webshells.com/nwuco Forum
webshells.com/nwuco Forum
| Author | Eric Lee |
| Date | 00/06/13/01:20 |
| Hit Count | 745 |
| Another important change the Internet is bringing to unions is that it is democratizing them. Some of them. This is a painfully slow process and is nowhere near as advanced as the re-internationalization of the labour movement. But there is already good evidence that it is happening. Already back in the early 1980s, the British Columbia Teachers Federation, then pioneering use of modems, discovered whole strata of the union hierarchy that proved to be unnecessary once communications were improved and made more direct. In the summer of 1999, flight attendants working for NorthWest Airlines rejected the company's contract offer in a surprise vote. The union leadership had urged members to vote for the contract. This is not the first time that the rank and file have rebelled, but what made the NorthWest case interesting was that the campaign against the new contract was conducted entirely online. It was organized initially by a single angry flight attendant based in San Francisco who sent out repeated emailings to fellow union members explaining what was wrong with the contract. Because of the nature of their profession, always travelling from place to place, unable to attend conventional union meetings, email turned out to be an especially potent weapon. It even turned out that the NorthWest insurgents were not such pioneers; they had heard that a similar rebellion at American Airlines, also using email, had won a better contract some time earlier. At just about the same time in Britain, the Communication Workers Union, which represents both postal and telecom workers, had concluded a long and difficult series of negotiations with Royal Mail to produce a joint long-term vision of employer-employee relations for the years to come. Historically, postal workers have been a militant lot and the future of Britain's postal service in the Internet age is uncertain. One can imagine how much work must have been put into reaching an agreement that satisfied both the union and management. Rank and file postal workers were not, admittedly, organized by email into an effective opposition to the agreement. They did, however, vote to defeat the proposal in a democratic ballot, forcing the union to re-think its strategy regarding Royal Mail. But there was also an Internet angle to the story. Some months earlier, the union had launched a series of web forums on its site. Though over a thousand members of the union (out of 250,000) had password access to the forums, they were largely unused. In one particularly embarrassing case, a female member of the CWU launched a forum on women in the union and began with a message asking if anyone was out there. She received no response. As the forums were fairly inactive, and the top union leadership not yet connected from their desktops to the Internet, no one noticed when insurgent postal workers began using the tool to exchange views -- and trash the union leadership for the deal it had made with Royal Mail. After a while, the attacks became bolder and personal, bordering on the libelous. Someone noticed. The reaction of the union was to immediately shut down all the web forums for 48 hours and rethink the situation. In the end, a set of guidelines for behavior in the forums was proposed and they were reopened, but it came as quite a shock to the CWU leadership to see the new technology being used for such purposes. One should not exaggerate the democratizing potential of the Internet for trade unions. If the net were truly the great leveller, making everything transparent, giving out all the facts so propaganda and lies would become ineffective, and so on, then in countries like the US where Internet penetration is very high, you'd see a rapid decline of old, corrupt leaderships and their replacement by democratic reformers. And yet the single biggest change to happen to US union leaderships in the age of mass Internet access was not the triumph of a reforming slate somewhere, but Jimmy Hoffa's election in the Teamsters. When I pointed this out at a conference in New York City a year ago, an angry Teamster, herself a strong Hoffa supporter, pointed out that the Hoffa campaign had run an excellent website and used email intensively. Which is, I guess, the whole point. The new technology by itself can be used by insurgents and by entrenched bureaucracies -- there is nothing about it that guarantees the success of democracy. What made the NorthWest and Royal Mail cases different was that the union leaderships were caught off guard. In the future, those leaderships will be better prepared. In addition to internationalizing and democratizing unions, the Internet has the potential to greatly strengthen them -- not only as a recruitment tool, but as a way of binding members ever-closer to their unions, using the new technology. In late 1998, John Dixon was sent on a global fact-finding mission by his union, the New South Wales Teachers Federation, in Australia. While visiting the UK, he met with officials of the National Union of Teachers who told him that the web had proved to be an incredibly effective organizing tool. Some 5,000 new members had been recruited online, he was told. I have my doubts about this story. Because as one looks around at the hundreds of trade union websites that seem to offer the possibility of joining up online, in reality what they all seem to really offer is the chance to fill out an online form and receive a packet of information by snail mail. This was confirmed by the fact that headlines were recently made in the US by the second largest union at Boeing (the SPEEA) which allows potential members to download the union's authorization card in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), meaning that they can print out the cards themselves, sign them, and hand them in to union representatives. This seems to be about as far as it has gone. Not even the SPEEA actually allows you to join online. True online organizing means allowing people to join unions in the same way that they bank online, or buy insurance, or shop for books or CDs. You should be able to fill in a secure online form and sign it using an encrypted digital signature. There should be no need for paper at all. Obviously such a technical development would not eliminate the need for human organizers actually talking to potential recruits. The labour movement is not going to grow because people read good things about unions on websites and promptly fill in the online forms. But there is no reason why technological barriers should still exist to actual online recruitment. And I'm convinced that it's only a matter of time before unions actually do recruit this way. Already in Britain, the government's proposed ecommerce legislation with its support for digital signatures has convinced some that true online recruitment is now possible. Organizing means more than just recruiting members -- it also means keeping members in unions and bringing them closer to their unions. This is where the Internet can play a big role in strengthening unions. Unions which until now were limited by budgets to quarterly magazines which were sent to members can now communicate with their entire memberships on a daily basis, using email and the web. Because of the enormous cost involved in old-fashioned print and mail, unions have become increasingly distant from many of their members. When I asked at Britain's giant MSF union (with some 400,000 members) about the possibility of doing a mailing to the membership, I was told that the union simply didn't have the financial ability to do such mailings. It relied upon a bimonthly or quarterly magazine to keep up contact with the rank and file. It had no means to mobilize its membership in time of need. Today, MSF's website is updated on a daily basis, allowing the union to talk to its members in real time -- something it has never been able to do before. The potential for mobilizing is now there. There are other ways unions can bring members closer to the organization. In the past, unions used things like t-shirts or pins and badges. Today, email addresses can play a similar role. MSF negotiated a deal with a provider of web-based email to provide an MSF email address to every member of the union. This would be their permanent address, regardless of where they worked or who their Internet service provider was. The idea was that members would tell people their email address and that would be a way identifying themselves as union members. Other unions have made determined efforts to create portal websites which would be the home pages of members on the Internet. Such sites would bind members closer to their unions. The most ambitious attempts to do so have been those recently launched by the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the AFL-CIO, both of which are offering package deals of computers, Internet access, and the portal website. If hundreds of thousands of union members begin using these services, as the two national centers hope will happen, they will not only be exposed to union news and views on a daily basis, but will probably begin to identify themselves more and more as trade union members, even if they have never attended a union meeting in their lives. The new online tools also allow unions to reach out beyond their own memberships as never before. This is particularly true during times of need, such as strikes, when the support of the community is especially important. In recent years, unions have made extraordinary efforts to use the web to tell their side of the story. This proved particularly effective in the case of the Teamsters, a union which suffers from generally awful public relations, when it led a strike at UPS which proved to be quite popular with the American public. As I write these words, the Teamsters are again involved in a long and bitter nationwide strike, this time at Overnite, and have set up a special website to tell their side of the story. In 1999, Quebec's nurses found themselves embroiled in an extremely difficult strike against a union-hating provincial government. The union's website was caught unawares as the strike began -- it was a simple online brochure with a picture of the union's president and some basic information and everything was in French. But as the strike intensified, with threats of arrests of union leaders and multi-million dollar fines (nurses' strikes are illegal in Canada), the union found itself transforming the website, turning it into a tool to mobilize public support. Daily news was added. An English language page was added. Another page showed a long and growing list of organizations which expressed solidarity with the nurses, from all over Canada and around the world. After only a few days, the Quebec nurses were using the Internet actively to build support, spread the news, raise morale. With widespread community support and an unwavering rank and file, they eventually won. The net certainly played a part in their victory. Unions are often perceived, at least in the advanced industrial countries, as dinosaurs. It would surprise no one to hear that most top leaders of most unions are Internet illiterates. But a campaigning union website sends out the opposite message. It says that unions are part of the new, networked economy, that they intend to stay around for a while and are not about to become extinct. Using the new communications technologies itself is a way of sending a strong message about unions' commitment to the future. Until now, I've talked about the past and present of unions and the net. It would be appropriate to conclude with a few words about the future. Naturally, no one knows what will happen. With the incredible pace of technological change, predicting has become an impossible job. But we can take a page from Samuel Gompers, who when asked what trade unions want said, "More!" What will happen to unions and the net in the years to come? More -- more websites, more online campaigns, more online recruitment, more online communities (web forums and chat rooms), more mailing lists, more news, updated more frequently, more interactivity, more online rank and file activism, more international solidarity. Thanks in part to the Internet, we are moving inevitably toward a networked global economy. Just as the emergence of national markets in the 19th century spawned national trade unions, so the 21st century is giving birth to the next stage of the labour movement: networked global unions. Copyright Eric Lee About the author: Author of The Labour Movement and the Internet: The New Internationalism (Pluto Press, 1996), editor of the LabourStart website (http://www.labourstart.org), and ICT Co-ordinator for Labour and Society International. Also the author of Saigon to Jerusalem: Conversations with Israel's Vietnam Veterans (McFarland, 1992) and the unpublished Mole: Stalin and the Okhrana. Founding editor of The New International Review (1977-1989) and Workers Education (1993-1997). Member of Kibbutz Ein Dor, Israel. Editor of the online newsletter BibiWATCH (1996-98). Currently based in London. |