It’s always good to have a holiday – and I have just got back from Scotland, where the electorate seems almost to be awake in the run up to the forthcoming elections. If any Scottish readers can explain to me why all the posters I saw were on lamp posts rather than in windows I would be interested to know.
It is also good to be back home and to be back to blogging just at the time when sensible folk are trying to bring some order – and manners – to the blogosphere. My antipathy to anonymous blogging and the sort of playground bullying which anonymity encourages is not novel. I hope that those of us who are trying to bring blogging to trade unions (and trade unions to the blogosphere) will sign up to sensible ground rules for free and fair expression.
One possible excuse for anonymous blogging is that the blogger might lose their job if their employer knew that they were telling the truth about their work (a point made to good effect in today’s section on public service bloggers in the Grauniad). However, I also think that workplace trade unionism ought to be a forum and a focus for truthful expression about the reality of the workplace. If anonymity is the only way that workers can tell the truth about their experience at work then the union in the workplace is weaker than it should be.
Sadly that is all to often the case. Let’s change this.
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Hi John - not sure if you've heard of the Electronic Frontier Foundation? http://www.eff.org/ They've been around for a few years defending internet freedom but recently I noticed them as I was working on something about blogs & the workplace http://www.eff.org/br/
It would be good to link up with some trade union stuff as from my experiences it seems that an increasing number of union cases are due to internet related stuff..
Hope things are going well
Spencer (ex-Merton)
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