UNI Communicators' Forum

ICTs offer great potential to assist unions in recruiting and retaining members, and in giving activists the tools to become much more effective. This section explores the issues around using technology to grow our unions.

BPO employees fight for rights, on the net ‘E-Unions’ To Communicate Directly With Stakeholders

By Sujata Dutta Sachdeva | TNN

Many unions worldwide have to cope with a decreasing number in members. Membership is ageing rapiidly while in the meantime, unions struggle with the fact that younger workers are not easily convinced of the advantages of joining the union.
The De Unie trade union in the Netherlands is directly concerned with this issue. It’s not so much reaching out to new members, but also how to adapt current union services to meet the demands of the new generation workers.

I've massively up-dated and revised a research paper I wrote last year on Web 2.0i and organization.

It's ready to submitted to an academic journal - comments are welcome!

Follow the link to the paper.

The abstract for quick viewing is below:

Another excellent blog post from Eric Lee. This time he's discussing the problems organisers may have when their identies can no longer be kept a secret. As more and more about us is written on the web and searchable, employers will be doing more detective work on people.

A lot of you will know Derek Blackadder of Labourstart (pictured here).

Well, we just had one of the shortest ever campaigns, to get him reinstated on Facebooki, after he was banned from it.

And we won - very quickly, and all thanks to Labourstart

Follow the links here:

A recent organising campaign at Kettle Chips, a UK potato chip company, was defeated with the help of US unionbusters, The Burke Group. However, two Facebooki groups set up by concerned members of the public helped to raise the profile of the dispute, without union involvement. Guardian journalist David Hencke believes the union missed a big opportunity by not reacting quickly enough to get involved online, and has a good blog post on this at Comment Is Free.