A role for Facebook during a strike?

An article that appeared on Personnel Today about a recent civil service strike makes reference to Facebook and how employees who did not strike may do so if this continues to be the course of action taken by the PCS trade union.

Here are details of what is really supposed to have happened during the strike:

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) civil servants in Carlisle have alleged they were ordered to imitate answerphones between 12pm and 2pm on Monday, so that when callers got through, the workers would say: "Due to the high volume of enquiries we are currently experiencing, we are unable to take your call".

And here's how details of this management tactic became known to strikers and the media:

The claim, widely discussed on social networking site Facebook, is said to have made non-strikers consider joining the strike – which lasted two days between 8 Monday and 9 Tuesday March – over changes to the civil service redundancy terms.

For more details see Non-striking civil servants 'pretended to be answering machines' to handle volume of calls.

Work blogs back in the news

It's been a good few months since work blogs represented a major press feature.

In yesterday's Sunday Times was a story about a blogger reporting on the inner-workings of the current labour government.

The Civil Serf - as she calls herself - claims to be a 33-year-old fast-stream civil servant ready to expose the daily chaos of the Labour government machine while lampooning ministers and highlighting the idiocy of mandarin colleagues.

For more details see Hunt is on for the "Civil Serf" demon blogger of Whitehall by Jonathan Oliver.