Why do the AFL-CIO and/or CTW and their affiliated unions fear interactive sites?

The United Farm Workers have updated their website (http://www.ufw.org).

While it certainly is a visual and/or informational improvement over their previous site, they still lack user-driven interactive features, such as user accounts, the ability to post news and blog entries, and member driven forums. Like so many other CTW and AFL-CIO websites, the UFW remains at best ignorant and at worst fearful of a democratic communications network.

Here is the official announcement from the UFW about their updated site (including the features they believe to be most important):

UFW unveils new high-tech web site Visit it today at www.ufw.org and tell your friends!

The United Farm Workers has just launched its new and dramatically redesigned web site, www.ufw.org . The revamped site headlines ongoing UFW organizing activities and campaigns in which activists can quickly and easily participate. Exciting
innovations include:

* A new "Union Organizing" section with updates on the latest drives and a special "Worker Voices" section where visitors can hear farm workers tell stories in their own words.

* A "Hot Issues" section with the latest about current news and events right on the front page.

* An easy-to-use "Take Action" section where farm worker supporters can make a difference by lending their voices to specific organizing, legislative and political campaigns.

* E-cards (e-mail greeting cards with images and text to send family and friends on special occasions) and updated photo gallery, digital movies and audio clips of Cesar Chavez. For example, March and April's E-cards highlight Cesar Chavez Day.

* A regularly updated events calendar featuring dozens of Cesar Chavez Day events across the nation.

* A "Youth Activism" section to help young people learn how to organize in their schools and communities.

* A "Research" section to make it easy for students, reporters and historians to locate background information via a search engine covering the web site's extensive archives.

* An on-line poll where visitors can share their opinions and see how others feel about the same issue.

* A complete listing of UFW offices by region and state.

Please visit the site today and share the URL with your family and friends.

If you received this message from a friend, you can sign up for the UFW List Serve at: http://www.ufwaction.org/ufw/join.html?r=I1z5xzs19cOTE&

United Farm Workers, 29700 Woodford-Tehachapi Rd., P.O. Box 62, Keene, CA, 93531 www.ufw.org

While many of these features are no doubt useful, they are limited to one-way informational pamphlets. The UFW, like so many mainstream business unions, just cannot seem to think outside of the box. To the officialdom, websites are little more than brochures.

The UFW even devotes two whole features to promoting the ongoing cult of Cesar Chavez.

Nowhere, however can the visitor find the easily recognizable "XML" or "RSS" tags that are so prevalent on genuinely interactive activists sites, such as this one.

Even if the mainstream unions cannot live in the 21st Century and make their sites interactive, one would think they'd at least appreciate the value of sharing their news headlines, urgent actions, and announcements across the "labornet" (if such a thing exists).

Sadly, mainstream unions in the United States remain mired in bureaucratic doldrums whetehr in cyberspace or real space.

Meanwhile, it is rank & file workers and (self-promotional plug alert!) revolutionary unions such as the IWW that are once again showing the true leadership in bringing about a new labor movement in the shell of the old.

Take a good look around the internet and you will see that it is self-organized workers (e.g. http://www.starbucksunion.org), unions like the IWW (e.g. http://www.iww.org), and/or rank & file union dissidents (e.g. http://www.ufcw.net) that are the biggest users of interactive website features, such as Content Management Systems (CMS), RSS, and member driven sites. This is no coincidence.

At best, pro-capitalist business unions do not understand their rank & file. At worst, they fear them. Serious champions of workers' freedom and workers' rights would do well to take notice.