Tomorrow we’re presenting a session at Hello Business, a 2 day conference in Birmingham that’s all about how digital media can help to grow businesses.
Four of us (Antonio Gould, Retooled producer, Nick Lockey, New Media Development Producer at Maverick, and Retooled participants Nigel Smith and Martin Craig) are going to run a session on How Social Media can support the unemployed. Here’s the plan:
In a country facing the highest jobless levels in over 15 years, what role can social media and digital technology play in supporting the unemployed?
Through a series of film interviews and blogs this session will explore how a team of ex MG Rover employees set up a website about their experiences of redundancy to help others going through similar experiences.
We’re on at 12.15pm on Friday 22nd October – and we’ll write up the discussion on this blog afterwards……
Check out the full article here.
Really pleased to have gained the endorsement from the local MP for Northfield and Longbridge, Richard Burden. Here’s what he has to say about Retooled and what the resource is doing to support people going through redundancy:
“As the local MP for Longbridge, I will never forget those days in the spring of 2005 when MG Rover collapsed and thousands of people were thrown out of work. For each of them and their families, the financial impact of losing a job was big enough.
“But it was about even more than that. It felt like a giant collective bereavement. And since then, many of the families involved have gone through so many of the emotions that you associate with bereavement – grief, anger, sometimes denial, and then a desire to draw a line and move on. Only people who have personally been through something like this themselves can really understand what it is like. Even people close to them – maybe like me as the local MP – can only get so far in that understanding.
“That is why I think Retooled is such an interesting initiative. It gives people who have been through redundancy themselves the chance to share experiences, to pass on knowledge and to support each other as they build a new future. It also means they can join together to tell policy makers what they need to hear. Continuing global economic uncertainty and the impact of the new Government’s austerity programme will make Retooled’s contribution even more valuable in the months to come.”
Retooled’s only just launched and we’ve already been on ITV Central news this morning. The news crew came down yesterday to interview participants and see us at work getting the site ready.
Here’s a screengrab of the piece online – you can see Nigel giving an interview there.
We’re going to try and get the piece up online in full…
After the final countdown and rush to get last content up, we’ve just put the website live – whoohoo!
We had a slight conundrum over how to launch it, and decided to project the website on a wall, with a couple of the team holding ribbon over it. Martin did the honours of cutting the tape when we clicked the live button.
Can’t believe we’ve done it all over these two weeks.
Now time to go off to the pub – everyone’s in need of a well-deserved drink…
Martin Craig found some old photographs on his computer that he took back in 2000, when he was playing with a new digital camera. The first set of photos is from one of the many night shifts he did during his 15 years at the plant, although:
Had I been caught taking photos I would have probably been dismissed, it was quite important that people didn’t sneak cameras into Rover and take photos of things.
The shots are of him C02 welding, which for those not in the know is:
A mix of argon and c02 gas, this produces a nice clean weld which is very good for car bodies and the like.
Although the night shifts were hard work, and according to Martin many of his colleagues had high blood pressure and other stress-related problems, he still has fond memories of them and the illicit beer-and-curry breaks his team enjoyed:
The night shift started at 10 o’clock….there were about 3 breaks during the shift and after about 4 hours you’d have dinner….Somebody would go out and get a curry and some Carling Black Label, that kind of thing. You’d only have one tin of course, because otherwise it was very difficult to operate very heavy machinery and welding machinery….We did that quite often.
The other photos are from a march in protest of the threatened closure of Rover by BMW in March 2000:
This march that went on was to try and save Rover and there was an enormous amount of people there. I’ve never gone to football matches or anything like that so huge crowds of people are not something I see very often, but on this particular day we did and it really was very impressive how many people turned up to march in favour of Rover being saved from closure by BMW. It wasn’t too long after this that the business was sold for £10.
