It is now around 5.30pm, and the organisers of the virtual picket of IBM in Second Life are delighted with how it has worked out – albeit that the company has apparently decided to keep a low profile.
See our report from this morning on the start of the protest and the background to it.
As the UNI activist maintaining the protest blog put it a little earlier this afternoon:
“I'm in a virtual world, protesting outside IBM offices, but I'm still hungry, my fingers are getting cold (my office is in Switzerland) and people in Second Life are exactly as you'd expect them to be in the streets: SHOUTING slogans, jumping up and down, picketing and mingling. You have the quiet ones who sit on a bench and watch, the really original ones with funny outfits (I met a French speaking Banana today), and the ones playing music and talking too.”The organisers estimate that more than 1,000 people from 30 countries took part in protests at the seven IBM Second Life offices during the course of the day.
I counted around a couple of dozen people at the IBM Italia site half an hour ago – about twice as many as were there this morning – and it really was just like a normal picket line, only without the threat of rain.
Not long ago, the organisers said that IBM had started shutting some of its virtual offices and barring entry to the protesters. But there has been no other reaction from the company.
The only sour point of the day appeared to be the presence of a gun-toting avatar (a rather less serious threat than at a First Life picket line, clearly) intent on causing a nuisance, and especially keen on establishing the sex of the protesters.
The general consensus was that, despite Second Life rules restricting access to over-18s, our griefer was “a kid”.
And so the protest continues. It will be 9pm tonight before the activists call it a day, and they must be hoping that many supporters arriving home from work will join them for the final hour or so.
Has it all been worth it for the union? Well, it probably won’t do that much in terms of changing the minds of IBM managers or “forcing” them to a negotiating table. The virtual world really isn’t that important yet.
But I’m willing to bet that, while the protest is hardly going to be frontline news, it will pick up a fair bit of media coverage – probably rather more than ten people outside an office in Milan would have managed.
And it’s a cheap way of running an industrial dispute. Having honed their skills today, I imagine the organisers will be keen to share what they have learned with UNI member unions who see potential to take their own future disputes into the virtual world.
As more and more companies develop their online businesses, we can probably expect to see rather more of this sort of thing.
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