Virtual unions are growing and developing at a very quick pace throughout the United States and the rest of the world. The growth and development of these virtual unions are worth watching and tracking.
Workers thru-out construction are connecting using various social media outlets like Facebook.
Solidarity of workers in the 21st Century is again taking form, and the use of social media appears to be the medium of choice for discussion, education, job placement and collective activism.
An example of this activism and worker to worker discussion was just played out in real time with the pipefitter stand-in at the Cheniere Sabine Pass job site located in Cameron Parish in Louisiana.
http://www.kplctv.com/story/28281931/workers-walk-off-cheniere-job-site-over-pay-raises
Approximately 1000 workers staged a stand in @ Sabine Pass this past Friday and controlled production for a day demanding increases in pay and other changes on the job site.
This “stand in” exemplifies the powers of concerted activity and the power of workers to organize for better wages & working conditions!
Virtual Unions and forums such as The Shut Down, which have brought large numbers of workers together, very quickly, have provided workers with job site specific information and conditions across North America that are needed by workers to accept the jobs in real time.
Skilled trade recruitment is practiced, pay structures are displayed, conditions are made known, and activism is documented and discussed by the workers themselves on a daily basis. In essence these forums work as 24-7 union meetings.
Within a very short time, these Virtual Unions have gone from education to activism to action on the job site. One group actually even made an effort to self-organize a legitimate union to try to be recognized by the AFL-CIO before unraveling due to lack of structure.
In every way is this solidarity of the workers in which we all should support.
These Virtual Unions are in effect steering workers away from jobs, which thru a consensus, they collectively feel are exploiting workers. What is very noticeable is that consensus is being adopted more and more by workers who then do not man the job!
If you watch the various hiring forums thru-out the country such as Tradesman International, I Hire Building Trades, Trillium and other recruitment firms you can “connect the dots” that these Virtual Unions are having a very real effect on construction pay and conditions on the jobs targeted.
Solidarity and its meaning and implementation continues to evolve in the 21st Century.
In Solidarity,
Chad Dawson
Friend of all workers
Danny L Caliendo
Organizer
Labor Rising
