I’ve been unemployed since July 2008. My tech job was outsourced to the Philippines. The week before that, my wife had been forced out of her job in retaliation for having reported sexual harassment at one of Wall Street’s leading regulatory agencies. I was intrigued when she showed me an article on AlterNet telling about a newly formed Union of the Unemployed formed by the IAM. I joined online.
Then I set out trying to figure out what I had gotten myself into. The union is organized into 6-person Cubes. One could communicate to everyone within a Cube, but all other communication had to be done one-by-one from the membership links. As for what the union was fighting for, the emphasis was on excoriating Jim Bunning for holding up unemployment extensions (which Democratic Party dallying made possible). While there were references to IAM press releases supporting jobs creation, the actual agenda was to support the bill whose heart was giving tax breaks to small businesses so as to encourage them to create jobs (the lowest paying jobs). There was no link for contacting the union.