Global Alliance for Immediate Alteration
= GAIA - Global Alliance for Immediate Alteration, New Transnational Social Network Union to Crack Capitalism and Protect Life, Peace and Justice on Earth
URL = http://openfsm.net/projects/gaia/summary
Description
"This space is an experiment for constructing a new type of transnational social network union that aims at bringing individual industrial and non-industrial workers in the Global North, the precariat in the Global South; peasants, domestic, immigrant and jobless workers together with social movement activists from other struggle fields, activist/researchers and many others who has to work in order to reproduce his/her life and to provide an open space where we can connect our networks and struggles to each other.
GAIA project is an open invitation for inventing a world wide, common, grassroots, wiki social movement union that will aim an immediate alteration of capitalist social, cultural, and political order.
Hundreds of millions not if billions of workers in the world are out of reach for the established trade union mechanisms and structures, they do not have any protection at all. Peter Waterman calls them 'Labour's others', for some others they are the new working class; the precariat composed of people who holds no property and even secure job. What kind of trade union structure will be able to go beyond the on going problems, and the crisis of unionism that had been born out of those well known problems, and will become the change maker of our time.
Can open space online social networking ensemble a model for such future union organisation through the internet?
There are already many good examples of action and organising taking place via the net and incredible results are getting reached, as it happened in 2007 when financial support has been mobilized from the wealthier segments of the Western working classes for the Ford worker's first ever strike organised in Russia since the beginning of the 20th Century.
For already some times online social networking is gaining ground as an important and dynamic form of communication and collective action tool. Many activists are involved today in one or another social networks on the net, as well as on the real world. Time has came to transform this tool into a new generation social movement union. Therefore we need comprehensive discussion on how can this happen, would it work, how would we build and gain legal ground for such a union, is it possible, or necessary? How would such union look like, be governed and function against the offensive coming from the employer and the state?
'Social Network Unionism' working group has recently been created with the aim of promoting such discussion and providing space for comprehensive work in order to experiment with Social Network Union idea by utilizing the opportunity created by UnionBook.
With the creation of GAIA space within Open WSF, I would like to invite all who involved one way or other in labour and trade union movements, environmental justice activists, women rights activists, immigrants' rights activists, water justice activists, information activists, activist students and others from other struggle fileds to join and contribute to build GAIA space together as network of networks that can stop capitalism and save the peoples and the mother earth."