United Professionals

I haven't heard of this effort before,
"United Professionals". It sounds like an
open enrollment union.
http://www.unitedprofessionals.org
as mentioned here:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?bid=7&pid=123681

It'd be great if there were a single source of
info about this kind of union.

One of the problems
of the classic workplace-based union IMHO is that it is limited to very specific types of positions in specific workplaces. So if you don't fit in with that one local, there's no other choice.

Secondly if you have skills of a certain type and they don't need any more people with those skills, there's little for you to do for the union. For example, in our union we have way more technical people than we have a use for technical skills. But all the accounting people are in a different local. Thus our local was always having accounting problems whereas some other locals have no technology people and they have technology problems. There's no way to spread out the skills to where they're needed, nor overcome local personality conflicts or discrimination issues that may crop up. If there was a really good way to utilize the skills of the membership, and the union was very broadbased, it might be possible to do a significant portion of union service activity by rank and file volunteer work
rather than expensive consultants. The higher the dues the harder it is to get someone to join and the more critical they're likely to be of the union. With the typical one and only one union that is allowed to recruit people in your job classification, if you don't fit in in that local, there's no other choice.

And if there's no local in your workplace at all, the only choice is to try to organize one, which is a very risky and dramatic undertaking that frankly few people are brave enough to tackle. There definitely needs to be a plan B. Hopefully these open enrollment unions are an answer.