By Leigh Strope
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - One of the country's largest unions is taking its organizing drive to the Internet, creating a virtual labor organization that isn't tied to a work site or dependent on employer recognition.

The Service Employees International Union's new affiliate, called PurpleOcean.org, was disclosed Tuesday at the union's convention in San Francisco. The union's trademark color is purple.

The new group "is a radical new way to think about organized labor," said Andy Stern, president of SEIU, the largest union under the AFL-CIO with 1.6 million members.

The union, which endorsed former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean for the Democratic presidential nomination, is drawing on his campaign's extensive Internet network of supporters to build the new group. Dean raised millions on the Internet and mobilized hundreds of thousands of supporters.

Stern was inspired by the effort and began to write a Web log on the labor movement. The virtual union idea came next, with a goal of 1 million people to support SEIU campaigns.

Union membership is at an all-time low, with just 12.9 percent of the work force belonging to a union last year, according to the Labor Department. That's down form 13.3 percent in 2002. In the private sector alone, only 8.2 percent of workers were union members last year.

"Organized labor needs to reach into the bag and look for as many different ways to reach workers and speak to their needs as possible," said Bob Bruno, an associate professor of labor and industrial relations at the University of Illinois at Chicago.