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Labour Website of the Year 2005 - IWW Comes in 6th

Submitted on Sun, 01/15/2006 - 5:41pm

Well the results are in.  Although disappointing that the IWW didn't win the competition for its centenary year, it is notable that the IWW beat all AFL-CIO union sites hands down.  

In this year's competition, 6,848 votes were cast for hundreds of trade union websites around the world. 5,578 (81%) of these confirmed their choice by email and only those votes are counted in this year's competition -- the first time we have ever undertaken this precaution.

This year, among the top 10 websites we have four from Canada, two from the USA, and one each from South Africa, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. These ten websites come from unions representing a total of nearly 3,000,000 workers. The winning site this year received more votes than any other site ever received in one of our annual competitions.

And the winners are ...

  • In 10th place, with 85 votes, is the website of the Irish Nurses Organisation, Ireland's largest professional union for nurses and midwives with 31,000 members. It is the first Irish union website to place in the top ten for a labour website of the year competition.

  • In 9th place, with 100 votes, is the Canadian Union of Public Employees, winner of the 2004 and 2003 competitions. CUPE is Canada's largest union, with more than 500,000 members and its website works in both English and French.

  • In 8th place, with 119 votes, is la Confédération des syndicats nationaux, a French-language website from Quebec. The CSN represents some 275,000 workers in the Canadian province.

  • In 7th place, with 130 votes, is a third Canadian website -- CUPE Alberta.

  • In 6th place, with 168 votes, is the website of the Industrial Workers of the World, which has content in around 15 different languages. The IWW, founded in 1905, and headquartered in the USA, won the labour website of the year competition in 1999.

  • In 5th place, with 213 votes, is Your Rights at Work -- a community campaign run by the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Australia's national trade union center, which represents 46 unions and 1,800,000 workers.

  • In 4th place, with 244 votes, is a fourth Canadian website to make our top ten this year -- the Nova Scotia Union of Public & Private Employees (NSUPE), a union of about 1,500 members.

  • In 3rd place, with 404 votes, is Confined Space. Confined Space is the weblog of Jordan Barab from the USA and offers "news and commentary on workplace health & safety, labor and politics". This marks the first appearance of a weblog in the top ten of the labour website of the year competition.

  • In 2nd place, with 708 votes, is the website of Solidarity -- no, not the Polish union but the South African one. Solidarity's website (which appears in both English and Afrikaans) serves a union with 1,000 branches across the country.

  • Finally, in first place, with a staggering 1,078 confirmed votes, is the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) -- the largest union representing teachers and headteachers throughout the United Kingdom with over 200,000 members in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The NASUWT is the first British trade union website to win the website of the year competition since 2001. (Last year, not a single British site even made it to the top ten.) Feel free to send your messages of congratulations to the union's General Secretary, Chris Keates.