Unions and the Digital Divide

Those with less education will not have the interest in getting the technology they need to empower themselves. And, of course, the education divide is a direct result of the income divide. And the income divide is the direct result of lack of union density. So the solution to the digital divide is to organize!

But seriously, I think computers are so cheap now that affordability really isn't the issue. I think the biggest hurdle is having uneducated workers see the value in the Internet and why it is as indispensible as a TV.

A lot of people are very leary of using email because it has some very bad properties compared to say speech. It's a lot safer to say something verbally than in email. There are laws against recording voice conversations without notifying the other party. Typically a workplace would not have the ability to record employee's speech in their offices (but maybe on the phone) but it is very common for workplaces to log all electronic messages (and do it legally). Computer communications unfortunately did not inherit the legal protections that speech had. There are no laws protecting people from someone forwarding their email all over the place, someone else reading that email and so on. And email is forever, like sending a physical letter to someone only it is more easily copied and changed than a letter. I would like to outlaw mailing list archives. If you say something verbally that turned out to not have been a good thing to say, it only will haunt you "so long". If you typed that same content in an email, it is potentially going to be used against you forever. And there's that problem of taking what someone typed out of context. You can always claim they misheard you in a dispute over a verbal exchange. It is nearly impossible to fight someone over an email you allegedly sent, even tho it is very easy for people to forge emails. The law does not match the technical reality.

A lot of people have found out the hard way that just about anything one could say on a mailing list that is easily accessible by the employer or a future employer can and will be used against the poster. I got turned down for jobs because I had participated on archived computer security mailing lists and the potential employers felt I was "excessively concerned about security"! The point being, if I had not been participating on that list and/or had not been identifiable, they never would have been able to hold their (idiotic) opinion against me when I applied for the jobs. Because of these problems, a lot of people shy away from using email even when it would be the cheapest, fastest and best way to transfer some information. I dont know what the answer is to these problems but they're definitely issues to deal with. I've personally had big problems with these and because of that typically do not use an easily identifiable email address. It makes it one tiny little bit harder for people to forward my email until it gets me into deep do-do. I dont have to make it SO easy for them by having my name stuck right in a signature or right in the email address. I would have to say that people who insist on doing everything over the phone due to these concerns, and I think there are a lot of them, are in fact correct that voice is much safer, but it is oh so expensive and inefficient. (Also voice or in person gives people that invaluable schmooze opportunity.) Further people doing service work often are judged on how many phone calls they field. Because of that, organizations are often very loathe to put substantive information on web sites. It's better for them if every single person who needs to know some routine piece of info has to call them. Secondly and probably more importantly, if they made an error in some advice they are less likely to get "convicted" of it if they gave that information over the phone than if they had it on a web site or in email. So again, this makes computer communications more dangerous than voice and that impedes its use.
The crux of the matter is perhaps how do you make it safe for the
information sender, by concealing their identity, without impairing the credibility of the message?
Ideally one would want to prevent the recipient from identifying the sender, yet the recipient has to know if the message is valid and really sent from an entity they need to receive information from. As far as I know email remailers that guarantee anonymity cannot have a reply message be returned to the orginal sender. This figures since if the system is storing the sender's true address then having that address stored is a very large risk.

An issue I really dont understand tho is why organizations are so loathe to give up printing. It is difficult and time consuming to prepare documents for offset printing particularly due to having to fit things onto a certain limited number of pages. The printing and mailing are very expensive and then the electronic version of such documents are typically ponderous hard to read on screen multi-column pdf files. Why organizations don't get rid of printing and mailing and simply put all those documents in html on their web site I will never understand altho I'm sure a part of it is not easily being able to restrict web access to the proper "subset". But in a lot of cases I cannot imagine the materials really need to be for their eyes only. I would really like to see Unions cut way down on the physical document printing and mailing they do.