"Free Edition" Unionism vs Open Source
Isn't "free edition" unionism more descriptive of efforts by unions like SEIU to broaden their base and encourage participation of non-union workers than "open source"?
Don't we want a true open source unionism, one where the actual contents and workings of the "software" are open to critique/revision/challenge/innovation, a unionism that looks more like Drupal or Linux than AVG?
I'm a big fan of AVG, by the way, and support the idea of making unionism beneficial to non-members. (Bill Pearson and others did that in his old UFCW Local -- see Retailworker.org)
But, U.S. unionism is in collapse and the current leadership is generally seeking for authoritarian solutions -- more like "closed source" unionism. Imagine if your union were a browser, wouldn't you want to hack it? Rewrite the grievance code? Enable all the participation modules and give workers permissions beyond just "access content"? (Forgive the Drupalese!)
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where is the rest of this discussion?
I think your comment must be in response to something but
now it has been disconnected from that. However it sounds
like an interesting topic.
My understanding of what SEIU likes to do in the ideal case is show that people can get benefits from union activity even if they are not
explicitly trying to get exclusive collective bargaining representation of that workplace. That's a very good idea and a very good thing to do if you can pull it off. To do that they may do things like unearth a lot of unfavorable publicity about an employer, research and publicize wage and benefit disparities, and so on. So they may be able to show
that wages, benefits,working conditions, climate and whatever improved because of the union involvement. This is compared to the organizing campaign disaster classic where people try to organize a union, management cans all of them, which teaches everyone that unions are bad for your welfare.
Or a case where the union has a drive to change temporary part-time jobs to fulltime permanent jobs and succeeds but throws most all the former part timers out of work vs creating a few plum positions. In such a case the large number of people "screwed" by the union floating around being understandably resentful is harmful to future union campaigns.
It is true tho that SEIU is doing this where the business can not be offshored in an instant. Whereas with a lot of
other jobs the job site will move to another state or country if there is any sign of union action. Perhaps a way
to counteract that is expand the scope of the effort way
above one single employer or worksite.
a non-sequitur but...
Sorry, that post was a bit of a non-sequitur. I was working on something else and realized that rather than get caught up in an argument about what "open source unionism" is, I could offer a different term -- free edition unionism -- that better described the ethos of what some people call "open source unionism."
My point is that open source is a great concept and that, if applied to the union movement, it would be much more radical than simply experimenting with different forms of associate membership.
I'm not opposed to that experimenting, just as I am not opposed to free edition software. But, I want to encourage people to imagine a unionism that was truly "open source." One where its members become authors, developers, collaborators, with full ownership rights and access privileges...
SEIU, sadly, seems to be going the opposite way, making the source code even harder to crack, removing the opportunities for ownership, control, power except insofar as workers embrace "the program."
The development of open source software offers a powerful metaphor for an alternative unionism, I think.
open source unionism
I would get away from open source the software term because
that tends to only mean that people could see the source. There
have been a number of cases where open source software that
had been FOSS (Free and open source) became not free. If you're highly dependent on a free product and it goes commercial that is not a good thing. That's
probably not what you wanted to happen in the open source
union. I think it deserves a brand new name.
There's an interesting book that covers in particular the
SEIU plan in it's ideal form. Yep sounds good on paper :-)
Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement
by Rick Fantasia
http://www.powells.com/biblio?PID=23921&cgi=product&isbn=0520240901
"Don't be evil" unionism?
I think you're probably right about the wisdom of using "open source unionism." (Or other such catch phrases.) But I think that there is value in taking some of the ideas and assumptions that characterize open source, creative commons, etc. and applying them to labor unions. Why? Because it throws into relief the stultified, bureaucratic/autocratic, top-down features of our current unionism. And because it may help us think "outside the box" as the cliche goes: what would it mean to make our unions more collaborative, transparent, participatory, etc.?
It seems particularly useful when looking at unions that are pursuing the path of centralization and consolidation, and creating increasingly powerful bureaucracies.
But, better to talk specifics than lean on catch phrases.
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