Using Cell Phone and Text Messaging for New Worker Organizing and Member Communication: A Field Test

Happy Memorial Day weekend, if "happy" is the correct word for a holiday where we remember how many people have died in endless wars.

I am about to launch a field test of a system at both my local and a sister local in MA that utilizes cell phones as a gateway to multi-media communication. Below, I've excerpted from the full proposal my general goals and assumptions for your review.

As I've noted in this Blog, the case for accessing members through cell phones is growing. Our sister local recently organized a "comprehensive service and support agency for adults with developmental disabilities," North of Boston and staffed by a largely Kenynan workforce. They discovered during the drive that: 1) due to their brutal work schedule and multiple jobs, workers were rarely home to receive visits from organizers, 2) that text messaging was their communication medium of choice because they couldn't really talk on the job and, 3) the workers had a very lively, existing network. So, they are searching for entry paths to the network. In my specific case, our local has a 40% error rate for snail mail and I've previously mentioned the New Bedford INS raid in an earlier post where text messaging led to massive job abandonment among Latino workers in the fish packing plants.

While the stakeholders are currently focused on broadcast messaging using SMS I am after bigger game. I am trying to see whether an interactive, multi-lingual, call and response, system will be embraced and increase worker participation.

Although the technology can be complicated, for example automatically going from voice to IP and making it simple to use, it is not the biggest problem I have. I'm really struggling with the interative language piece. I'm not concerned with what happens if I fail, I'm concerned with what happens if I'm successful. What do I do with a torrent of messages in three or four different languages? What kind of a back-end database would I need? How would we respond, and respond quickly? I have some ideas, and I've partnered with a translators cooperative, but I'm not there yet.

We could just do the whole test in English but it doesn't feel right. I believe we wouldn't learn as much or establish as firm a connection with the worker. I may be "over-thinking" and complicating the procedure so I would appreciate comments. Here are the assumtions:

Proposal

Establishing a Multi-Lingual, Multi-channel, Communication System

Introduction

The current worker profiles for both our Locals makes it difficult to communicate with existing sectors of the union or prospective organizing targets either quickly or efficiently. Conventional methods like mail and leafleting have mixed to poor success rates and are limited in their growth potential.

Organizing service workers presents unique communication problems. The job market for service workers is not stable which means workers move frequently and have unreliable mailing addresses. The pay is low, workers hold multiple jobs and have difficulty affording or maintaining computers or internet access. Workers do have cell phones, and use these as their primary means of communication.

Effective mobilization of the membership is built on trust and reliable communication. Adding communication capacity would directly benefit the Localsby:

· Effecting personal communication through cell phones with a large sector of workers who may not be reached by conventional mail. Cell phones as a gateway to multimedia;
· Providing multimedia avenues of interactive contact with members who opt into the system including voice, video, websites, text messaging and email;
· Data collection to tailor messages to a specific group of workers determined by the sophistication of the handheld device;
· Allowing members to chose a preferred language and the ability to offer selected content to participating members;
· Increasing speed and response times. Text messaging is far quicker than either leafleting, email or auto-voice dialers for information dissemination and collection. It is an excellent and demonstrated medium for rapid strategic decision making;
· Voice or digital secured Polling and Surveys;
· Group conferencing on demand.

The following is a proposal to supplement our existing broadcast communication practice with multi-channel, interactive technology. Some of the main operating assumptions of this proposal are:

· That cell phones are the emergent communication technology of working class people and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future;
· That workers have existing cell phone networks that unions are excluded from and to which unions want access to;
· That there are several levels of value that unions can capture by an investment in this technology. These are interactive communication, broadcast communication, data collection/mining and leadership identification.
· That voluntary buy-in by the member is necessary to maintain the virtual connection. Something of immediate value must be offered. This could include access to job postings, gossip and stories about work, information about benefits (scholarships), the contract (“Did you Know…”), legal information (immigration), events (picnics, outings) or contests with cash or merchandise as prizes (SEIU jackets, etc.).

Let me know what ya'll think.