And then the bubble burst, and what remained? There were a few things that you actually could do better on the net than off, and one those turned out to be job hunting.

A handful of very big companies have set up some very big websites to do online recruitment and these have turned out to be a very lucrative business. One of the giants, monster.com, claims to have 800,000 jobs on offer. Yahoo's HotJobs site is not far behind.

The business has gotten so large that there are even magazines dedicated to the online recruitment "industry". One of these, "Online Recruitment", claims to know of over 3,000 websites dedicated to helping people find a job.

Many of these websites offer fairly powerful back-end databases – on some you can post your resume, on many you can apply directly for a job from within the website, on nearly all you can ask to be notified when jobs become available according to your own specifications. So if you're looking for work as an accountant in Chicago, you'll only be notified when there are vacancies for accountants in the windy city.

Unions have been relatively slow to pick up on this. Some union websites do list vacancies, though not all do. And anyway, if you're thinking of working for a trade union, what are you going to do – visit every single union website to see what's available?

In some countries there are websites offering union jobs – for example, there is unionjobs.com in the USA. But there is nothing comparable in Canada, or the U.K., or Australia. And anyway, union jobs are portable jobs. I know British citizens working for unions in South Africa and Australia, an American working for a union in Ireland, an Israeli working for a union in Britain, and people from everywhere working for the international institutions of the labour movement in Brussels and Geneva.

Globalization means that unions should recruit internationally. In most unions, it would be a breath of fresh air to have someone around who was raised in a different labour movement. Might even shake things up a bit.

Anyway, that's the thinking behind LabourStartJobs – a new project just launched by the online global labour news service LabourStart and a British-based company known as The Internet Corporation. The latter has had extensive experience building jobs boards for British and international companies, and got its feet wet in the trade union movement with the unifi4jobs.co.uk website, a joint initiative with the finance workers union UNIFI.

The new website, located at http://www.labourstartjobs.org, allows trade unionists looking for work in unions to register themselves and receive emails when a job they might be interested in pops up. One can apply for jobs through the site. Employers (in this case, trade unions) register to use the site and list details about the jobs available.

In the site's first few days online, unions in the US, Australia and Britain began posting the first jobs. These included some fairly interesting ones, such as a Research Officer specializing in lifelong learning for a British union, or a program/outreach director for a US union, or even a research position at an Australian university – looking into issues raised by a ground-breaking study of the problems of the labour movement down under known as Unions@Work.

Initially the website is being run at no cost to the unions advertising jobs there, although eventually that will change. However, LabourStart negotiated a commitment from its profit-making partners to never charge unions in developing countries that are looking to recruit staff. And of course use of the site will remain free of charge to those looking for union jobs, forever.

I think this is an exciting new project, one with huge potential to change the way we in the trade union movement look for work and the way our unions recruit staff. There will be loads of unintended consequences – for example, do you know how much a union organizer gets paid in Britain or Australia? Well, you will. We might even see some interesting cross-fertilization as unions weigh the possible recruitment of organizers and researchers and other staff from places outside of their usual framework. Who knows what could happen?

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