An interesting request from Derek in Canada. They have a dispute going on at Toronto’s York University that looks to be shaping up as a bunch of milestones in online union activism – all of them ++ungood.

Teaching assistants (TAs) at the university (CUPE local 3903 members) are out now for two weeks, after pay talks broke down. Management are offering a 3 year deal that looks less and less attractive as you pick away at what it means, and negotiations on it are going nowhere at the moment.

So what’s new? Well, the employer has an interesting updates site, purporting to report on both sides of the dispute, but naturally written from one of them. They’re not using it as much as they could, but this strategy of trying to control the first point of call for information may be something unions need to consider for the future – Who can get the most updates out, portraying themselves as the most authoritative source? It might be an opportunity for both sides.

And then there’s the Facebook groups. Not the “support our strike” ones, we’ve all joined a dozen of them. This is groups set up in opposition to the strike by people affected by it. In this case there are some large groups set up by students, worried about upcoming exams, or just not caring about the strike issues and wanting to get on with the education they’re paying for. Some seem to be trying to organise communications activity to get the union to fold – powerful tools for forming an anti-campaign which would have been much harder to recruit and organise from scratch without social networking. And even the less active are an interesting change for a local dispute like this. The TAs on the picket line will likely have dozens of Facebook friends in the student body, and their updates list will show news coming in about people they know joining a group to diss their cause. This could be worse for morale than all those anti-RMT groups that appear whenever there’s a threat of a tube strike, as those are full of people the strikers probably don’t know personally, and who it’s easy for them to form an uncomplimentary opinion of – water off a duck’s back.

And thirdly, there’s the battle for Google. CUPE 3903 have a nice campaign site telling their side, which currently comes up 8th for a Google search on “York University strike information”. Above them though are 5 media reports, the York U site, a hostile blog post and a neutral forum discussion. However, the plot has just thickened in that someone opposing the strike has bought the domain cupe3903.ca and pointed it at the employer site, possibly in an attempt to up the employer side’s Googlejuice (a complex formula linking inbound links, text mentions, metadata, pagerank and so on, which helps your pages carry more weight in Google searches, and be more likely to appear in those important top spots in the listings). CUPE 3903 could do a little more about their Googlejuice sure (metadata especially – they’re on WordPress, so my tip would be to stick in the All-in-one-SEO plugin if they get a chance), but active attempts to fiddle against them are somewhat below the belt.

The good news is that there’s stuff you can do to help!

1. Googlebomb. If a lot of sites link to them using helpful descriptive keywords, this makes Google look twice at them for searches on that term. Something like York University strike information, for example. Now, I don’t need to tell you that this site doesn’t really carry any weight with Google in itself, but for a specific term like that, the referring sites are much lower, so any links are likely to be useful. If you have a site or blog, have a go yourself! Whilst you’re at it, if you’ve a del.icio.us account, or use another social bookmarking service, give them a plug there too.
2. Group-hug. There are diss groups for the strike on Facebook, and they outnumber the pro-union group, so why not drop by with a bit of cyber-solidarity? Visit the official CUPE 3903 strike Facebook group and say hi, or just join the group to help with the numbers.
3. Or just the old-school online petition – courtesy of the CUPE national site.

Good luck to colleagues on strike in Toronto – here’s hoping you manage to settle with a fair deal soon!