THE UNION ORGANISING brand seems set to get a major makeover with news that Hollywood star James Franco is directing and starring in the film of John Steinbeck’s labour novel In Dubious Battle, a book described by former organiser Barack Obama as one of his favourites. Matching the star quality with substance was the news that the Tunisian trade union centre has shared in the Nobel Peace Prize for its work as part of the civil society ‘quartet’ organising for and then sustaining democratic change in Tunisia.

From Hollywood to Oslo, the meme of unions organising to challenge power appears to be shaking off the almost three decades of deliberate marginalisation and, at times, criminalisation. And at the same time – and for the first time – after all the attempts to keep unions locked in a twentieth-century analogue world, organising is starting to build unions in the new digital economy in both Australia and the United States.