I dreamed I saw Joe Hill

So I'd like to apologise to Gertrude Elion for missing out on her as feminist of the day. I've been attending the biennial conference of the largest democratic organisation in New Zealand. This is obviously a new use of the word democratic that I hadn't previously been aware of.

I'm unsure of how much I'm prepared to write about union politics at this stage, so I will stick to the highlight of the conference.

Less than twenty four hours after Helen Clark had announced that she would be forming a government with reactionary right-wing parties, the CTU conference gave her a standing ovation. During her speech she modified the only good thing to come out of the coalition agreemnts to be "we will be a government that aspires to get a minimum wage of close to $12 by 2008."

So then she got two more standing ovations.

To make it worse, we didn't sing any union songs - the closest was them twice playing half a verse of Power in a Union before replacing it with something from Nature's Best top 30 NZ songs compilation. Apparently the only place unionists sing union songs is at funerals.