Of course, quite a lot of high-profile union campaigns are keenly aware that progressive activists are a potential source of valuable support, and many union campaigns court activists aggressively.  Unions which do this kind of outreach typically ask progressives to do some or all of the following things: write letters to the company being organized; boycott the company being organized, and/or patronize union-friendly competitors; write letters to elected officials, or other quasi-public figures who might bring media pressure on the company; attend a rally, or walk a picket line; inform friends and family about the campaign, and enlist them to take part in some of these actions.  Examples of these kinds of campaigns include Hotel Workers Rising, the Southern California Grocery Workers campaign, Respect for Toyota Workers,  Free Choice at Verizon, School Bus Workers United (and the recent accompanying efforts at Dailykos).  All of these are good ways to enlist progressive activists, and I certainly hope unions step up the efforts, and do more to recruit activists.  In fact, although I hardly think it needs to be written, unions shouldn't stop at organizing self-identified progressive activists.  There are large swaths of Internet users who would probably be sympathetic to the goals of a union campaign who don't self-identify as progressive activists.

The concepts and technology behind these campaigns are pretty solid, and for the most part, my only critique of unions with regards to their efforts in enlisting activists is that they don't do it enough, and that they don't provide activists with enough tools to support a campaign.  Too many campaigns use their websites to solicit email signups, and perhaps encourage activists to send emails to company executives and/or elected officials - and leave things at that.  I'd like to see more websites which deploy the full breadth of available online activism tools, like boycott pledges, rally or picket line signups, strike fund donations, etc.  Moreover, I'd like to see unions apply a bit of creativity, and fully think through the kinds of things which activists could do online to bring pressure on a company.

Some unions are doing just that, and in the last year or so, a number of very interesting tools have been developed to enlist activists in supporting union campaigns.  Here are a few examples, which I think are particularly exciting:

• In support of Hotel Workers Rising, UNITE-HERE developed Informed Meeting Exchange, which helps conference planners find a union-friendly hotel where they can hold meetings.  This tool has been particularly popular with academic conferences, and has been a useful pressure point in encouraging hotels to become responsible employers.

• In support of the Southern California Grocers campaign, UFCW teamed up with Brave New Films to produce a series of documentaries about the grocery workers' struggle for a fair contract.  This particular tactic didn't get off the ground, because the union succeeded in getting the contract it wanted shortly after the first documentary was finished.  However, this is a very promising idea, and I encourage unions to pursue it further.  In future campaigns, unions could encourage activists to screen documentaries about union campaigns in their campaigns, in a manner very similar to MoveOn and DFA's screening campaigns of the last several years.  I'd imagine that screening campaigns like these would be a particularly good way to recruit volunteers for rallies or picket lines.

• Although I haven't seen it in use anywhere, I'd be curious to see whether it's possible to use the web to organize proxy vote on shareholder resolutions.  With shareholding becoming a relatively widespread practice among middle-class households, I imagine that in any given campaign, unions are bound to be able to find a lot of Internet users who hold stock in the company being organized.  Is it possible to aggregate the proxy votes of union-friendly shareholders, in order to pass - or gather a significant bloc of support behind - shareholder resolutions?  It seems like it should be possible.  This is actually a fairly old idea, as Saul Alinsky wrote about something similar in Rules for Radicals over thirty years ago; considering the power of the web to aggregate lots of resources in this way, it seems like Alinsky's vision should be easily realizable today.

In addition to enlisting activists in support of ongoing campaigns, I'd like to see progressive activists enlisted in strategic research.  As SEIU is discovering in its campaign against Blackstone, the increasingly tenuous nature of corporate ownership means that unions are going to have to be increasingly nimble in exerting pressure in small niches - for example, in the world of hedge fund managers and private equity firm owners.  These are the sorts of things that progressive activists, and progressive bloggers in particular, can be very good at.  In a similar vein, progressive activists could be extremely useful to union organizers conducting corporate research, especially when that research can be easily subdivided.  Our experience in sifting through campaign finance reports, I imagine, could be put to use in analyzing SEC filings, court documents, and similar kinds of raw data.  Furthermore, to whatever degree unions plan to use the internet to recruit workers into ongoing union campaigns or find new union organizing opportunities, I can only imagine that the wealth of technical knowledge in the progressive blogosphere will be very helpful in designing and executing those efforts.

Using the internet to recruit progressive activists is hardly a new idea, and I'm glad to see that many unions are already leading in this field.  There are some exciting new ideas brewing in this realm, and I'd like to see more unions adopt them, and deploy a wider range of tools for enticing activists to support their campaigns online.  From walking picket lines to researching corporate misdeeds, activists can be a tremendous boon to union campaigns, and the web can be an excellent way to contact them.