Tech unions found fantasy island in Second Life
Socialism gets second wind
IF FAT CAT executives ever needed reassurance that socialist ideals were nothing but fantasy, this might be it: the international union movement is setting up a virtual centre in Second Life.
Unison, a UK union, said today it was backing the launch of Union Island, a virtual workers' movement featuring beautiful cartoon girls with big hair and tight t-shirts.
But it might not be a move to cloud cuckoo. The world's first virtual union protest at an imaginary company headquarters last year may have led to tangible results for downtrodden techies.
After IBM had arbitrarily cancelled performance bonuses in Italy, 1,853 protesters swarmed IBM's virtual headquarters in Second Life and stormed a management meeting with cartoon placards.
The head of IBM Italy, who imposed the offending employment terms, subsequently resigned, IBM workers got their bonuses back and new contracts also secured payments into a health insurance fund, said the UNI Global Union.
The union admitted that the threat of real strikes might have had some influence in bringing IBM to the negotiating table. But the virtual industrial action generated enough negative publicity for the computer giant to take note.
In February, the protesters were given an award for their ingenuity by former French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin.
Unison said it hoped to create a "new generation of online activists". It was laying on DJs, and a virtual bar with virtual beer for the launch on 1 May, recognised as Labour Day every since British unions won the right for factory workers to go home after eight hours and rest at the weekend.
Anyone working in the tech sector might well wonder what happened. µ
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I think you're "girls with big hair and tight t-shirts" link is broken. At least I didn't see any.really do not get it...
What the hell is so special about SL ?Getting throught the "tutorial" is pain in the behind. Graphics are...well... only colourful, but my ZX Spectrum could do the same.
Really wonder why Entropia is not getting at least as much press. Better graphic, stable real cash economy and you can really shoot things :D
And not to forget, they will switch soon to the Cryengine2 .
Unions is are bad
Tech unions: which twin, fascism, or socialism?borne again again
Is there a recording available of the protest? That sounds fun; can you just build a character that looks anyway you want, and just fly them about the place? What if you built and operated a tramp that didn't buy things and slept on the benches?Can you sell other characters hallucinogens that are really code scripts that upload to their database and make their characters become hippies?
@WoenK
Because PE tries to scam you when you want to withdraw your earnings.Here is the difference between Entropia and SL
The difference is that Secondlife is fully user created. You can create and do anything, You can make your sim a medieval wonder land or a sleaze filled gothic -cyber nightmare. There are no limitations and LL only works to make the baseline system work better, not make content to try to sell to the end user. And by the way if you havent been to SL lately the graphics can in fact be much better than those in Entropia. As I said all the content is user created so if a poor user makes bad content you get crappy textures and poor builds. If you want to see the best SL has to offer visit "Little Mos Eisley" in the skylar region or "Midian City" both are great sims with active communities."content is user created"
But it is still crap, apparently. Lovely excuse to blame it on the participants.On the other hand, they did manage flying penises, so I guess they one-upped Wikipedia at last.