Why Bloggers Should Unionize? “you’re sitting at a computer and your ass is getting wider and your arm and neck and shoulder are wearing out because you’re constantly using a mouse.”
Really? Anyway you look at it, the idea is silly. I have always felt that blogging is an alternative to the MSM. Bloggers keep the MSM in check, so to speak. In this forum, we discuss current events, politics in particular, but political blogs are but a small portion of the blogosphere. Mike Pechar points out:
Typically, a labor union has some leverage by threatening to strike against management. Bloggers threatening to strike would probably be greeted with a ho-hum or maybe even applause.
Of course, one must also consider that utopia is only achievable when the workers of the world unite.
When you finish reading that, take a look at The American Spectator’s Organizing the Leisure Class
LABOR’S ATTEMPTED COURTSHIP of the netroots at YearlyKos 2006 was not nearly as successful as it was this past weekend. They’ve gone from behaving like awkward kissing cousins to impassioned newlyweds. Last year not more than 35 people showed to the “Labor and Power” panel. When one of the speakers asked the crowd who among them was involved with a union, virtually every hand shot up. “We can’t win unless you win and you can’t without us,” Chris Chafe of Unite Here said, but everyone recognized the room was all “we”s and no “you”s. “I don’t think most of the folks at this conference appreciate just how big [unionized labor] is,” activist/professor Joel Rogers groused.
Not long after the conference In These Times quoted the panel’s moderator Nathan Newman thusly, “The labor movement actually took YearlyKos very seriously, contributing money to help subsidize costs and sending top leaders to attend the sessions….I know that the labor leaders were a bit frustrated that their interest in the blogosphere was not reciprocated.”
So where was the disconnect?
Labor’s primary problem last year was that it attempted to arrive on its own terms. Look at all we’ve done and how indispensable we are, labor tried to say. This is not a message Kossacks have the slightest interest in. Show up, kiss the ring, look deep into their eyes longingly and tell them you’ve never met anyone like them. Snuggle up to their collective electronic ear and whisper how ecstatic you are they’re running the show now. This is what they want. And Hoffa? He turned out to be a real crowd pleaser.
“A lot of you don’t know anybody in the labor movement,” Jimmy Hoffa told Kossacks. “But that is why we’re meeting today, so we can start getting to know each other….You are the voice that has come up and risen out of nowhere. The new voice of America.”
Hey, if Democratic presidential candidates are groveling, why shouldn’t the ever-weakening heads of Big Labor? Forget puffing out your union chests and trying to regale computer kids with tales of union glory you yourself can barely recall. Hoffa’s crew and the other unions, like the Democrats, have learned their lesson. Sorry, Teamsters, Kossacks don’t want a flash drive with downloadable union stats on it. But T-shirts reading Working Class Blogger? That’s more like it. Gimmicky dog and pony show type stuff like Take Your Picture With A Teamsters Truck? Even better. Very popular. There is people power in a blogger’s union? Get up and say “Amen!” Just don’t mention support for drilling in ANWR or you’ll get growled at like Hillary Clinton incarnate.
August 6, 2007 - 09:40 AM on August 6th, 2007
Hey, Why not let the lefty bloggers and posters unionize and go on strike. The sooner they do the better.