[p2p-research] New Unionism... organizing 4 democracy at work

[Michel Bauwens]

hi kevin,

thanks for returning to this topic at your leisure, see already:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/u-cubed-a-new-model-for-occupational-networking/2010/07/19

what about the continued serialization of your book, I haven't seen anything
in a long while?

Michel

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 12:17 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 7/16/10, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > i'm already briefly covering this on the 19th, but I hope you can dig
> some more info and offer some comments:
> >
> > U-Cubed: A new model for occupational networking?
> > Union geeks (you know who you are!) have been intrigued by the
> development of U-Cubed. It's unlike anything seen before. Unemployed people
> in the USA are signing up and then linking themselves (if & when they
> choose) to others with the same zip code. Together, six members form a cube.
> If they like, this group can then join up with eight other cubes to form a
> 'neighbourhood'. And three neighbourhoods can join to form a 'power block'.
> It's an ingenious way of bringing people together around occupation (in this
> case the unemployed) and location (per zip code). This builds community and
> voice in a natural way, and encourages activism at the base in a way that
> traditional representative structures find difficult. They're only a few
> months into the experiment, with about 2500 members, so it's too early to
> learn any lessons. But for those interested in building occupational or
> sectoral networks within their union, here's an intriguing experiment to
> follow. More:
> http://www.unionofunemployed.com/ucubed-resources/communicating_cubes/
> >
>
> I think this is definitely material for a post.  It reminds me a bit
> of attempts to organize the unemployed into radicalized unions of
> their own during the CIO's big strikes in the early '30s, which put
> pressure on conservative governments from a second front and also made
> the unemployed harder to recruit as scabs.
>
> The I.W.W. and some radicals in the AFL-CIO and SEIU are also
> proposing a different model of "minority unionism" where the
> federation recognizes locals made up of a minority of workers in a
> workplace even when they don't  meet the standards for NLRB
> certification under Wagner; the same people are big on the French
> model of labor federations and unions offering union membership (and
> with it benefits like cheap mutual insurance and other forms of
> networked mutual aid) to people who are unemployed or don't have a
> local in their workplace.  The idea is to make union membership open
> to anyone who wants it, without jumping through the NLRB's hoops. This
> would also work well with labor tactics (like those in the old Wob
> pamphlet "How to Fire Your Boss") other than conventional strikes,
> aimed at fighting guerrilla war inside the workplace.
>
> --
> Kevin Carson
> Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
> Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com
> The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
> http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
> Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
>



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