p>]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>He’s at it again: Lansley has form on pauses that aren’t anything of the sort</title> <link>http://johninnit.co.uk/2013/11/09/hes-at-it-again-lansley-has-form-on-pauses-that-arent-anything-of-the-sort/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[john]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Sat, 09 Nov 2013 11:30:53 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Andrew Lansley]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Lobbying Bill]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Part three]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unions]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.johninnit.co.uk/?p=1518</guid> <description><![CDATA[Remember the Health and Social Care Bill listening exercise, anyone? When former Health Secretary Andrew Lansley ran into difficulties with his Dick Dastardly NHS plans, he called a reflective pause, just long enough to do bugger all, whilst the media conveniently forgot what he was up to in privatising our NHS. Jeremy Hunt may have …]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Remember the Health and Social Care Bill listening exercise, anyone? When former Health Secretary Andrew Lansley ran into difficulties with his Dick Dastardly NHS plans, he called a reflective pause, just long enough to do bugger all, whilst the media conveniently forgot what he was up to in privatising our NHS. Jeremy Hunt may have finished the job, but Lansley’s listening exercise masterstroke was enough to buy off the fretting ranks of Lib Dems, and get the job done without too great a rebellion, and without any significant concessions.</p><p>Fast forward to 2013 and Lansley is mired once again in a dog’s dinner of a Bill, this time one ostensibly designed to deal with the lobbying sleaze crisis in Parliament, but which seems to actually do very little to upset the interests of the big money corrupting our politics. Business lobbyists have unsurprisingly avoided any significant changes, whilst 38 Degrees and Hope Not Hate are being thumped for daring to think about the government’s failings. And unions have been included too, mainly because it seems they haven’t been punished much of late.<br /><span id="more-1518"></span></p><p>What’s a poor Lord Privy Seal to do? Well, why not reduce the heat by calling for a pause, and hinting at a few changes? That should take the wind out of the sails of those pesky civil liberties campaigners, just long enough to regroup and push it through again come December.</p><p>That seems to be working for him again, but this time though, he’s decided to try two birds with one stone – Why even waste time with a pause, when you can pause one part of the Bill and speed up another, to keep to your overall timetable whilst looking to all the world like you’ve compromised?</p><p>You have to admire the chutzpah of the guy. Two months grace on the civil society gagging clauses, but he’s done it by bringing the section on trade unions forward two months to match. So whilst UK progressive types celebrate a supposed victory on one section, we now have no time to prepare for a Lords battle on some severe but superfluous union-bashing regulation (of which <a href="http://strongerunions.org/2013/11/08/partisan-and-pointless-the-lobbying-bills-attack-on-trade-unions/">I’ve wrote more on here</a>).</p><p>And whilst it might not seem as severe as the damage Lansley would like to inflict on Hope Not Hate (basically banning them doing anything at all for one year in five), the punishment he wants to mete out to unions is pretty drastic. Costs of implementation could be a real problem for some unions, and the work required to keep up with vexatious challenges under the new regs from political opponents. But we’re most annoyed about the way this pries into the privacy of 6 million UK union members – sharing information they’d thought was confidential with government agencies and employers’ agents.</p><p>Compounding the injury is the insult that they just don’t care about the problems they might cause for union members, evidenced in their belief that you can call forward a snap debate and vote at just days’ notice, as it presumably doesn’t matter much. The chance for scrutiny of part 2 is a good thing – this is a Bad Bill on all fronts – but it should be a genuine pause. Lansley’s playing bait and switch to get his legislation past Parliament, and despite overwhelming civil society opposition.</p><p>All of which is saying, if reading this hasn’t totally exhausted your caring-about-stuff time for today, please <a href="http://www.goingtowork.org.uk/peers/?campaign=9">send an email to a member of the House of Lords now</a>. Real people lobbying them is a good antidote to a Bill that does nothing on the real problem of corrupting big lobbying money in politics. Wonder why the supposed Lobbying Bill is so silent on that?</p>]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Embedding a Vine (for the sake of it)</title> <link>http://johninnit.co.uk/2013/02/19/embedding-a-vine-for-the-sake-of-it/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[john]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Tue, 19 Feb 2013 07:51:56 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Teh Web]]></category> <category><![CDATA[video]]></category> <category><![CDATA[code]]></category> <category><![CDATA[embed]]></category> <category><![CDATA[twitter]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Vine]]></category> <category><![CDATA[wordpress.org]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.johninnit.co.uk/?p=1504</guid> <description><![CDATA[Being a semi-professional Apple-hater, I’ve not had much use for Twitter’s new YTMND style videomaker toy, Vine. However, never let it be said I don’t like to fiddle with new stuff, so we had a go at one, just to say we did it, and so we could then forget all about it. The interface …]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Being a semi-professional Apple-hater, I’ve not had much use for Twitter’s new YTMND style videomaker toy, <a href="http://vine.co/" target="_blank">Vine</a>. However, never let it be said I don’t like to fiddle with new stuff, so we had a go at one, just to say we did it, and so we could then forget all about it. The interface is very nice (leaving all discussion of the point of it aside), and it was easy to produce something speedy around <a href="http://pinterest.com/pin/23151385556596272/" target="_blank">a recent campaign graphic</a> by a very clever colleague about the Working Time Directive.</p><p>However, it annoyed me a bit that it was so disposable – it goes out on Twitter and Facebook and that’s pretty much it. Hopefully the web services for Vine will come onstream at some point (and the Android app for the rest of us…), but in the meantime, here’s a slightly roundabout way to embed your Vine on your WordPress.org blog.<span id="more-1504"></span></p><p>First off, you need to make sure you add it to Twitter. This is the last option Vine gives you when creating it, and if you skip it, you won’t get seen. The Vine itself isn’t actually shown in the timeline unless you click the “view media” link to expand it, but then you get to see it in all its 6 second glory.</p><p>Now, Twitter last year introduced the option to embed tweets into a web page. You’ll find it under the “more” link, bottom right of each tweet in the timeline. And this is how you’ll get to embed the Vine elsewhere on the web. Click it, and then “embed tweet” and you’ll get a snippet of code to copy. Make sure you check the “include media” box before copying.</p><p>Then off to WordPress, where you switch to Text view in a post, click “code”, paste the snippet and click “code” again to close it. Don’t switch back to Visual editing view (it might be a good idea to write the rest of the post before you do this), or it could screw up the code.</p><p>And here’s the result:</p><p><code></p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>5 work rights you might well miss if David Cameron revokes the EU Working Time Directive http://www.stopemp... <a href="http://t.co/QybdtUSn" title="http://vine.co/v/bJjLPgUlv1d">vine.co/v/bJjLPgUlv1d</a></p><p>— Stronger Unions (@strongerunions) <a href="https://twitter.com/strongerunions/status/296304620190433280">January 29, 2013</a></p></blockquote><p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></code></p><p>True, you’re not directly embedding the Vine, and it’s including all the rest of the tweet stuff and formatting around it, but hey, that should be enough to prove you actually did make one, and can now go off an fiddle with something else…</p><p> </p>]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>WCIT: The regulation of the Internet in memes</title> <link>http://johninnit.co.uk/2012/12/06/wcit-the-regulation-of-the-internet-in-memes/</link> <comments>http://johninnit.co.uk/2012/12/06/wcit-the-regulation-of-the-internet-in-memes/#comments</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[john]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Thu, 06 Dec 2012 13:03:29 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Teh Web]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Dubai]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Internet]]></category> <category><![CDATA[ITU]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Memes]]></category> <category><![CDATA[WCIT]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.johninnit.co.uk/?p=1461</guid> <description><![CDATA[Having the attention span of a gnat, my head is getting proper done in by watching and reading the impenetrable stuff coming out of WCIT in Dubai – and we’re only 3 days in. Luckily persons smarter than I are making more sense of it online for me to read on blogs & Twitter – …]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Having the attention span of a gnat, my head is getting proper done in by <a href="http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Pages/webcast.aspx" target="_blank">watching</a> and reading the impenetrable stuff coming out of WCIT in Dubai – and we’re only 3 days in. Luckily persons smarter than I are making more sense of it online for me to read on blogs & Twitter – Thank heavens for a vibrant and pluralistic and open Web, eh?</p><p>So I thought the best contribution I could make for others like myself would be to present these complex and high level debates as a series of tired old memes. It’s my way of honouring Russia’s proposals to the ITU that countries should be able to restrict the Net to just “rational” uses.</p><p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1464" title="Hamadoun Toure" src="http://s542374874.websitehome.co.uk/johninnit/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/hamadoun-toure.jpg" alt="All your base are not belong to us" width="400" height="451" srcset="http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/hamadoun-toure.jpg 400w, http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/hamadoun-toure-266x300.jpg 266w" sizes="(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px" /></p><p><span id="more-1461"></span>ITU Sec Gen Hamadoun Toure has been rather at pains in the run up to Dubai to point out that all the nasty things being said about the ITU are terribly unfair, but especially that the ITU doesn’t have plans to regulate the Internet. The ITUC have <a href="http://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/response_to_itu_posted_comments-2.pdf" target="_blank">documented their own ding dong with him</a>, and he does indeed have half a point, but it’s also fair to say the proposals do amount to an attempt to secure at least a greater degree of ITU involvement in Internet regulation (which may be a good or bad thing), and various ITU members definitely are seeking more of same, even if Dr Toure might be too modest himself.</p><p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1463" title="Vint Cerf" src="http://s542374874.websitehome.co.uk/johninnit/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/vint-cerf.jpg" alt="Oh, you like sender pays?" width="400" height="380" srcset="http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/vint-cerf.jpg 400w, http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/vint-cerf-300x285.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px" /></p><p>Internet supreme being Vint Cerf (co-inventor of TCP/IP and now Google’s official Internet Evangelist) has been rather exercised about all of this. Whilst an open internet brings with it other problems (monopoly search providers anyone?), it’s been the major driver in building the rapid innovation that’s given us so much in recent decades. Developing countries may well be a tad pissed off that they’re paying for the delivery of Google’s services to their citizens, and fancy a slice of Google’s earnings for their assistance, but I’d worry that they’ve more to lose by the greater digital divide of being cut off from global services running on micropayments that wouldn’t generate enough ARPU in many countries for it to be worth the sending.</p><p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1465" title="Terry Kramer" src="http://s542374874.websitehome.co.uk/johninnit/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/terry-kramer.jpg" alt="One does not simply regulate the internet" width="400" height="291" /></p><p>US Ambassador Terry Kramer tried some bold ITUjitsu, to limit the scope of WCIT’s decisions just to the telecoms services type stuff the body was set up for, and to leave off regulating internet companies that don’t actually own any wires. This didn’t go down all that well, though <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/271299-kramer-reports-on-un-treaty-inaccurate" target="_blank">he can’t hear</a> the fat lady quite as well as the others yet.</p><p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1462" title="Nikolai Nikiforov" src="http://s542374874.websitehome.co.uk/johninnit/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Nikolai-Nikiforov.jpg" alt="YO DAWG, I HEARD YOU LIKE HUMAN RIGHTS" width="400" height="262" srcset="http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Nikolai-Nikiforov.jpg 400w, http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Nikolai-Nikiforov-300x196.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px" /></p><p>The Russians have been keen to get standards for Deep Packet Inspection included in WCIT’s deliberations. Cynics might say this could be to legitimise some of their restrictive practices by letting them say they’re only keeping to UN standards, or maybe to try to get other governments doing it too, so they don’t look so bad. But of course, maybe they just want to know what a DPI is for certain so they can make certain they never do anything that naughty? (<a href="http://boingboing.net/2012/12/05/leaked-itus-secret-internet.html" target="_blank">BoingBoing has the leaked text</a>).</p><p>And of course if you find this all less LOLworthy than me, there’s still time to <a href="http://action.goingtowork.org.uk/page/s/stop-the-net-grab" target="_blank">sign the TUC/ITUC petition to delegates</a>. And Mozilla have some <a href="https://webmaker.org/en-US/ITU/kit/" target="_blank">great resources and pointers</a> for people wanting to get stuck in over WCIT.</p><p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1477" title="in Russian proposals" src="http://s542374874.websitehome.co.uk/johninnit/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/in-russian-proposals.jpg" alt="In Russian proposals internet regulates you" width="400" height="306" srcset="http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/in-russian-proposals.jpg 400w, http://johninnit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/in-russian-proposals-300x229.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px" /></p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://johninnit.co.uk/2012/12/06/wcit-the-regulation-of-the-internet-in-memes/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>1</slash:comments> </item> <item> <title>Unionmade Goods hipster clothing not actually union made. Whodathunk?</title> <link>http://johninnit.co.uk/2012/11/30/unionmade-goods-not-actually-union-made-whodathunk/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[john]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Fri, 30 Nov 2012 18:35:23 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Human rights]]></category> <category><![CDATA[unionbusting]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unions]]></category> <category><![CDATA[USA]]></category> <category><![CDATA[labor]]></category> <category><![CDATA[rights]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Union Made]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unionmade Goods]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.johninnit.co.uk/?p=1455</guid> <description><![CDATA[Via a rather pissed off AFL-CIOnow today, I came across a Gawker article about Californian clothing company Unionmade Goods. They sell upmarket priced downmarket looking clothing to the good hipster folk of the Bay Area. All quite pleasant looking, if rather on the pricey side, and topped off with a woolly commitment to ethical sourcing, …]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1458" title="unionmade: unionbusters?" src="http://s542374874.websitehome.co.uk/johninnit/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/unionmade.gif" alt="Unionmade Goods: unionbusters?" width="450" height="234" /></p><p>Via a rather pissed off <a href="http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Corporate-Greed/AFL-CIO-Demands-Unionmade-Stop-Its-Fakery">AFL-CIOnow</a> today, I came across a <a href="http://gawker.com/5961169/unionmade-retailer-of-expensive-fashions-that-are-not-union-made">Gawker article</a> about Californian clothing company <a href="http://unionmadegoods.com/" target="_blank">Unionmade Goods</a>. They sell upmarket priced downmarket looking clothing to the good hipster folk of the Bay Area.</p><p>All quite pleasant looking, if rather on the pricey side, and topped off with a woolly commitment to ethical sourcing, which is some way better than nowt for the fashion industry. But what’s this? Apparently the fact they’re called “Unionmade” and have a rip off US union logo, is not to be taken as any kind of inference that unions have been involved at any point in the process.<span id="more-1455"></span></p><p>I saw something rather similar in the UK a few years back, when Firetrap tried a US blue-collar collection, replete with <a href="http://www.johninnit.co.uk/2007/11/08/union-made">“union made” T-shirts</a>. After badgering them for some time, they relented and told me that their line had nothing to do with unions at all.</p><p>It got me wondering, why is it that a fashion brand can think it can get away with abusing the union made mark? It’s not like they’d ever think twice about writing “Fair Trade”, “Organic Cotton”, or “Not tested on animals” on something that wasn’t.</p><p>I imagine in the rarified and union-free atmosphere of fashion design, they just see us as being a part of history to be plundered to get the right look. Even if they’re doing this out of a fond sort of nostalgia for better times, it’s a very harmful place for us to be if we let them get away with painting us into a historical corner.</p><p>For all the positive ethical choices that fashion companies can make in sourcing materials, none of them carries the guarantees that union made does – That the workers involved in the item’s production had an actual stake in the terms of their employment, not just relying on the extension of philanthropic whims.</p><p>You might like to big up that you make your clothes in a properly inspected factory. You might give your growers a fairer wage than the rest of the sector, or less harmful chemicals to work with. But if they don’t have a way to stand up for themselves, there isn’t the guarantee that things are going to stay good, especially when your buyer turns their back for a bit on the outsourced supplier you use.</p><p>So come on Unionmade Goods, wise up please. Exploiting your customers’ willingness to help low income workers in the garment sector is a pretty lousy way to make a big price premium on your clothes. Get it fixed and recruit some unionised suppliers (and hey, why not let your retail staff join too), and the next time in San Francisco, looking to spend $95 on a vintaged tweed tie, I’ll know where to get it.</p>]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>ITU Net grab: Russia give us a taste of their ideas for the Internet</title> <link>http://johninnit.co.uk/2012/11/30/itu-net-grab-russia-gives-us-a-taste-of-their-ideas-for-the-internet/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[john]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Fri, 30 Nov 2012 09:07:47 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Human rights]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Online Campaigns]]></category> <category><![CDATA[video]]></category> <category><![CDATA[block]]></category> <category><![CDATA[censorship]]></category> <category><![CDATA[International Telecommunication Union]]></category> <category><![CDATA[ITU]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Pussy Riot]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category> <category><![CDATA[WCIT]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.johninnit.co.uk/?p=1449</guid> <description><![CDATA[A Russian court yesterday ruled that websites which don’t remove Pussy Riot videos from their pages may be blocked. Judge Marina Musimovich (using a vaguely worded law originally aimed at curbing nazi and terrorist material) ruled that videos including the band’s controversial ‘punk prayer’ asking the virgin Mary to kick out Putin, had “elements of …]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>A Russian court yesterday ruled that websites which don’t remove Pussy Riot videos from their pages may be blocked. Judge Marina Musimovich (using a vaguely worded law originally aimed at curbing nazi and terrorist material) ruled that videos including the band’s controversial ‘punk prayer’ asking the virgin Mary to kick out Putin, had “elements of extremism” and called for “mass disorder”.</p><p>It’s a timely reminder of why Russia are so keen on some of the proposals they’re bringing to the International Telecommunication Union’s WCIT conference in Dubai over the next fortnight. If they pass, this sort of thing will get vastly easier for autocratic states to curb freedom of speech at home and abroad.<span id="more-1449"></span></p><p>Russia will be seeking to use a new treaty at WCIT to place an obligation on telcos to engage in deep packet inspection (monitoring the detail of what everybody is looking at online), so they can comply with requests from national governments to block services they don’t like, or in Russia’s words don’t consider “rational” uses of the Net.</p><p>So rather than having to enforce a ban on a particular YouTube embed on Russian hosted sites, Putin would be able to turn off access to it for Russians, regardless of where in the world it was hosted.</p><p>Of course, yesterday’s ruling proves that Russia already has some ability to censor the Net domestically, with this loose interpretation of anti-terror laws, and with other laws aimed at blocking whole services which the authorities claim could be hosting material harmful to children. But when they do this, it’s both tricky to execute and politically embarrassing for them to be shown up as autocrats.</p><p>If this becomes the default position on the Net, enshrined by UN treaty, Russia and other states can act with impunity, banning and blocking more easily as they want, whilst at the same time claiming to their people that it’s merely standard practice for all countries, not something that only bad regimes engage in, as they’re only following UN guidelines.</p><p>If the ITU conference in Dubai comes to a vote, it could be finely balanced, and without national vetos, if states like Russia get their way, it could cause real problems for the operation of the Net and freedoms we need to preserve online.</p><p>So please help by <a href="http://action.goingtowork.org.uk/page/s/stop-the-net-grab" target="_blank"><strong>signing the ITUC/TUC petition</strong></a> to ITU delegates in Dubai.</p><p>And make sure to watch punk prayer in solidarity!</p><p><code><iframe loading="lazy" width="450" height="253" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/GCasuaAczKY?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></code></p>]]></content:encoded> </item> </channel></rss> If you would like to create a banner that links to this page (i.e. this validation result), do the following:
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