Landmark Theaters Employee Union

After being shut down for a long period due to a lack of funding, the ShopUnionMade.org website is open for business. Finally, consumers sensitive about the working conitions of those who manufacture the products they buy can again educate themselves about which products have earned the union label.

A question about best practices for official union websites:

Should an official union website be under a creative commons license (share alike, attribution, non-commercial, etc.)?

I have argued here, without a lot of success, that we should think of "open source" unionism not only in terms of union leaders bringing in new categories of members, or taking on broader social issues, but also in terms of making the union's own "source code" and "architecture" open to the members.

On September 25th of 2006 Alcatraz Cruises, part of the notoriously anti-union Hornblower Yachts, took over the contract to run the Alcatraz ferry service using non union crews for the first time since the service began in the early 70's.

ouch! Link

More on this later, but this is a good trend -- well not yet a trend, but good initiatives: videotaped union officer election debates. Youtube and google video make it easy to get this out to members and the public.

I have no idea how much it cost the Chicago Center for Working Studies to put this site together, but it is quite impressive. Check it out at: http://www.labortrail.org

Skype is a voice over internet protocol program or VoIP. Kari over at Politics and Technology asks a good question about the availability of the technology and the potential to use it for organized activity.

A dream of mine for several years---to work full-time helping unions communicate on the Internet---has now been realized. There is no doubt in my mind that communicating labor's message is absolutely key to the labor movement's survival. So, I recently stepped down from my paid position at the Pioneer Valley AFL-CIO and am turning my full attention to my newly launched business, Prometheus, http://www.prometheuslabor.com, which builds union websites. I'm very excited to have the chance to focus 100% of my attention and efforts helping unions do a better job to deliver their vital message to workers and the general public.

Unions have to notify members of their democratic rights under Section 105 of the LMRDA. This requirement has long been honored in the breach, as they say. But we at AUD have had some success enforcing the rule in recent years. We also petitioned the Department of Labor to apply the same rule to federal employee unions which fall under an analogous law, the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA).

"Faculty and grad workers demonstrated against the University of Florida's plan to "reallign" (i.e. gut) most of it's humanities programs in favor of other "more productive" programs in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS)...."

This message was in my inbox. One of the exciting things about the creativity of this group of folks is that they are using YouTube to publicize their rally. And most exciting for me ;-) is that they have started a wiki (of the peanut butter variety). Unfortunately it is locked down, no open edit here. I was going to hyperlink CLAS - because it means something and I want it to link to what it means! For the open edit wiki!

Let's what how they use these tools.

also see earlier weblog post Google Video.

And those new to this website, welcome, this website is called a "weblog" and new entries stack on top of each other. Here are the links that are embedded in the text above:

* Click here for CLAS Unite wiki

* Click here for the YouTube:ClAS rally video

http://www.ipdi.org/
Sounds like an interesting report (but it
costs $20):
"Person-to-Person-to-Person: Harnessing the Political Power of Online Social Networks and User Generated Content

What's a campaign, non-profit, or advocacy group to do when the public wants individualized, interactive, on-demand content thisveryminute? The good news is that the tools for building active social networks already exist. They are surprisingly affordable, and they seem to work well for both national movements and small, local campaigns. Person-to-Person-to-Person takes what you already know about human nature and incorporates the concepts in an affordable, tangible way into strategy.

Release Date: September 15th, 2006"

You can read the executive summary for free,
tho.

Publicised by infoworld:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/09/15/HNsocialnetworkpolitics_1.html

Most often the question of union democracy online comes up because of rank-and-filers setting up independent sites. But we are also seeing cases where union officers set up independent sites, and run into similar barriers...

This report on mobile media from the New Politics Institute was just emailed to me and although I haven't read it just yet, I thought I'd pass it on for those of you interested in the cell phone discussion. Fun Facts:

· 80 percent of voting age Americans have mobile phones and an increasing number are becoming savvy at using them to create and consume media.

· Mobile video services already reach more users than the 8th largest cable operator in the country.

· By 2008 as many as 30 percent of wireless phone users will not own a land line. (What will political pollsters do?)

· Last year U2’s Bono got 800,000 people to sign up for the One Campaign to eradicate poverty by sending a text message through their mobile phones at his concerts.

All of a sudden, after years of being in the background, text messaging as a political tool is all over the web. What this usually means is that everyone is about to pile on and its usefullness will be over by the time Labor realizes it's even there as a potential organizing tool.