Union of Unemployed Now Active in All 50 States
March 16, 2010
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The IAM Community Service project known as Ur Union of Unemployed, aka UCubed, now has 1,649 members in over 1,400 zip codes — up from 321 only thirty days ago. Its jobs activists now can be found in every state, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Three hundred fifty-seven cubes are operating. That’s up from 72 a month ago – a five-fold increase. Cubes exist in all states save Alaska and Nebraska.
“UCubed is urging activists to reach out more aggressively to jobless Americans,” said Rick Sloan, Acting Executive Director of Ur Union of Unemployed. “Filling out their initial cubes and starting new ones takes on a higher priority. Communicating within cubes, meeting up in person and helping each other through this Grave Recession becomes easier as our numbers grow. And with larger numbers UCubed can exert more pressure on politicians.”
Just last week, the cube-to-cube linking function went live. One jobs activist, Alexandra Aldrich, has grown her original cube into seven cubes. With two more cubes, she will have created our first UCubed neighborhood near Boston, MA.
The UCubed website was equally active. In its second month, 42,000 folks visited the site and viewed over 265,000 pages of content – almost double the prior month’s traffic. Some of those visitors are jobs activists; others are assessing what UCubed is and what it does; and still others are simply curious.
Much of the growth this past month was driven by bloggers at Alternet, Daily Kos, Common Dreams, Democratic Underground, Iowa Blog and Labor Talk. Their blogs pushed UCubed to new audiences. UCubed was profiled on RT and in Congressional Quarterly, Chattahbox, In These Times, Axis of Logic, Digital Journal and Huffington Post.
