Campaign for change, that’s what.

Walmart is one of (if not the) largest employers in the world (with 1.4 million staff in the US alone). In the United States, their employees are mostly on minimum wage or slightly above. Walmart are also notoriously anti-union, long resisting the efforts by their staff to organise and unionise.

Walmart Workers for Change is a campaign of the United Food and Commercial Workers, the union representing retail workers.

The campaign website looks amazing, featuring videos of members in Walmart, facts about Walmart and advice on how to organise fellow workers. It looks like UFCW is taking on many of the lessons of the Obama campaign model. There is even an SMS campaign, with a unique SMS code (check out what I’ve written about mobile phone campaigning here).

The rules are below but you can read more at  Labour Start.

Check out the entries this year at Flickr.

Last years winner:

Rules:

1. You may only submit your own work.

2. Only one photograph per entrant. If you submit more than one the first (by date/time) will be your official entry.

3. Photos should be, very broadly, of union members in action. At work, in struggle … surprise us! They must have a caption explaining the image.

4. When posting your photo on Flickr you should understand that you are allowing LabourStart to use your photo for contest purposes and to publicize the contest. See the permission information at the bottom of this page.

5. Entrants may be required to disclose to LabourStart their contact information, including their real names, in order to be qualified. This information will be kept strictly confidential if requested.

6. Photos must be entered via Flickr. If you do not already have an account you can register at no cost at flickr.com. Once on Flickr you can upload your photos to your account. Then join the group here.

There are already a range of unions that “tweet”. Many union officials and union members are on Twitter. Labourstart uses Twitter extensively. There is even a union Twitter group.

US union communications site, “Communicate or Die”, gives some ideas for how unions can use Twitter:

1) Set up your website to receive incoming RSS feeds from the picket lines or other major events like conferences.
2) Labor leaders can twitter their daily activities to keep members apprised of what leadership is working on and fighting for.
3) If you don’t have time or staff to write quality blog posts, use twitter to keep the community up to date on the issues and concerns of your union.
4) Set up a bogus Twitter account using the name of a hated CEO or manager. Post entertaining items like “Don’t know why our workers are so upset at my salary. Don’t think they realize all the maintenance needed on 100 foot yachts.”
5) Post up the minute bargaining updates to the website right from the bargaining table.

What do you think? Waste of time or useful organising tool? Leave a comment below.