Wayne Langley's blog

This report on mobile media from the New Politics Institute was just emailed to me and although I haven't read it just yet, I thought I'd pass it on for those of you interested in the cell phone discussion. Fun Facts:

· 80 percent of voting age Americans have mobile phones and an increasing number are becoming savvy at using them to create and consume media.

· Mobile video services already reach more users than the 8th largest cable operator in the country.

· By 2008 as many as 30 percent of wireless phone users will not own a land line. (What will political pollsters do?)

· Last year U2’s Bono got 800,000 people to sign up for the One Campaign to eradicate poverty by sending a text message through their mobile phones at his concerts.

All of a sudden, after years of being in the background, text messaging as a political tool is all over the web. What this usually means is that everyone is about to pile on and its usefullness will be over by the time Labor realizes it's even there as a potential organizing tool.

Just an update on the progress (slow) of my local unions experiment with text messaging. Sent a 400 piece mailing and got a poor response. Only about a dozen members responded, a majority of whom wanted to be contacted in Spanish. My thought that folks would jump on this because we would automatically alert them to new job postings appears, with hindsight, to have been optimistic. There are a couple of other possible explanations for the response rate. We had a number of bad addresses (which this experiment is trying to redress), we suspect that many members just don't open mail from the union, and/or the letter could have been lost.

I don't know if anyone has picked up on these news stories about the struggle between the Telecommunication Workers Union (TWU) in Canada and the Telus Corporation. It may be old news for some of you but it just made my radar. There is an article from labour.net and a slightly longer one from the OpenNet Initative.

I don't know if there have been other examples of censoring unions by Internet providers in the U.S. but I'd be interested in learning about them if there were. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This is an update on my earlier post about text messaging. My goal is to walk people through the process as I attempt to introduce new technology in an actual union local. Hopefully, we can all learn something about the difficulties inherent in technological innovation in organizations.

Happy 4th of July! I’ve just returned from a two day conference in England on Trade Unions and their use of digital technologies. There is a website for the conference that people can access and that (hopefully) will contain further discussion as soon as everyone catches their breadth at Lancaster.

Happy Memorial Day weekend, if "happy" is the correct word for a holiday where we remember how many people have died in endless wars.

I am about to launch a field test of a system at both my local and a sister local in MA that utilizes cell phones as a gateway to multi-media communication. Below, I've excerpted from the full proposal my general goals and assumptions for your review.

Why do some innovations grip the imagination and enjoy immediate acceptance while others, equally or more valuable, require the “hard sell?” Over the years I have tried many tactics to persuade union locals to adopt new technologies. From simple fax machines to computer networks, some ideas moved quickly through the system while others took a long time before people were ready to listen.

In this space I’ve written a lot about organization and how the internal values and culture of Labor conflict with modern computer technologies. If you believe, as I do, that our structures need to change, the very next question is how, and that is a very difficult question to answer.

Steve Dondley and I attended the Unions and the Internet Conference at the Labor & Worklife Program of Harvard Law school on March 24th and 25th. I thought a short report would be interesting since a number of national and international people working in the field of technology and unions showed up. Unfortunately, I missed Saturday so perhaps Steve can fill people in on that day.

What is it that causes some people to accept new inventions quickly and others never? In his book, The Evolution of Useful Things, Henry Petroski says: “The very fact that we are so adaptable to our artifactual and technological environment is often what makes us resistant to changes in it, especially as we grow older and accumulate our own familiar things and ways with them.”

One of the questions that keeps buzzing around in my head is whether the “information economy” really requires the free flow of information to function and, if so, does this mean that broad use of the Internet will lead to a more participatory democracy? Assuming for the moment that the information economy actually exists, China’s pervasive political censorship looks to be the premier test for this idea. There is an interesting article about press/web censorship in the latest issue of the Christian Science Monitor which also mentions the complicity of US companies like Yahoo and Google in suppressing dissent.

I've just finished reading "What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry," by John Markoff a well-known technology writer.

I would highly recommend this book for several reasons. First, it is an interesting and personal history of the development of PCs and the Web. Second, it talks about how revolutionary inventions are not created in a vacuum, but are nested in particular social and political contexts i.e. politics are embedded in design. Third, it shows how personal computers and the Internet were produced in opposition to the authoritarian bureauracies that were controlling mainframe computing and finally, it talks about how technology is inseparable from culture and organization. Here is a quote from the preface:

You can’t take technology out of politics, and you can’t take politics out of organization. A perfect example of this effect is the means and ends debate. This discussion directly impacts the use of technology in unions. How union organization confronts the necessity of gaining worker’s trust and participation goes hand-in-hand with their attitudes towards the significance and use of tools.

There at least two divergent ideas of how to convince workers to join the union struggle. The first is a variation on “build it and they will come.” This is a bureaucratic theme which argues that good organization is a meritocracy run by experts that understand the “big picture,” plans the strategy and looks out for the best interests of the members. This is identical to the old industrial division of labor where “efficiency” was achieved when managers understood the purpose of the assembly line and the workers only understood a piece of it.

It is not a democratic vision because what democracy means within this model is not good. If you flatten the organizational decision structure you simply get mediocrity and self-interest. You get everyone looking out for themselves, opportunists and free loaders and a bunch of timid people afraid to take risks or a bunch of hot heads who charge off into oblivion. You get ill informed debates because of uneven experiences and different levels of political savvy. You magnify your weaknesses. So, as long as you feed them steaks, who cares how you slaughter the cows? Results matter.

Anyone with experience in the nitty gritty of union politics recognizes that this argument has some truth to it. For example, bargaining committee members who only care about their pet demand. Executive board members who only want to get their hands on the treasury and accumulate perks. Weak International leadership that enables corrupt, business unionism to flourish. Racist, white guy’s cabals.

The other idea takes off from Kurt Vonnegut’s contention that “You are what you pretend to be.” If you adopt a corporate boss organizational structure, well, that’s who you are. Your organizational structure “prefigures” your result. It argues that workers are not passive consumers but need to feel active ownership in their organization. Otherwise your operation will become a mile wide and an inch deep. The problem with only concentrating on results, is that as soon as you don’t deliver what the workers think they deserve, they leave. One leader, no matter how charismatic, is a liability. Organizations, just like complex computer systems, need redundancy.

Even if Democratic organizations do contain all of the faults listed above, you’re not looking for perfection in the bureaucratic sense. There are no shortcuts. You have to have an organization build on a solid foundation of people who want to be there and do not flee at the first sign of adversity. Without this you have a mirage.

We also know that this is true. I’ve been on picket lines where the only thing holding them together is a shared sense of justice. The history of labor in America wasn’t built on a string of victories but a stunning series of defeats where worker’s organizations rose phoenix like from the ashes based on a shared sense of injustice.

Ownership involves communication. The “noise” of democratic give-and-take is a necessary prerequisite for strong communities. It assumes that there is more value in diverse opinions and experiences than problems. It is not an undifferentiated, “mass” it is a series of individual strengths which you’ve now made available for the group to use in problem solving. Democracy is efficiency because it is flexible and fast and avoids bottlenecks that arise when every decision needs to be threaded through a small circle of decision makers. It routes around disruptions just like Internet protocols.

The whole means and end thing reminds me of a discussion I had when I was an enlisted man in the army. I was organizing to restore the idea of a citizen solider rather than a professional one. A Major confronted me on base and said it would never work. He said even the Chinese revolutionary army restored the concept of command and control by restoring officer’s rank because they realized you couldn’t convince someone to charge a machine gun nest. Recently, I ran across the picture of that single individual stopping a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square. More on the connection to technology later, this is all for now, I need more coffee.

One of the questions I wrestle with is how technology changes the class struggle. As I surfed through the blogs recently, I discovered one from a “union avoidance” attorney who argued that the information economy renders unions obsolete. He made some interesting points, particularly about China, but then went on to make some ridiculous assertions. One of these argued that technology is eliminating “bad” companies (sweatshops) and encouraging “good” companies who value their workers. Well, the high tech industries I’m familiar with exploit janitors too. The information economy has sharp teeth.

I had another disappointing experience trying to talk about organization and technology the other day. There just seems to be such confusion and paranoia about these ideas. A real minefield. Either that or despite my best efforts I’m still not being clear enough. I think at least some of the resistance is due to fallout from the breakup between Change to Win and the AFL. I’ll explain.