from Vol. 22 | Issue 6 | December-January 2004
FACE TO FACE OR CYBERSPACE
By Derek Blackadder
I'm a webhead. Ask my partner, my co-workers, friends, my
family. Many of them wouldn't ever see or hear from me if they didn't have an
e-mail address.
So it pains me to say this: the web ain't what we thought it would be when it
comes to union recruiting in the 21st century. In the mid-'80s, I and a bunch
of other tech-inclined types were (insufferably) convinced the Internet was going
to change the labour movement in a profound way. Change the way people communicate
within organizations, we thought, and you change the organizations.
Change the technology unions use to talk to non-members, we said, and you can
change the nature of the real "labour market," the place where workers
go when shopping for a union.
While waiting for the Internet to become more available, we set up dial-in "bulletin
board" systems and handed out passwords to our co-workers (who wondered
why they needed a password to check the bulletin board by the water cooler).
We got resolutions passed at conventions and budget money out of national executive
boards. We tinkered with unstable "mail gateways" to the text-only
Internet, and waited while the serious geeks, locked in their parents' basement
and eating nothing but Cheezies and Root Beer, made the revolution possible by
working the bugs out of "Hypertext."
Nice idea. Still is. Just a tad over-ambitious, perhaps.
I like to think there were 1914 versions of webheads like us who believed that
a direct telephone link from London to Berlin had the potential to stop the First
World War. After all, if English workers could speak directly to German workers,
they might realize how much they had in common . . . .
The fact is, though, that recruiting new union members today takes the same face-to-face
legwork that made unions grow 200 years ago. This isn't to say the Internet hasn't
turned out to be a useful tool for organizers. As a way of communicating, e-mail
is right up there with the phone, and the web is this century's replacement for
the poster. The Internet has as much potential to transform a union as it does
to transform any other organization. It's just that, while there are practical
realities that make the Internet faster and more convenient in recruiting new
members, the Internet is no more effective as a political tool than the semaphore.
A few years ago I did an informal survey of co-workers in my union (and several
others) who are comfortable with the web. Everyone agreed, however reluctantly,
that there was no revolution in organizing taking place. And these were people
who desperately wanted to be able to say differently.
More recently, at a December 2002 conference called Networked Labour - co-sponsored
by Harvard's Labor and Worklife Program, the London School of Economics and LabourStart.org
- the people I spoke with seemed to be, however reluctantly, reaching the same
conclusion.
Here's the problem: for most non-union workers, joining a union is an act against
the status quo. Change is a scary thing, even in the most relaxed of workplaces.
Scarier still if you're one of the people initiating change by signing a union
card. Throw into the mix an anti-union employer, or co-workers who are likely
to react badly to the thought of a union, and change is beyond scary. It's downright
threatening - to the worker, their dependents, their future.
Workers in that frame of mind listen to one person and one person only when making
up their minds about forming a union. That person is a co-worker who's known
and trusted and respected, and who has already made a commitment to the union.
As far as I know, no labour board in this country allows for electronic or online
membership cards to replace the paper cards we currently use in organizing. I
do know of a couple of provinces in which unions are lobbying for changes that
would allow this. But even if it were possible to register online your support
for a union in your workplace, I'm pretty sure that wouldn't make a huge difference
to our ability to organize, or to the rate at which workers form unions.
In Britain, a different legal basis for trade union membership means that you
can join online. Unions there can act on behalf of a minority of workers in a
workplace, even a minority of one. British unions found that making online registration
available did substantially increase their recruitment rate. But when they looked
a little further, they discovered that these new members weren't responding to
e-mail and other "virtual" appeals to join. They were mostly responding
to face-to-face contact - stewards and activists talking to them in the workplace.
What the availability of online registration did do was allow organizers in the
workplace to react more quickly to non-members' interest in joining. Before,
they would have had to return to their work station, meet up with the potential
member later, get a card signed, accept dues money, make change, keep track of
receipts, and do all that other stuff involved in signing up a new member. With
online registration, the activist simply called up a website, walked the new
member through a process that took a very few minutes, asked for payment from
a credit card, and immediately registered the new member.
Still, no one reported any real change in the effort needed to convince a worker
that they should join a union. There was a slight reduction in time spent getting
answers to questions (policies, reports and constitutions could be accessed on
the website), but that was it. The issues and arguments that non-union employees
reacted to didn't change. The union's website had provided existing activists
with a tool that made it possible for them to react more quickly to workplace
issues and interests. It had also made the work of the activists easier. But
it hadn't, in and of itself, drawn people to the union.
And even these results were generated in workplaces where the workers were used
to communicating with each other by e-mail, and to trusting the web's security
features. Recent organizing efforts at IBM in the U.S. have had similar, positive
results. But for every success like these there are, I suspect, dozens of next
to useless attempts made to organize workers by sending e-mails out into the
void.
Using the Internet to test the waters about organizing may seem convenient and
efficient, but it can be a huge mistake, especially in workplaces where the workers
aren't likely to be Internet-friendly, or (rightly, in many cases) prepared to
trust the privacy of an employer-provided e-mail account.
An organizing committee's website is a wonderful tool for communicating with
workers who are comfortable with the Internet and who have already signed a card,
but it doesn't generate a lot of cards by itself. It's the equivalent of a great
newsletter: not everyone reads it, but it informs those who do. And keeping track
of your readership is one way of tracking your support. But the most you can
expect from a website as far as non-supporters go is that it will make them aware
that there's a campaign going on around them, and, by providing information,
will very slightly reduce the time you have to spend talking to them.
Very, very slightly. It may make it easier for people to jump on the union bandwagon,
but there needs to be a bandwagon there waiting.
Similarly, e-mail has made organizing committee decision-making more flexible
and inclusive. E-mail makes it easier to get decisions made quickly in response
to employer actions, and makes it possible to involve workers from all shifts
and widely spaced worksites in those decisions. It has also made potential members
more demanding: if they can ask a question an hour of their long-distance phone
company and online bookstore and get responses within eight hours, they expect
to be able to do the same with the union that's trying to win their allegiance.
Make an organizing committee available by e-mail (and you have to) and those
are the expectations that have to be met.
The Internet still holds a great deal of promise as a means of improving union
communications, of educating (it's a great tool for distance education) and organizing
existing activists - who often wouldn't have "met" were it not for
listserves, chatrooms and bounced e-mails - and as a potential means of improving
and broadening union democracy. Today, a local union can make it possible for
each and every member to be involved in its decisions.
Perhaps most spectacularly, the Internet has created a huge new potential for
international solidarity actions by unions and individual members. Still, in
recruiting new members, nothing beats the smiling face of a workplace-based activist,
someone with as much to gain and as much to lose as you have. And as a space
for organizing, the Internet has yet to get even close to the coffee shop down
the street.
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