Can advanced technology save labor's problems?

In the early nineties I was part of a large team of twenty organizers in a state employee organizing project for over 20,000 in Nevada. Looking back at that time makes me realize how much technological change has happened in a mere decade. The project was internationally managed, and even then, information was kept in the hands of the central office and doled out to organizers by hard copy for use and hand-update in the field. It was not a day of laptops; can you believe it was not even a day of cell phones in 1993!

I can remember another limiting factor then (versus now) due to such a gigantic geography. Face-to-face staff meetings had to be held to keep twenty organizers in step with one another over the 18-month organizing project. Pulling people from across such a large state was costly -- this could be done inexpensively today in a number of ways with today's technology. When the state employee local was finally chartered in 1994, the international paid for a video-linked convention between Reno and Las Vegas - with a downlink to Ely, Nevada. It was a big deal then at a very big price. Only ten years later this same event costs pennies on the dollars paid in 1994.

In 2002 in Las Vegas, the five-month card drive in the school district campaign happened very quickly, and organizers sent in from other areas did not have any central system to plug into because of such a fast-track set-up. International guys all had laptops but none were used for card-tracking purposes. That's fairly recent and I find that a real opportunity lost. And this tells me in organizing there must be a state of readiness for any web-based management operations we dream about.

I imagine a whole system could be 'on retainer' by the International on behalf of affiliates - with hardware awaiting dispatch from regional union settings to campaigns as they materialize. Web-based database management would be the 'cyber office' where data is sent and retrieved. Training readiness could happen at regional meetings and showcased to Locals' organizing staff. With infrastructure in place, this system could be good-to-go in short-shrift. (The problem could be, though, that each international union is its own stray cat; so many histories of turf-wars, etc., create a real nightmare in getting AFL-CIO affiliates to trust one another and/or use the same systems.) Security and trust. Strange words to integrate with one another.

Thinking of that, I must go way back to an East Coast campaign in my memory where theft of computer files at Yale University changed a campaign overnight from UAW to HERE. Those stories have left bad tastes in campaign administrators' mouths about open use of data by plug-ins from the field. I'm sure the right walls could be built to combat that today, but getting the biz-guys to truly trust labor contemporaries could be a hurdle higher than a mountain.

Let's be very, very frank here. The labor administrators I've worked with the past few years don't touch members much; they just count dues units. When the boss can't count more dues units from organizing, the first thing he cuts back on is organizing. Our 2003 campaign is pending at the Nevada Supreme Court with at least one more year before the election order is activated. I gave up in February and left the local. Free at last. Free at last.

Good stuff here gang and part of changing where we are is always rooted in understanding why we are where we are. Kathy does a great job of laying out the staffers nightmare and Peter sums up labors failures to strategize. Let's face it, it ain't easy being good, and most labor folks are too busy just trying to be what they were/are.

Is that over simplification? I think not. Virtually every labor education session i took, every George Meaney class, every UFCW convention or gathering having educational opportunities were filled with staff who wanted more; were looking for help or answers. Unfortunately, the big dogs were off by themselves having already come to the conclusion they knew it all.

I've had these conversations a hundred times away from the maddening crowd and with guys who knew we were in shitcity. Individually we saw the problem, collectively we marched along a path of ruin. The top down was built to follow in lock step, not rock the boat, play by the rules.

It is why we are dieing. It is why technology and labor are almost an oxymoronism (misspelling intended). There is no good reason for labor to not have grabbed the latest and best of the technological advances and used them to reach workers, except for the reason i gave you Steve...they can't control them/it.

IT scares the snot out of them. IT allows workers and staffers to build networks, educate and communicate freely. IT gives power to people who have none. IT creates a sense of community that is not immersed in i'll tell you what to think, do, and how to act.

Most staffers/organizers have a better handle on what workers are thinking feeling. The leadership sees the "big picture," unfortunatley workers see whats in front of them. They feel the impact of hour cuts, concessionary contracts and rising gas prices. They know workers lose their jobs when companies close but union leaders seem to be untouchable.

Our problems go so far beyond what is happening in a couple of weeks in Chicago. We need major changes in how we think, work and plan. We need to break a mold of upside down unionism where the top is more important than the bottom. We need to develope every technological enhancenment we can find to better educate and communicate with workers...without fear of whether the "boss" will lose the next election.

Once and if we get past that, then we must meld the marriage of technology and people. The tools we have aren't alone the answer. Our ability to make them work for us is wide open. Can we integrate building data bases, connecting workers and then putting them all in the same room is a question no one has answered yet. Sadly, we're too busy worrying about who owns what workers and who gets to be king. Worse yet, it matters not to workers, their concerns are about paying the bills, getting a kid through college or having health care.

Thanks Kathy, an organizers life is thankless. I guess just having a chance to say this stuff speaks volumes about the value of the net and this site. Giving people a voice is a lesson well learned...internet 101...empowerment. IT's what scares them to death.

"It is often easier to fight for one's principle's than to live up to them."

I really agree with much of what you're saying, Peter -- especially about planning. For me, on the ground in a campaign, a plan is flat. It has a timeline and a number of cards or votes I have to assess and count - coupled of course with lots of talking to real live people to assess union support.

But we both know each campaign has many other layers negatively impacting a winning vision: the local economy, right-to-work, AFL-CIO turf arrangements, etc. The planning I've been privy to has too often been written on a cocktail napkin with the expectation that all layers top to bottom will understand the 'big picture.' Of course, that plan is a pipe dream for the types Brother Pearson speaks of -- for when the campaign becomes a loser, the napkin author can twist the 'plan' to superiors any way he may want to save his own pension. If it's a winner, they take all the credit for their own vision... (Seriously, that's been my experience eighty percent of the time!)

Conversely, if we look at organizing when the AFL-CIO decides to get strategic, it's oh-so-colossal and world driven, like "Let's go organize Blue Cross Blue Shield" (failure - twenty years ago); or "Let's do coordinated organizing of women in Washington DC and Baltimore" (failure - twenty-five years ago where I began as a field agent); or more recently, "Wal-Mart has taken control of the economy, let's go organize them!" (Here, moving an international strategic mission across the dynamics of a mere fifty-state labor structure is no easy mountain to climb, much less the entire world. On Wal-Mart, I often ask myself, "Where is the strategy here?")

So, I would expect that 'effective strategic planning' in this setting is quite the topic in your world. Maybe we better fill the strategic bucket with information before we try to figure out a campaign's communication needs, eh?