Weak Ties, Porous Walls

In "Where Good Ideas Come From," Steven Johnson points to Twitter as an instance of the platform model for innovative development:
Twitter's creators recognized that there was another kind of competitive advantage that came from complete openness: the advantage that comes from having the largest and most diverse ecosystem of software applications being built on your platform. Call it cooperative advantage.
In a Weak Ties world, what is true for the product is also true for the producer, and the producer who relies exclusively on those within her own organization for production, development and innovation will find herself at a distinct cooperative and competitive disadvantage. In the Strong Ties world of industrial unionism the ethic has been to defend ownership of work through division of labour, strong seniority rights, closed shop certifications etc. The "walls" around work have become very porous in the pursuit of complete openness in the Weak Ties world of networked knowledge work. When the internet is both the work place and the market place, how do unions reimagine ways of addressing  issues of social and economic justice that persist and often thrive in the virtual reality of commercial endeavour?