Classifying Labor Union Communication on the Internet

I'm going to put on a theoretical, academic hat for a moment and take a stab at creating a general classification system for communication on the Internet. (Real academics please chime in.) Yeah, not the most exciting blog material, I know. But categorizing things is useful for helping us think clearly and logically about the world.

Two ideas about communication that go back to the time of Aristotle are that of ethos (speaker) and pathos (audience), which I will base my Internet communication classification system on. My larger point for doing all this is to argue that in order to have a truly effective Internet strategy, labor unions at the local, state, and national levels should have a separate plan for participating in each of these categories of communication:

Leadership to Public
A good example of this kind of site is the AFL-CIO site. The audience is everybody from members, to non-members, to influence peddlers.

Leadership to Membership
Most, but not all, such sites would manifest themselves as password protected dicussion forums or password protected web pages. It would include general announcements and news on a local union's site. This category would also include communication through e-mail, etc.

Leaderhip to Leadership
Again, these are often restricted, private access channels meant for limited distribution. But this category could also include materials publicly available generally of interest primarily to labor leaders.

Leadership to Non-Members
The first case that jumps to my mind is the YouAreWorthMore.org site. The idea here is to educate rank and file non-union workers who may or may not be sympathetic to labor unions.

Member to Member
This is an interesting area made possible almost entirely by the Internet. A good example is UFCW.net. Although such sites are not password protected, the subject material is restricted in such a way that it appeals only to members of a union or group of unions. This would also include web sites set up to promote a rank-and-file candidate for election.

Non-member to non-member
In the past, I've written about truckers who have set up web sites to facilitate communication between themselves about their work industry. Like member to member, the Interent has made this kind of communication much more practical.

Member to non-member
This happens in a very limited way, unfortunately. It's unfortunate because I think it could coceivably be a very powerful way of reaching out to non-members. How it might occur is that leadership would help facilitate such conversations in discussion forums within a web site geared toward non-members. Leadership would likely have to play an active role in getting members to participate.

Now these are very broad categories. Some sites don't fit neatly into one or the other. For example, the old "Unite To Win" blog appealed mostly to leadership but rank-and-file members and the general public participated as well.