Lately there has been a lot of talk about “knowledge workers” and the “New Economy”. When I was at the University of Maryland, I trained to be a high school teacher. I ended up doing that along with a variety of other jobs. Now I am a knowledge worker, or more accurately, a member of the digital proletariat.

I’m not whining....coding websites in our air conditioned attic home office for a wide variety of generally interesting people beats any of the warehouse and factory jobs I’ve held.

But let’s not glamorize it either. My partner and I are responsible for our own health insurance, retirement, sick leave, vacations and scheduling. To stay afloat we tend to work long hours and its not unusual to get burned by a business that goes belly-up. Sure we could get in line at the bankruptcy hearing, but the gas, light and phone company will be there way ahead of us.

It’s clear to me that people in our line of work need to organize. Our little partnership belongs to the Oak Park Chamber of Commerce, the National Writers Union, the Chicago Creative Coalition, Digital Eve and the Graphic Artists Guild. We participate actively in the Open Source software community, sharing whatever little tricks we’ve learned with other web developers and encouraging the use of Open Source and Free Software to break corporate monopolies and fight government censorship.

But honestly, our efforts seem almost pitiful...a candle in the wind.

When it comes to organizing knowledge workers, they are more ornery than a Route One filled with Maryland radicals or a herd of cats---- pick your metaphor.

Still, I have hope that knowledge workers can organize...which of course will have to be globally. Not a day goes by when we don’t get an offer from China, India, the Ukraine etc..etc. to do provide cheap web programming and and software development.

Marx was right about many things and dead wrong about some. But he was right on when he wrote,” Workers of the world, unite!”.

I sure wish he had left a manual for this New Global Economy though.....