Unite - welcome to the 21st century virtual interweb
Feb 28th, 2008 by cpev
I have no idea whether Unite’s claims about M&S are true. Neither do I wish to be glib about the serious subject matter of workers’ conditions.
But I suspect that the union is selling its campaign very short with this sorry press release.
Apparently the union has launched “a virtual and actual campaign”. I beg your pardon? But hang on - it gets worse.
Unite Joint General Secretary, Tony Woodley says,”We are using virtual reality to highlight the actual reality for workers producing M&S meat and poultry.”
To be clear, he wasn’t talking about putting people in headsets and walking them through a digitised 3D horror of exploitative labour practices.
No, he was talking about a pay-per-click ad campaign, that was quickly snuffed out by Google because it breached well-established guidelines about advertising on the back of others’ trademarks.
And, perhaps, he was referring to a mailshot sent to over 100,000 UK email addresses and “thousands around the world”.
Amazingly, the cyber warfare strategy (no, really) managed to garner a fair bit of coverage in the mainstream media, meaning that the Unite press office will claim some success.
But I reckon they were lucky on this one. The notion that this kind of online campaign - revolving around a short-lived sponsored link campaign and some spam - represents a radical new frontier in industrial disputes totally fails to grasp the magnitude of what’s happening on the internet.
And by now the press really ought to know that.
Dear God, it’s The Times again. A couple of recent stories have made me realise how far it’s fallen off the internet:
“The union is effectively hijacking searches for M&S on Google” - in much the same way as Churchill are currently hijacking searches for car insurance or the WWF is waging cyber war on Greenpeace, I suppose.
It’s loose, web 0.5 reporting, and they need to get their head out of their arse if they want to stand a chance of catching the Telegraph or Guardian.
And another thing. If a journalist ever feels compelled to take the phrase ‘cyber war’ for a day out from the banned words list, the least they can do is apply it to a denial of service attack, or use it for something else that actually constitutes subterfuge or skulduggery before they get shot.