It seems that all my freaky clothes are turning into rag

As ELO once sung, ‘vote for me’. Each year LabourStart holds an international competition to find the best, or at least most popular, union website in the world. Normally to win it helps to write in English (one tick for us) and to have readership in a large, populous country (one cross, so let’s do it for the little fullas, eh?)

Last year the British teachers’ union, NASUWT, won the competition and US weblog, Confined Space, became the first ‘blog to make LabourStart’s top ten websites of the year. So, let’s have a go and enter our unofficial ‘blog, the Gossip.

Yes, it’s true, we have our own real website at Finsec; a flashy little blue and orange number that, according to our statistics, was unusually popular with Icelandic people last year. But we have decided not to enter that site in the LabourStart union website of the year awards. Instead, we are offering you the chance to vote for the Gossip. After all, blogs are the new retro… and retro is the new black. So, let’s be havin’ your votes, thanks.

Tell us what you’re wanting to read

It’s been just under a month since the gossip shifted to wordpress.com and in that time we have had more than 1000 visits on our website (plus obviously all of you who read the gossip by weekly email). Our most popular stories appear to be the ones about outsourcing, with six of our top ten rating stories over the past month being on banks outsourcing or off-shoring work to other countries.

Stories on the supermarket distribution lockout were also well read, as were stories about women’s suffrage day, workplace bullying, being a gay banker in London and ANZ’s involvement in logging Papua New Guinean forests.

Our main website has had over 300,000 hits in the last five months with 36,000 individual visitors. Popular pages include each enterprise’s page with the relevant employment agreements, the latest updates and union council contact details as well as our library resources and the ‘join us’ page. Plenty of readers joining us from Australia, so perhaps some of those bank head offices are keeping a close eye on what we have to say?

So, we’ll continue to publish stories on those topics that are popular. If you have any feedback or comments and what you would like to see us writing about, let us know.

(Thanks to chotda for the photo)