Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 172

companies, as they become inextricably bound to global supply chains,
face the resistance of organized labor. These are examples of a process at
work in the broadly deined knowledge and cultural industries that brings
together workers across once discrete sectors. As a result, unions that
once represented only telecommunications workers now include creative
and technical talent in the audiovisual, writing, service, and technology
sectors. The Communication Workers of America and its counterpart in
Canada, which in 2013 merged its communications and power workers'
union with the union representing auto workers, are good examples of
worker organizations that have followed the path of technological conver-
gence in their organizing efforts. The 2012 merger of the Screen Actors
Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists brings
together the major Hollywood unions for the irst time to face off more
effectively against the increasingly integrated Hollywood media industry.
Moreover, individual unions are not only expanding across the converging
communication and information industries, but they are forming large
transnational organizations like Ver.di and UNI Global Union. These
transnational unions are better equipped to deal with powerful multi-
national companies because they have enormous memberships and are
well funded. Furthermore, the scope of their membership enables them
to better represent the convergences in both the labor process and the
working conditions among information, cultural, and service workers and
to build bridges across the divide separating workers at different spatial
and occupational points in the global division of labor.
Ver.di was founded in 2001 and by 2013 had reached 2.3 million
members, primarily in Germany but in other parts of the world as well.
It represents workers in thirteen sectors, all of which are increasingly
affected by the rollout of cloud computing, including inancial services,
health and social services, education, science and research, media and
culture, telecommunications, information technology and data-processing,
postal, transport, and commerce services. Its members work in govern-
ment and business at almost every level of occupational skill and function.
The union can not only mobilize a large and diverse workforce but also
draw on the specialized talents of its members, who can help the union
to tighten and secure its internal communications or carry out guerilla
theater protests that attract widespread media attention. UNI Global
Union was created in 2000 when three international worker federations