Sure you love being a trade unionist, but if you’re the type who’s ever thought it might be *even* nicer to be a trade unionist on a private mediterranean island, with lovely views, free beer and the superpower of flight, this might just be one for you.

Come join the fun on Union Island, the movement’s new resort in virtual world Second Life. Okay, you can’t actually get in just yet (in the manner of the best foreign holidays, the accommodation is still being built), but you can look at the piccies and sign up for the user group, to get notified of developments and have your 4pworth on how it’s going. The site is at www.slunions.org

It’s a joint project of a bunch of (real) organisations, TUC, UNI and the New Unionism Network, as well as unions such as Unison and ver.di. The idea is that given a few years, virtual worlds will be much more common in social networking and in business applications. But at the moment, any unionists wanting to campaign and experiment in this area face a double barrier of technical learning and set-up costs. By building core facilities in common, the project hopes to remove these barriers, and let the whole international movement build a community for union activists and members to network with each other and develop union campaigns.

If you don’t have one, register for a free account with Second Life (and get up to speed with the excellent SL blog New World Notes, which has covered this already), and check out an interesting and radically different (if rather smaller) social networking service. Plus they haven’t kicked Derek Blackadder out yet, so it must be okay!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Unions, Second Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.