Black Friday Strike Will Test the Power of High-Stakes Online Organizing

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/171425/black-friday-strike-will-test-power-high-stakes-online-organizing#

Josh Eidelson on November 21, 2012 - 7:53 PM ET

No one knows just how many Walmart workers will walk off the job on Friday—organizers included. Labor officials involved in planning the Black Friday strike say they won’t know until it happens exactly who’ll show up. Not just because of the inherent uncertainties of high-risk organizing, but also because they expect that some workers will strike who’ve only ever interacted with the main campaign groups over the Internet.

“We’re not trying to do this in the completely traditional way of, ‘know your numbers,’” said Dan Schlademan, a United Food & Commercial Workers union official who directs the allied group Making Change at Walmart, in an interview earlier this month. “This is really about doing open-sourced organizing…The total of what happens, we’re not going to really know it until Black Friday.”

Asked whether, given the serious risks involved in striking, he expected that workers who’ve never had a face-to-face conversation with an OUR Walmart worker leader or organizer would join the strike, Schlademan said, “Absolutely.” Given the size and geographic distribution of Walmart’s 1.4 million member workforce, Schlademan said that the alternative to embracing long-distance organizing would be to deny hundreds of thousands of workers the chance to take part.

Long-time labor leaders and scholars say that the coming strike’s use of Internet organizing offers an experiment worth watching.

FULL story at link.

[PETRUS]

1. K&R