http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-8437119.html Unions a casualty of dot-com shakeout By Alorie Gilbert Staff Writer, CNET News.com January 11, 2002, 4:00 a.m. PT Alan Barclay is glad he took on Amazon.com, even though he lost. The former customer service representative had been trying for months to sign up workers for a union when he and his 400 colleagues got an e-mail from management: Gather your personal belongings and meet in 20 minutes for an announcement. Barclay knew it was over. When Amazon announced, as he expected, that it was shutting down the Seattle service center as part of widespread cuts last January, it also killed one of the few nascent efforts to unionize tech workers. Other closely watched efforts that died in 2001 included those at online grocer Webvan and online electronics reviewer Etown.com, both of which ended when the companies went out of business. The same labor leaders who hailed those efforts in the beginning stages have now mostly given up on trying to organize tech workers, even though employees face far more daunting conditions in the current recession and would ostensibly be more open to organizing. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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