Leadnow.ca is a youth-led pro-democracy NGO with some interesting folks, including Judy Rebick, on their advisory board. Until recently, they were known mostly (at least, by me) for their attempts to organize younger folks to vote. In early June, they organized actions at the constituency offices of over 80 MPs, demanding that they commit to breaking up Bill C-38, the budget implementation bill, to allow for proper debate on the issues it whacks.
What's interesting, for our purposes, is that the action was organized in cyberspace. People across the country on the Leadnow mailing list were sent a description of the action and a brief overview of the issue. On a riding-by-riding basis, "hosts" stepped forward to volunteer as media contacts and to do some further organizing amongst their own contacts.
In my riding, Northumberland-Quinte West, in Ontario, from the arrival of the first email to the appearance of 25 protesters at our MP's office, less than 48 hours elapsed. Given the low media profile of the issue prior to this event (and the subsequent BlackOutSpeakOut website-darkening campaign), this was remarkable. And many other ridings had similar experiences.
How did Leadnow manage this? How did they build a bridge from cyberspace commitment to meatspace action? And how'd it all happen in so short a period of time? I've asked Leadnow for an interview on all these questions, but that's for another day. Meanwhile, a few components of what they did are obvious even from a distance.
First, Leadnow has been enthusiastically collecting email addresses of progressive (very broadly defined) Canadians. So, they have 100,000 addresses in their database. Even more impressive is the fact that they have collected that many in less than two years. With a list that size, if even a small percentage of addresses generate some action, the results can be significant.
Second, their appeal was broad enough that virtually no one short of a Tory MP (and apparently not all of them) could find something offensive in what was being complained of.
Third, the action was not scary. Participants were asked to stand in front of their (closed for the most part) MP's office holding signs objecting to C-38. Photos were taken and collected by Leadnow. It was not a huge leap from the "slacktivism" of clicking to send a protest email, to standing with a sign. Non-confrontational, non-partisan, an easy transition from couch to picket line.
Fourth, and I am only half joking about this, participants were promised no speeches. This meant a bunch of things that I don't need to spell out for an audience of trade unionists, but it also signalled that there would be no efforts at partisan recruitment and no association of participants with the views of a speaker.
Fifth and last, while the Leadnow mailing list was useful in getting the word out, the action relied on local networks of people who knew people who knew people. Standing in the crowd at my MP's office, I could almost draw lines between myself and the people I had never met before by playing connect-the-activist. I knew a local union president. I had emailed her. She knew a workplace health activist. She had called him. He knew the local environmental-organization folks. He emailed them. They knew the woman from the international development NGO. She knew - well, you get the idea.
The extent to which the Leadnow action was a success is perhaps debatable. Perhaps. Myself, I think it qualifies as a rip-roaring, unqualified success. Prior to email becoming ubiquitous, an action like this on the lead time Leadnow had wouldn't have been attempted. Couldn't have been.
The lessons here are pretty clear, and all doable, save for one possible barrier: the lack of a large, unified, mailing list. Union numbers are held pretty closely, but I bet no union or central labour body in this country has a list the size of Leadnow's (100,000). There may be several unions that could get there if local and provincial and national bodies of the union combined resources and pooled their lists, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
And, anecdotally, at least, many union lists are the result of various kinds of "data mining," of collecting e-mail addresses in ways that don't guarantee that the addresses are owned by members of the union. If a non-union worker hears of an online campaign your union is running and participates and her address is added to your database, is that what you want (probably yes, but a qualified one); and have you any way of differentiating that address from those of members? Has your union made a concerted effort to collect members' addresses systematically? Likely not. Again and again, we ride the technology at high speed straight into the political/structural wall.
BLACKOUTSPEAKOUT
BlackOutSpeakOut was a related campaign that sought to bring attention to the anti-democratic agenda underlying Bill C-38, using the websites of a coalition of environmental protection organizations, other progressive NGOs, and unions. Participating websites blackened their main pages for a day with a message about the impact of the bill. Individuals were encouraged to use campaign graphics as their Twitter and Facebook profile photos. Not all national unions participated, but a significant number did. Unlike the actions at MPs' offices, the impact of this effort is hard to assess. Still, it was much remarked upon in the traditional media, so it at least had some novelty value.
SAY NO EVIL ABOUT YOUR BOSS
Temple University Hospital in the U.S. and Queen's University here in Canada have both bargained, or are attempting to bargain, "non-disparagement" clauses on behalf of management into collective agreements. The effect is to restrict freedom of speech on the part of workers at institutions popularly thought of as bastions of free inquiry and opinion. Employer interest in such clauses, or in policies that have the same effect, is increasing in direct proportion to the popularity of social media and the potential impact of comments made by individuals.
Surely this is a ringing endorsement, if ever there was one, of the power of social media. It's a shame the labour movement is moving so slowly to harness the communicating power of those same people employers are all afraid of - our members.
TRACKING SUPPLY CHAINS
Lately, my UK bud John Wood has been into supply-chain tracking of the bits that make up popular smartphones. Feast your peepers on his latest effort, backtracking the Samsung Galaxy, and imagine how easy it is to do this using the net, and how useful, especially to industrial unions at the high end of the product assembly and distribution food chain.
PAY WALLS IN CYBERSPACE
The Globe and Mail's announcement that it will be climbing on the cash bandwagon (is there room? Move over New York Times!) should be cause for thought and some assessment of the opportunities it presents for progressive online media, including union websites. If ported-over traditional media outlets like The Grope and Flail are going to limit the number of free page views readers can get in a set period (10 per month appears to be a developing standard), then news readers will either pay, limit their exposure, or look for alternative sources. Some of those sources will be the ones we and our friends control.
SHOP UNION
As pleased as I was to report on the online guides to unionized goods and services the B.C. and Alberta federations of labour have created, the UFCW shop-union app gets more applause. Find the nearest UFCW-organized shop anywhere in North America using your iPhone.
Details here.
Derek Blackadder is the co-ordinator for LabourStart in Canada and an honourary member of the Toronto Workers' History Project’s Archive Committee. Feedback and ideas for future WebWork topics welcome.
If you like what you're reading and want to subscribe to Our Times, please go here. Thank you!
