LabourStart: What Do Unions Need to Do Online?
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At this week’s LabourStart conference—much like at last week’s Netroots Nation conference—union communicators, activists and bloggers are taking a close look at how the union movement is approaching new media. Where are we doing the right thing, and where are we lagging behind?
LabourStart attendees agreed we as labor communicators need new studies of what the union movement—in the United States and around the world—is doing online. Today’s morning session highlighted the healthy debate about how to go forward—do we need a scholarly study or a practical handbook to use on the ground? Do we need to focus on broad, large-scale campaigns that attract a lot of attention, or do we concentrate on small, focused local campaigns where we can have more of an impact? And how do we utilize new media tools to get people engaged and get leverage in campaigns?
UnionBook: A Social Network for Labor
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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.
