Teamsters and Bloggers unite. I’m not sure if this is what I have in mind with respect to the empowerment of the creative class. I think it is incredibly powerful that bloggers can write about labor issues like this, and YouTube makes it possible to watch a video of this whole thing right here:
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but my first reaction to that video was pretty negative. It seemed kind of very silly to have some geeky guy drive a big rig in to the sound of AC/DC’s Back in Black and make a brief appearance on stage with Jimmy Hoffa (Jr.). But those bloggers and union folks got fired up and are now collaborating on this issue.
If you read the “call to action” and 170+ comments on DailyKos, you will experience that “overwhelmedness” that I talked about in the Mission Statement post below. It doesn’t feel like my fight. But I think the online media activity would be much more effective at communicating the issues than union leaders or newspaper articles with quotes from strident pro-union idealogues and anti-union conservatives.
I cannot imagine unionization in the “knowledge worker”/creative class context. Maybe we’ve all been brainwashed, but we feel we have to manage our own careers, that our jobs are likely to change a lot, and we hope that we play a unique role in our organization, so no one would be competent to collectively bargain on our behalf. We strike by quitting.
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