I suppose I should have a go at saying something intelligent about this. I've been trying to focus some of my writing on labor and the union movement, and I once wrote a paper on Second Life, so the virtual strike by IBM's Italian employees seems right up my alley. Here goes. At first glance, a virtual labor strike seems ridiculous. Strikes are all about hitting the pavement, chanting witty refrains, pumping signs up and down, right?

Well, sure, but that's when the goal is to increase public pressure on the offending company and to keep other workers from scabbing. The IBM strike might not win a lot of pity points from the Italian public for losing their annual bonus, so picketing up and down Italian streets might not be the most effective means of protest. But by striking in Second Life, the Italian IBM workers are letting the tech-savvy company know that they don't appreciate their behavior, while raising consciousness on Big Blue's doings in every tech publication that has picked up the story around the world. They're connecting directly with their target audience of fellow techies and company management, and doing it in a cheap and easy way.

I do wonder, though, if it's too cheap and easy. What are the IBMers losing? I mean, I don't think that they're actually not working during the strike period. And on the cost to employers side, nothing's going to grind to a halt as a result. So that's a bit unorthodox.

I have heard, completely anecdotally, that IBM can be a tough place to work -- in particular that they over-rely upon contractors to whom they don't extend the same benefits, vacations, and the like. So an interesting aspect of the Second Life strike would be, I think, where it might connect Italian IBMers to employees elsewhere around the world so that they might work together for more humane labor conditions.