Matt Noyes's blog

The following article, by veteran building trades activist and AUD Research Director James McNamara, appears in the May-June issue of Union Democracy Review. See also Richard Dorrough's previous comments on this. -- Matt Noyes

Want to see a hint of what internal union democracy could look like, if union officials embraced the internet and used it promote internal discussion and debate? Check out www.SEIUVoice.org and its coverage of the SEIU International Convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico. (See too the SEIU International's convention site -- the old seiufactchecker.org address now resolves to it -- www.seiu2008.org )

Recently, CorD has seen a low level of activity, much of it consisting of hostile exchanges between two or three people.

As the person who runs the website at the Association for Union Democracy, I try to maintain a pretty liberal links policy when it comes to rank-and-file and independent union websites. AUD is non-partisan, so I link to many sites whose views I don't share personally. My criteria are simple: a) is the site a bona fide, independent, union member site, b) does it aim to make unions stronger? No anti-union sites.

"Anti-union" is a slippery concept, because autocrats call critics anti-union all the time, but there are a few sites that help us define the term: the website of the National Legal Rights and Accountability Project (NLPC) is one.

My point in the last post was that what is internal and what is external has changed: so-called internal union affairs are now largely external and forums and media outside the union are increasingly part of the union's internal culture and politics.

I think Steve's question is worth a separate discussion:

How does a union organization grapple with the legitimate need to "stay on message" with the need to allow members to have their voice heard in a public venue? It seems
unions, being more "of the people" than say private corporations, have a unique expectation placed upon them to discuss and debate disagreements in public.

What I advise unions to do is the following:

1) Screen comments. As much as I love free-for-all, spirited debate, there are times for having it and times for not having it. A public union website is not the forum for that. Do it behind closed doors.

2) Allow criticism. Members need to be heard. And a good leader will should listen to all criticisms. And the union needs to show that it is genuine about listening to its members.

3) Require all criticisms be done respectfully. No name calling, nothing that even hints at an insult. People must be extremely polite.

4) Require criticisms be accompanied by an alternative suggestion.

5) Criticisms should only be about the stance leaders take on issues, not the leaders themselves. If the leader is an alcoholic megalomaniac, take that up in the union meeting, not in public.

To me, we have to take a step back to get this discussion in the right framework. I think the underlying problem is that some of the foundations of unionism have shifted. Meaning, the old concept of that which is "internal" to the unions and that which is "external" has changed, particularly in relation to communications and politics.

Richard Dorrough called my attention to the submission guidelines on TeamsterPower.org. http://teamsterpower.com/teamster-power-posting-guidelines

TeamsterPower is a good looking site designed by CorD's own Steve Dondley and run by Richard Negri. Its mission is to promote the union and its members, "our national campaigns, our victories, our struggles." It is run by IBT International staff, but is not an official union site.

By now many of you have probably seen the exchange on Democracy Now! between Sal Rosselli and Dave Regan, both leaders of SEIU (Rosselli in United Healthcare Workers West, Regan in District 1199). If not, check it out.

Check new users, recent bog posts, and active forum topics.

Why not empower somebody to unpublish spam, or at least flag it?

A few years back, I wrote up a set of 50 Guidelines for building an effective rank-and-file website. I got the guidelines idea from Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir's book Homepage Usability. But I didn't want to just focus on technical issues or even usability in general. I wanted to help union members use the new technology for union democracy and reform. We need sites that help us organize. How can rank-and-file workers use the internet to organize for democracy and power on the job and in the union? What are some of the best practice techniques that union reformers are using?

The problem is the Guidelines are out of date, given the advances in tech and in use by unionists. So, I want to revise them. I would love to hear any feedback and suggestions -- I have a lot to learn -- so I am posting them here, one by one.

1. Tell people who, what, and where you are.

It seems obvious, but many rank-and-file sites fail to do this. Every site should tell the visitor:

• what the site is about,
• who it is for,
• who puts it out,
• where they are located and
• how to contact them.

Got this from Eric Lee. This is something CorD folks should respond to, and ask others to as well.

-Matt

In a moment I'm going to ask you to support the most unusual campaign we have ever launched -- but first, some background.

Blackadder: Banned from Facebook

Facebook, the social networking website, is getting a lot of attention these days. In the trade union movement, there are differences of opinion about how useful Facebook actually is. Some of us are making a real effort to find out by using Facebook as an organizing tool.

One of them is senior LabourStart correspondent Derek Blackadder, from Canada. Derek's day job is as a staffer for the country's largest union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). He's one of the people who thinks Facebook is potentially quite useful for trade unionists.

Well, maybe not so much anymore.

You see, a few days ago, Derek was banned from Facebook.

I'll let John Wood from the U.K. tell the story in his own words:

Derek got a note from the good book, telling him he was trying to add too many friends, and should calm down a bit, or else. Now as a union organiser, he’s quite likely to want to add lots of friends - it’s kind of what he does. So he waits a bit and tries again, and is told he can’t add any more at the moment and to wait and try later. Fair enough. He waits a bit more and tries again, same message. By now, he’s probably frothing at the mouth and muttering "must organise, must organise", so he has another go to see if the coast is clear, and promptly gets himself a ban. That being a ban from Facebook itself - no more profile, no access to the stuff he’s built up, no appeal.

John has launched a Facebook group to sign people up to protest the ban on Derek. I am writing to ask each and every one of you to take a moment and sign up to join the group. If you are not yet signed up on Facebook, join the 60,000,000 others who have done so and sign up.

We know that this isn't nearly as important as most of the other campaigns we do on LabourStart -- and if you read all of John's article you'll detect a somewhat light-hearted tone.

Still, as social networks become more and more important, our access to them as trade unionists must be protected. These are early days yet -- I know that most of you are not yet signed up to Facebook. This is good time to see whether we can mobilize the kind of support -- the thousands of names -- that will force the owners of Facebook to reverse course and allow Derek to do what he does so well: organize.

Thanks for your help on this. And spread the word!

Eric Lee

Isn't "free edition" unionism more descriptive of efforts by unions like SEIU to broaden their base and encourage participation of non-union workers than "open source"?

Don't we want a true open source unionism, one where the actual contents and workings of the "software" are open to critique/revision/challenge/innovation, a unionism that looks more like Drupal or Linux than AVG?

I'm a big fan of AVG, by the way, and support the idea of making unionism beneficial to non-members. (Bill Pearson and others did that in his old UFCW Local -- see Retailworker.org)

But, U.S. unionism is in collapse and the current leadership is generally seeking for authoritarian solutions -- more like "closed source" unionism. Imagine if your union were a browser, wouldn't you want to hack it? Rewrite the grievance code? Enable all the participation modules and give workers permissions beyond just "access content"? (Forgive the Drupalese!)

I saw this on Jonathan Tasini's Working Life blog:

Communication Workers of America: is undergoing an elaborate process that will, perhaps, result in an endorsement in November. From a CWA email to its members:

The goal is for every local to have at least 10 percent of its members vote online at www.CWAVotes.org. CWA headquarters will send updates to locals about how many of their members have voted as of Oct. 17 and Oct. 30, as well as a third tally on Nov. 13. The voting deadline is Nov. 9. Locals are urged to use websites and e-mail lists, to post flyers about the e-poll in workplaces and use their mobilization structure to get the word out.

Two thoughts. First, at face value, it's a way of getting members input. Second, it's a way for the union to put off jumping on any horse in the hope that events might make the choice a bit easier as the year draws to a close. After all, at this point an endorsement from CWA might not comes until maybe a month or so before the Iowa caucuses, which now appear to be slated for January 3rd (I'm going to spend New Year's Eve where???).

What follows is the first part of a recent article by Herman Benson and me, that appeared in Union Democracy Review. The audience is not just tech-savvy people, so forgive the elementary stuff.

The internet poses a dilemma for union officials because they are losing their monopoly control over access to their membership. As long as communication depended upon the printed word, they had no problem. They had the official union publication, printed and mailed to the whole membership at union expense, reporting on their services to humanity and on the plaques they received and bestowed for supporting worthy causes. True, most members discarded the products after a casual glance, along with all other bulk mail. Nothing to worry about, because no one else could reach the membership with a contrary message.

Independents, dissidents, critics could print their own stuff, but it was often burdensome and costly. Usually it was technically impossible and prohibitively expensive to get it into the hands of the membership, even more so as autonomous local unions were merged and reorganized from modest-sized manageable units into sprawling mega units, councils, and districts.

But the internet is changing all that. Now anyone can set up a website. E-mail can go out to a whole list at the click of a button. No postage costs, no fancy printing charges. It is economical, convenient, and even free (if necessary you can use a public library.) As more and more unionists become computer savvy and sign up for their own internet services, they cease to be passive recipients of messages; they seek out information available on websites. What they find, they share. And so union oppositionists can be partially relieved of the burden of seeking out an audience; it comes to them and spreads the word.

In response to the challenge of this new medium, most unions have established their own websites and line up their members to receive e-mail. Some unions try to limit their critics or shut them down by assorted disciplinary threat. But nothing works to eliminate the perceived danger from the independent internet.

The typical official website serves a narrow administrative purpose. Members can turn to it for technical information on meeting dates, pensions, legally required notices, and the like; but everyone knows it contains little beyond the acceptable politically correct line and puff pieces for the officers. For something exciting, or revealing, or imaginative, or even fictional, they turn to the independent sites. The reader may be outraged by some of the attacks on their leadership or may laugh off an absurdity, but they find the exchanges interesting. They pay attention, and they can participate in the discussion. The official site is no competition.

Attempts at repression by those in power are doomed to failure. Union officials bring disciplinary charges against their internet critics: libel and slander, revealing union business to the public, violating a claimed union copyright on information, failing properly to distinguish the insurgent site from the official site. The latest: a technical demand that insurgents seal off their sites from non-members by imposing a password that would require readers to identify themselves before opening the independent site. But none of this will really work. The dictatorial Chinese government, empowered by jails and police, finds it impossible to silence the internet voice. And this is the U.S.A. where leaders have only the limited power of their union office; even if they could drive the independent internet into a union underground, they could never repress it.

But some union leaders are enlightened or intelligent enough to know that something new is necessary, or shrewd enough to realize that they must become kind of union democrats despite themselves. (If you can't eliminate them join them!) They even post on the independent sites or establish official union blogs where members are encouraged to express themselves more or less freely, to reject union policies, and even to criticize their leaders.

A blog is a special type of online journal where the blogger offers commentary. Blogs do not stand alone. They offer links to other blogs and sites. Visitors can post their own comments. Blogs form a network, encouraging discussion and exchanging information. In many cases users of websites can establish their own blogs on the site. One expert notes that these new tools are "evidence of a staggering shift [away] from an age of carefully controlled information provided by sanctioned authority." Bloggers are creating a new community, an online community.

By encouraging free dissent under official union auspices, union blogs aim to bring members back home to an arena where their discontent can be, not only expressed, but answered under controlled conditions. To the extent that union members can find an outlet for democratic discussion under union auspices, it is hoped, they will cease to rely exclusively on the independent sites. But the turn to an official arena creates new problems for the union leadership.

The independent internet, uncontrolled, poses an outside democratic challenge to any union establishment. If to mitigate that challenge, they establish their own forum where members can speak freely, they must accept the dangers of internal union democracy. We find them confronting that dilemma in the experiences of several of our most important unions...

The IUOE is trying to impose a new policy that would force all independent member websites to restrict access to IUOE members only. The illegal policy is currently being challenged in federal court.

What would such a restriction look like in practice? How would members react?

Try visiting this website, for a slate of candidates in IUOE Local 150: http://www.150forward.com

(Anyone know anything about the Matrix Group International beyond what's on their website?)

The Matrix's barrier to entry drew this response from an IUOE member:

"...Long live FREEDOM of SPEECH, Long live a REAL UNION. Until a federal court Judge makes a ruling the IUOE will continue trying to shut us down, LONG live Democracy and REFORM is coming....

"USE MY ID 1405349 David M Jenkinson to log in if you want to remain unknown by the International. Charges, I don't know nothin about any stinking Charges. It helps to laugh at the BASTARDS."

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/SeeYaSink/message/165