Conference: Trade Unions in the “Information Age”

Happy 4th of July! I’ve just returned from a two day conference in England on Trade Unions and their use of digital technologies. There is a website for the conference that people can access and that (hopefully) will contain further discussion as soon as everyone catches their breadth at Lancaster.

It was my first in-depth exposure to the trade union movement in England and I was surprised to learn that there was no such thing as a union closed-shop. So, every union is effectively a minority union, although they did not have to provide services to non-union workers. This meant that unions, even large ones, had much less money to operate with than ours. Staff from the TUC (Trades Union Council similar to the AFL) were amazed when I remarked on the size of the budgets that many American unions had. As a rule, TUC affiliated unions have to be innovative and make the most of their scarce resources.

There were two workshops that I think our community would be particularly interested in. The first was a presentation by Paul Nowak, the National Organizer at the TUC Organizing Academy and John Wood, Campaigns and New Media Officer on three union websites. Unionreps is an internal, cross union, intranet, that hosts discussion forms for Union Representatives/Business Agents. It is password protected, but they have 9,000 reps from across the UK participating in open forums that discuss problems and that allows reps to offer each other advice about their work. Questions posted on the site are generally answered by the community the same day or the day after. John Wood, noted that the participation rate was very important since a much lower rate would lead to “a viscous circle rather than a virtual one” where a few people dominate the discussion. It was a great site and striking that they had so much cross union participants, something that I think is usually frowned upon here.

The other two websites were the Union Ideas Network which attempts to link the academic community with the trade union community and WorkSmart which is an open site for all those interested in looking for advice about problems on the job.

The first site has only been running a couple of months and has a smaller participation rate but the concept is great. They found that English trade unions tend to use the same academic players, regardless of their expertise, because they happen to know them. The site allows people to post papers on various topics they are working on, foster discussion and tries to expose unionists to a wider intellectual environment than they are used to. I believe US unions suffer as well from this problem and would love to see something similar here.

The second site is also pretty clever and they deliberately keep the relationship with the TUC low-key to keep people from being scared off and so that it can be a bit more creative. They’ve forged some agreements with both job boards and temp agencies where the TUC provides free work advice and the vendors use the union site as the main link for questions about work. Again, a very innovative idea. They run all three websites on a budget of about $60,000/yr although I don’t think this figured included John’s salary but who knows?

The other workshop of interest was called “Firefighting in Cyber space” which included Roger Seifert, Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Keefe and co-author of “United they Stood: the story of the of the UK firefighters dispute 2002-2004” a book on the failed strike by the firefighters, two rank-and-file members of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) who ran an opposition website called “30Kfirepay”, John Hogan, Reader in Industrial Relations, University of Hertfordshire and Andreja Zivkovic, Senior Lecturer, University of Hertfordshire. The official FBU website is open for review but the member website is closed, although it is still worth a look at the home page for the information.

The main theme of the workshop revolved around the role of the member website during the national strike and the boundaries of union democracy. Roger spoke about his book which was intended to be a case study illustrating a power relationship at a certain point in the British Government. Essentially, it was a story about how the state, and the Labor Party, used all of its resources to smash the firefighters struggle. Roger took a strong position against the “unofficial” member website "30Kfirepay" arguing that it undermined the efforts of elected leadership to present a unified front, was hijacked by the intelligence services and the employers to sow confusion and disinformation. In addition, sectarian groups within the FBU manipulated the website to undermine the democratically elected leadership at a moment of stress in an opportunist effort to gain power.

Roger took the position that any form of member dissent is inappropriate during a strike. That labor actions are similar to a war and in a war democracy is suspect and the command and control model of leadership is an absolute necessity. He noted that the FBU was a small union consisting of a leadership composed of 6 people, 18 members of an Executive Council (paid), and 50,000 members. All of the leadership are working firefighters, democratically elected according to the established constitution and by-laws and were popular as long as they delivered good contracts. This is hardly the picture of an unresponsive bureaucracy governed by mis-leaders engaged in selling out the rank-and-file.

It was true that the leadership felt confident going into negotiations because they had counted on the support of the membership, had won several recent job actions and felt that their demands were modest. They used “discontinuous” actions (rolling strike) as their main strategic tool.

However, the State flipped out, attacked the leadership, used the security services to spy on the leadership, tapped their phones, followed the leadership, called up all the newspapers and had them run editorials against them, hit them hard. Strike failed.

Roger felt that the nature of the technology, it’s open forum aspect, played into the hands of a small group of sectarian leftists (opportunism not democracy) seeking to gain power at all costs. The government was using it for disinformation, journalists were using it, employers (local governments) were using it to throw up all sorts of red herrings and conduct unsubstantiated personal attacks. Roger felt that it was entirely appropriate for the elected leadership and the Executive Board to suspend democratic procedures and ban the website (you could be thrown out of the union for going there. The website was a costly distraction from the real issue which was fighting the State not the internal democracy problem.

Not surprisingly, the two dissent members of the FBU representing the un-official website didn’t see it this way. When the website was first conceived it was never intended to undermine the union. It was simply a place where rank-and-file members could exchange ideas and comments in an on-line forum. Things started to go sour when communication with the leadership was shut down and that their main source of information on the strike became the newspapers. This lead to the belief that the members were being sold out.

Numerous attempts to get the leadership to participate in the website were rebuffed and, instead, the FBU tried to set up their own “official” website but found it was too much work. The members didn’t dispute that the “open” nature of the website encouraged mischief but they felt confident that they’d identified the government plants on the website and threw them out. You now need a password to enter.

The site was enormously popular with the rank-and-file with up to 2,000 members on line at the same time. They were innovative, for example, posted comments and pictures from various media celebrities pledging their support. Essentially, the members felt that by boycotting the site the official leadership left the field open for people to attack them with impunity. This morphed the site from its original focus into the “FBU police”.

The Firefighters used the website to honestly speak their minds and they felt that this is what the official leadership really had a problem with. After the failed negotiations members have been voting out the leadership as their terms expire and this shows the true breadth of support the website.

This workshop had the most lively debate of any of the workshops during the two days. Comments tended to divide into those who maintained that new digital technologies were prone to manipulation by enemies of trade unions and those who felt they held the potential to increase grassroots participation and invigorate unions.

My own feelings were that member democracy doesn’t equal chaos and union leadership doesn’t equal authoritarianism. The fact that the small circle of leadership was under such stress that they couldn’t tolerate, or incorporate, any degree of dissent was a strategic weakness. If anything, this is an argument for expanding the circle of decision makers so that the burden can be shared by a wider group. I believe that enhancing the democratic input of members directly leads to ownership of the struggle, an essential ingredient for solidarity and victory.

This particular struggle was a great case study of the use of ICTs in organizing and I hope to learn more about it.