Globalization has proved a complex and multi-faceted process for workers around the world, as are the strategies they must develop to face its challenges.

Our proposition aims to discuss ways to strengthen the capacity of trade unions, employers and institutions to test this new approach to the social dialogue: seminars, workshops, meetings, study visits etc. are at the heart of these efforts to cope with the rapid changes in the world of work brought by globalization, also with completely new tools, like “second Life “ avatars. In late September 2007, 1.800 activists from 30 countries demonstrated outside IBM premises in solidarity with Italian IBM workers in dispute with the company. This was, however, a rather unusual sort of protest: it took place on Second Life, the virtual world now populated by 7 million subscribers, and the demonstrators wearing union T-shirts were Second Life “avatars”.
It is easy to advance the view that whilst capital is global, labour remains local – that whilst business has found the framework to operate effectively on a trans-national basis, unions remain stuck in a nation-state view of the world. The IBM protest on Second Life (in this case coordinated by the Global Union Federation UNI) may or may not prefigure future ways of taking industrial action, but it does at least suggest that unions are finding intriguing new ways to try to respond creatively to globalization.