(FORTUNE Magazine) – Amid the tech carnage, there's one group celebrating: organized labor. The rout has given unions an opportunity to rally a part of the work force that was previously out of reach.

There are signs that labor leaders are finally learning from past mistakes. They're championing issues important to mobile dot-commers (think telecommuting); they're organizing employees across companies by job type (Web designers of the world, unite!); and they're looking for dot-commers in their natural habitats (online chats and pink-slip parties). This makeover is vital to ensure union survival: Only one in seven U.S. employees is a union member, vs. one in five in the early '80s.

In Silicon Alley, where union efforts are just bubbling, the local labor council fields dozens of calls a week from disgruntled dot-commers. Union activities are also heating up at online grocer Webvan, where local Teamsters have filed charges of unfair labor practices with the National Labor Relations Board. The Northern California Media Workers Guild says it is close to organizing workers at SFgate.com, the online outlet of San Francisco's two newspapers. "If a union can give me job security, what do I have to lose?" says David Shifren, who was fired from his job at OnSiteAccess.com after just two weeks.

Labor is also forging unusual relationships with corporations to make inroads with white-collar professionals. In Seattle, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) teamed with Cisco to build a lab to house Web programming classes. "Labor needs some kind of change. It can't sit back on its heels if it wants dot-coms," says Marcus Courtney, founder of WashTech, the three-year-old high-tech union in Seattle. WashTech has 250 dues-paying members, small by labor standards, but more than 2,000 subscribers to its newsletter, significant in an industry where few thought organizing was possible at all.

Even so, labor leaders have yet to organize a single dot-com. Workers at eTown, a consumer electronics information site, had voted to hold a union election, but the company shut down before they could. And Amazon ended a union drive when it laid off a 400-person customer-service division that was trying to organize.

Nonetheless, management is taking the threat of a unionized high-tech work force seriously. In the past few months Jackson Lewis, the high-profile employment law firm favored by FORTUNE 500 corporations, has started giving labor seminars to dot-com CEOs. "It's way too premature to talk about 'Dot-commers of the world, unite,'" says Gina Neff, a researcher at the City University of New York studying workers in Silicon Alley. "But dot-commers have a lot to learn from the labor movement, just as unions have a lot to learn from folks at dot-coms."