Industrial Worker - Issue #1696, June 2007

Yeah it's looking jazzier, but there's some way to go in terms of the actual content.

There's also the issue of where articles are written. I read under "Superdull Union":-

Now nobody in the UK who is serious would write something like that. It's been known for a long time that the T&G and Amicus merger would be called Unite. It's also not "superdull" by any means. It is in fact quite an interesting development that we'd do well to take heed of - the beginings of a huge and powerful international industrial union, if it can activate its membership. There are also some reforms being made in the local branch and regional structures of Unite which will free up space for rank and file co-ordination. Not only that the new union will have massive implications for the politics of the TUC as it will hold 52% of all the votes. At present the RMT, perhaps prompted by this, has invited the banned (clean and democratic) union the OILC to merge with it. This may lead to their expulsion from the TUC. Whether any of that is a good thing or not is a moot point. It should be discussed seriously though as it's a pretty big deal.

I appreciate myself or others never wrote in on this, and part of the problem is the union's small size and lack of experienced union militants, and no doubt the fact that PM and AL have sorted out a way of ensuring we actually receive the fucker (currently almost nobody in the UK receives it) things like this are less likely to occur.

I think the difficulty with content is that it is user generated by just a small number of users so there's a tendency to include almost anything that gets sent in. We need to decide if we want the IW to be outward facing (in which case we'd need to really change the content and make it a lot less ideological, or simply focus solely on what the IWW are doing (minus the stuff that makes us sound insignificant), or inward facing (in which case it needs to raise the bar on the theoretical and strategic discussions to educate our members). Either way the current content of the magazine is unsuitable for both. The editor needs to be telling people not to send in pish, and be much more brutal about not publishing pish, and we seriously need to clear up the ambiguity about who it's written for.

Just so that this does not sound like a rant I have the very same issues with B&R by the way. I'd also note again the PM's editorship has seen the thing revitalised in the look of the thing and with little being sent in it can hardly be an easy job.

As a point of reference though, it's worth taking a peek at Blowout - the magazine of that union the RMT's invited to merge with it, the OILC (a decent, democratic, anti-partnership, UK oilworkers union). [It puts all IWW publications to shame because it's very clear what it is, and the content is actually properly researched and relevant to oilworkers. It doesn't do 'rants' except from readers in the letters page, so it has an authoritative tone that will encourage its readers to take its content seriously. It also handles having a leftwing bias much more subtly, and hence much better, than we do. We could learn an awful lot from those guys. Before the issue of greater resources comes up the OILC is tiny - they only have around 3500 members I think - and are banned by the TUC and blacklisted by the bosses in the oil industry.]