Labour Notes letter - 2012

Labour Notes (you guys really should get around to correcting the typo in your title) is always the place to go for info and encouragement on issues, news and actions that don’t get a lot or much attention elsewhere.  So, thanks.

A good example is Ruth Needleman’s “Making Global Solidarity Real’.  But as much as I appreciated her analysis, there’s one trend in global solidarity actions and organizing that she doesn’t cover: the self-organizing that many workers are engaging in that doesn’t take place through or with their unions’ institutional connections.  Those unions may support these efforts, but they’re not directly responsible for them.

There’s a whole lot going on at the workplace level as workers connect directly to other workers using the internet.  The project I’m involved in, LabourStart, regularly responds to requests by workers in one country wanting a contact amongst their co-workers in another.  GM workers in Canada wanting to connect with GM workers in Korea was the direct inspiration for this letter.  The former had read on LabourStart about the latter heading towards a strike in July.  A quick e-mail and the connection is made.

Similarly, there are other efforts, like RadioLabour (see www.radiolabour.net or subscribe on iTunes) that work to try and raise the profile of struggles around the world an in that way build an understanding of the importance of international work by providing a 5 minute dose of solidarity in the form of an internet radio show.  Monday through Thursday 40,000 listeners get 5 minutes of news about workers and their unions from around the world, with a 10 minute weekly update each Friday.

Less than a month old is Revoluntionizing Retail, a one-stop shopping site for retail workers looking to change their working lives. See http://revolutionizingretail.org.  Right now limited to North America, it has the potential to grow into something much bigger.

As these volunteer-based ‘unofficial’ but union-supported efforts are working at the rank-and-file level of the movement, there’s some interesting ‘top-down’ (sometimes that can be a good thing) work being done too.  As Ruth noted in their article, unions as organizations are becoming more and more international in their organizing efforts.  One effort she didn’t mention is Union Solidarity International, a project of Unite (UK).  It combines a real commitment of resources by a union with a long history of international engagement with an understanding that for global solidarity to have a real impact on our work as trade unionists it has to reach deep down into the union and it has to have a direct and discernible impact on the work of local unions.

So USI (see http://usilive.org) carries print news, produces a weekly podcast and acts as a portal to Unite branches (locals) looking to be twinned with a local union somewhere out there in the world.

All great resources for anyone looking to organize more effectively in their workplace on the need for globalization of our kind, not theirs.

CUPE Convention Online

It hasn't really started yet, but it feels like all 600,000 members are here and jostling in the halls of the Montreal Convention Centre.

But on the off chance that you're not here and would like to look at Convention reports, schedules, agendas, event locations (or are here and lost any of the same) and follow the debates, CUPE has a way for you do do all this online.

Click HERE.

SoliComm for Searches!

Funny how when you search for something union-wise using Google, you get adverts on the right side of your screen from companies promising to keep you union-free, or which will
happily recruit, train and deliver scabs into your workplace.

Yum. Just what a local union activist wants to see first thing in the morning.

There is a union-friendly search engine alternative called SoliComm, which has a bunch of cool features like discussion forums and support for multiple languages. Brought to us by the good folks at ACTRAV, the Worker Activities Programme section of the ILO (International Labour
Organization), the project is headed by Marc Bélanger. When a Canadian Union of Public Employees staffer, Marc was responsible for SOLINET, the first real international union presence on the Internet.

If SoliComm does for web searches what SOLINET did for online union communications, at your retirement lunch you’ll be able say you were there when the ball first started rolling.

Give it a whirl at http://www.solicomm.net/.

And then make it the search site your members can access through your local’s website.

William Gibson Meets Ginger Goodwin

A little dated almost a year after it first appeared in print, but with the Second Life demo for decent work (part of the global campaign for the same) coming up in about a week...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I ran across a story on LabourStart.org the other day that made me think some one had taken the brains of two Canadians, one well-known and read and alive, and the other not-so alive, but just as deserving and had thrown them both into a bender.

William Gibson the speculative fiction writer and inventor of cyberspace, and Ginger Goodwin, mine union organizer, shot in the back while viciously attacking the police.

************************************************

I am getting old. I can tell: mostly because I keep finding more opportunities in life to say ‘I am getting old’. The biggest and best of those was when a granddaughter picked me up at the airport and drove me home.

The latest came when I stumbled across a story about 9000 Italian IBM workers, members of the RSU, taking job action against their employer – virtually.

As in online. Not real. Using little cartoon-like characters to represent real workers. This just a few years after I wrote an article saying such things would never happen, that organizing workers requires face-to-face contact.

Turns out that may be true of me my generation, but what’s coming up behind may have a different take on things. Note I resisted the temptation to make reference to ‘whippersnappers’.

There will be picket lines (though mebbe no oil drum heaters), leaflets for shoppers and other workers - everything you’d expect in a strike. Just no people. But lots and lots of avatars, because this is happening (if it can be said to be happening at all), in Second Life.

Second Life, for those of you who don’t know, is a virtual world in which 9 million users adopt facsimiles of themselves called avatars. Avatars then live out their lives at the direction of the users, interacting in most if not all the same ways their users do (so far as I know actual reproduction isn’t possible). But anonymously.

To the point where you can now buy real estate on Second Life, undertake all kinds of financial transactions find romance and figure out if you really could have made it as a painter.

You can also, now get this, visit a real embassy. Several in fact, with more coming. Get a visa, plan a vacation. Or take a university course.

While technically a computer game, Second Life resembles the Pong of my day the way I resemble whatever it was that first climbed out of the primal ooze.

Except mebbe a bit around the eyes…

Second Life has become so popular that a wide spectrum of corporations have established themselves there, the better to advertise themselves and their cutting-edginess, and to sell stuff to the online-addicted.

IBM is one. A big one. It has reportedly been spending big time on the establishment of a variety of online presences. On Second Life IBM has it’s own virtual island.

Corporations on Second Life actually use the environment for what they consider to be meetings that are more productive than conference calls or video conferencing. They sell stuff. They test stuff (especially graphic-intensive applications). And they advertise stuff. Oh boy, do they advertise stuff.

So what is this? The shape of strikes to come? A publicity stunt? Just a way of avoiding taking real action? Or just one more reminder from the Universe that I am getting old?

It’s perhaps all those things, but mostly it’s a case of whiplash for IBM. If transnational corporations like IBM have invested heavily in a presence on Second Life, then the workers would be stupid to ignore the possibilities for getting their employer’s attention it presents.

IBM can run, but it can’t hide.

Transnational virtual corps spawn transnational virtual unions. IBM doesn’t play nice with its workers; their union organizes something embarrassing on Second Life. And for some corporations it may actually be possible to have an economic impact on their business. If they are well established on Second Life (or any other social networking site), dependent on it for a significant chunk of sales or advertising or meeting time, then a virtual strike like this could have an impact back here in the real world of profits and share prices.

A virtual job action also the potential to make building support for unions, especially unions representing professional workers, workers with a long tradition of workplace conflict.

Better yet, potential for organizing high-tech home workers and telecommuters. These are workers that unions have traditionally had a hard time reaching and organizing. It’s hard to convince workers like these that what they are doing by organizing and mobilizing is real when you have nothing real for them to do. . As unreal as second Life is, the action the RSU members are taking against IBM is very real. Not concrete mebbe, but real.


For workers in a sector not traditionally union, the RSU is organizing a kind of job action that allows workers (if they work at it just a bit) to stay anonymous. They don’t, unless they want to, have to make it easy to identify who is behind their avatar. As a way to build confidence amongst workers who need and want to take that first action against an unfair employer this may have some advantages. Start out slow and work your way to more direct actions.

In and of itself it’s unlikely a virtual job action will bring IBM to its knees. Ten years from now I’ll be even older, both granddaughters will have driver’s licences, and perhaps the odds will have shifted, but not yet.

But the confidence in themselves, their co-workers and their union, that an action like this could create might just make possible and successful more, dare I say it, traditional, forms of job action.

Workers are not stupid. They may be in the position of having to react to their employers’ actions, but when you react you go looking for new weak points. IBM’s Second Life image may be that point. We’ll see. But if it isn’t, who cares? The workers may be, as a result, just a little more ready to move on to actions out here in meatspace.

Look at their press releases and statements: nothing new in their goals, incremental pressure on IBM to meet some well-defined and limited goals. With the exception of the details of the action that’s planned, there’s nothing exceptional in what the workers want (respect), or in how IBM has behaved (badly). Just in how the union is reacting.

Like the Borg, unions are adapting.

Ginger Goodwin might not approve (though William Gibson sure would), if he understood, but if you work for a tech company that does business in non-places like Second Life, you gotta fight them on their ground.

Even if that ground doesn’t really exist.

But the really nice thing about a virtual strike is that even if a car on a picket line hits your avatar, even if the riot squad shows up, you don’t wake up in hospital or spend an evening trying to get the stinging to stop.

Stay tuned. We’re going to see more of this.



For what seems to be the first story on the virtual strike see
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/ibm_italy_strike/

For info on Second Life, see The Sniffer Podcast at http://www.foursevens.com/thesniffer/?s=second+life

The IBM Italia Union:
http://www.rsuibmvimercate.it/

For more on Second Life:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_life

Ginger Goodwin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Goodwin

William Gibson:
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/

RSU Website:
http://www.rsuibmvimercate.it/

RSU public statement on the upcoming strike:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/15198

Communicateordie.com Gets a Makeover

A long-time hotbed of ideas for the online labour movement, Communicate or Die went, like all good sites, through the doldrums. It's now out the other side and cookin'.

http://communicateordie.com/

Worth following their feed too.