A highly unsatisfactory position which UGS members of SPSF were powerless to do anything about. We didn't even know each other, far less have any collective voice in the union, even though with 8,000 of us, we were as numerous as small SPSF Branches. Beginning in April 1994, I set out to organise a UGS section in SPSF using the Internet. Each University has an obvious organisation name. US universities are all like harvard.edu or berkeley.edu, etc.
British Universities are all like greenwich.ac.uk, and NZ universities are like auckland.ac.nz.
These are management people, but actually most of them are pro-union and progressive people, and a small but significant percentage turned out to be helpful. Plus a list of those few of my oppositie numbers whom I had met over the period of five years I had attended every available interstate meeting. Plus a few friends and political contacts, but generally these proved to be worthless. Other contacts proved to be useless, the political, computer-buff, family and friend contacts were all generally remote from what was happening in the union, and we had generally nothing relevant to talk about. This avenue was the only way union delegates were finding out about what their own union was doing.