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RedditUnions are gradually making fuller use of the Internet's capacities to improve communication with their own staffs or members. But increasingly they are also using the web to recruit new members or to establish "virtual communities" of union supporters in arenas not yet amenable to the standard collective-bargaining model.
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Taming Global Capitalism Anew
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Thea Lee, Will Hutton, James K. Galbraith, Jeff Faux, Joel Rogers, Marcellus Andrews & Jane D'Arista: Taming global capitalism is the overriding challenge of our time. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Thea Lee, James K. Galbraith and others offer their ideas on how the United States can transform global capitalism by creating a new social contract.
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Cities: The Vital Core
Joel Rogers: Urban centers are by their nature spawning grounds of progressive politics.
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Devolve This!
Joel Rogers: Progressives urgently need a strategy to take back the states from the GOP.
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Unfulfilled Promise
Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
Joel Rogers: Jim Weinstein has spent most of his adult life writing about the failures and possibilities of the American left.
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Progressives Should Vote Edwards
Joel Rogers: John Edwards offers a real program of democratic renewal.
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Unions on the Net
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A Proposal to American Labor
The National Writers Union (www.nwu.org), a UAW affiliate, is another example of a union virtually created off the Net. It provides information and advice--including extensive job postings--to members, and it lobbies on their behalf, most spectacularly in the recent Supreme Court decision it won on freelance worker copyright rights. But most of its members work without a collectively bargained contract.
In Britain, UNISON (the largest union in the country) and the National Union of Students have a website that tells student workers their rights and gives them advice about how to deal with workplace problems (www.troubleatwork.org.uk). It is a particularly engaging and practical illustration of how concrete problems can be addressed through Net assistance.
Finally, for a more geographically defined labor community, take a look at the website of the King County AFL-CIO (www.kclc.org), the Seattle central labor council that uses the Net to coordinate its own business, bring community and labor groups together for discussion and common action, post messages and general information to the broader community, and otherwise create a "virtual" union hall with much of the spirit and dense activity that used to be common in actual union halls in major cities.
