clipped from: www.commondreams.org   
Published on Friday, January 16, 2009 by The Nation

Social Movements 2.0

by Tim Costello, Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith

On September 27, 2007, the world experienced its first virtual strike. In response to a wage dispute, IBM workers in Italy organized a picket outside their company's "corporate campus" based in the 3-D virtual world of Second Life. According to a report in the Guardian, workers "marched and waved banners, gate-crashed a [virtual] staff meeting and forced the company to close its [virtual] business center to visitors.... The protest, by more than 9,000 workers and 1,850 supporting 'avatars' from thirty countries," included a rowdy collection of pink triangles, "sentient" bananas and other bizarro avatars.

While the strike was playful, it was also buttressed by careful planning and organization. Workers set up a strike task force, developed educational materials in three languages and held more than twenty worker strategy meetings.