This weekend I’m attending the LaborTech conference in San Francisco. I’ve been excited about this all week. The goal of this conference is to put social media, video, web, and cellphone training into the hands of the people who most need it: the workers who are trying to contest the “key messages” put out by corporations and the mainstream media.
I can’t believe how much I’ve learned in just a few hours. LaborTech is an International conference, so there are workers and organizers from all over the world.
One of the things I learned about was how Samsung, the most powerful corporation in South Korea (and prominent on a world scale as well), has been spying on its workers and using unbelievable union-busting tactics. For instance, Samsung management used the “Friend-Finding” GPS service to track workers and pinpoint where worker’s gathered to attempt to unionize. One of the first things I’m going to do when I get home this evening is write Engadget and other gadger review blogs to let them know how Samsung treats its workers: anyone who wants to put their consumer behavior behind upholding human rights should avoid buying anything from Samsung. I’m going to try to get a clip of the Samsung labor movement video to put on YouTube.
This conference is really focusing on video. There was an excellent video by Vivian Price on female construction workers in Japan. There was also a video on the months of labor revolution in Oaxaca, which includes the worker takeover of local radio and TV stations. There was a great sign that showed the LAW radio station being renamed LAW OF THE PEOPLE.
Mark Libkuman, an open source development planner who is speaking as I type this, lost a good friend in Oaxaca.
Here’s a pic of Steve Zeltzer, the Bay Area labor leader who was kind enough to invite me to LaborTech:
I have more pictures here. In the ongoing adventure in irony that is my life, my camera batteries just died. :-p Hopefully I can pick up some batteries over lunch and there will be more pictures tonight.
There’s no question that labor is where the netroots will be happening next simply because of the sheer failure of the media to report their perspective or the facts they have to contest corporate propaganda.