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).

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

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.

I don't know if anyone has picked up on these news stories about the struggle between the Telecommunication Workers Union (TWU) in Canada and the Telus Corporation. It may be old news for some of you but it just made my radar. There is an article from labour.net and a slightly longer one from the OpenNet Initative.

I don't know if there have been other examples of censoring unions by Internet providers in the U.S. but I'd be interested in learning about them if there were. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I'm very passionate about this topic, and even recently completed a book on it. I find it very frustrating that many people whom I interact with, particularly those over 40, do not see the same world as I do.

This is an update on my earlier post about text messaging. My goal is to walk people through the process as I attempt to introduce new technology in an actual union local. Hopefully, we can all learn something about the difficulties inherent in technological innovation in organizations.

A while back I wrote an Online Guide to Building Effective Rank-and-File Websites. The guide has much room for improvement, and was written before I knew anything about blogs, CMS, RSS and other such tools.

I want to revise the Guide, and it seems like a good candidate for a wiki, so I set up this wiki on the Labor Union Organizing wiki that Mark used for the Labor Notes Conference follow up. I posted the entire guide so that people can skim and revise the bits that most interest them.

Does this wiki have legs? Let's see.