UnionBook: A Social Network for Labor

by Mike Hall, Feb 8, 2009

Union activists are, well, active. Sometimes that’s a problem on social network sites like FaceBook, MySpace and others that tend to limit an individual’s activity if it exceeds their arbitrary limits.

Our friends at LabourStart have an answer—UnionBook, the just-launched social networking website for trade unionists. Already with some 1,300 members, UnionBookis free of advertising—unlike other sites—and specifically designed for trade unionists around the world. Now, that’s a heck of community.

Says LabourStart Editor Eric Lee:

If you’re too active doing the kind of networking that we trade unionists do all the time—recruiting friends, sending out messages, and so on—FaceBook can blacklist you and close your account. This has already happened to a number of union activists.

We’re not telling anyone to stop using other social networks. If you are active in Facebook or any of the others, that’s fine. But use UnionBook for your trade union activities and see how easy it is to build and form groups, and to publish content online.

UnionBook offers many features that you and your union will find useful. Among these are:

• Blogs—build your own blog today, free, with no ads.
• Groups—create a group to support your union and your campaigns. Groups can have discussion forums and shared documents. They can be public or closed. They’re a very powerful tool.
• Profiles—post your profile and sign up your friends.

Lee is modest about LabourStart’s accomplishment.

We know that UnionBook will never be as big as the giant commercial networks like FaceBook, but once we have several thousand trade unionists using it, I’m confident that it will become a powerful tool for our movement worldwide.

Networking knows no bounds, and it just expanded with UnionBook. Check it out and get (even more) active.

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