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We've been contacted by Middlesex University Press to see if a union blogger would be interested in writing a book review of Global Unions, Global Business, an interesting looking new book by Richard Croucher and Elizabeth Cotton, looking at the work of Global Union Federations, and their developing relationships with multinational empl

From The New Weekly, 5 April 1914. Used with kind permission from UnionHistory.info

Robert Tressall

Andy Stern
Free Press, 224 pages

America seems like a worrying place to be a leftie, and SEIU President Andy Stern lays out a formidable list of obstacles to progressive politics in this book. Global forces have changed the American economy to the point where the American dream that hard work can be valued and rewarded just isn’t a possibility any more. Income inequality has rocketed, job security is a distant memory, pensions and healthcare are imploding. Stern believes that the natural way to tackling this breach lies in trade unions, but that they will need to change themselves dramatically too in order to seize the opportunity.

book review by johninnit

A very apt book to kick off the tigmoo bookclub, this is at once a very illuminating peek into the world of working for a dotcom, and a hilarious satire. Stand-up comedian and story-teller Mike Daisey spent three years (21 dog years) working at Amazon in the US during the early days, and wrote up his experiences.

tigmoo.co.uk book club

We like books. We like reading them, we like talking about them and we shopping for them. There's just one fly in the ointment - one of our favourite companies for researching and buying books online, Amazon.co.uk, are rather fond of union busting, which is most certainly not high on the list of things we like. (Read this article by Gregor Gall for a bit more background on this).