LabourStart: What Do Unions Need to Do Online?   by Seth Michaels, Aug 18, 2009

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Adam Wright and Chris Garlock from the Washington, D.C., central labor council joined national and international participants for the LabourStart conference meeting at the AFL-CIO this week.

At this week’s LabourStart conference—much like at last week’s Netroots Nation conference—union communicators, activists and bloggers are taking a close look at how the union movement is approaching new media. Where are we doing the right thing, and where are we lagging behind?

LabourStart attendees agreed we as labor communicators need new studies of what the union movement—in the United States and around the world—is doing online. Today’s morning session highlighted the healthy debate about how to go forward—do we need a scholarly study or a practical handbook to use on the ground? Do we need to focus on broad, large-scale campaigns that attract a lot of attention, or do we concentrate on small, focused local campaigns where we can have more of an impact? And how do we utilize new media tools to get people engaged and get leverage in campaigns?

Andrew Casey of the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) noted that, since the companies, interests and issues that unions are contending with are global in reach, we need to use online tools that allow people all over the world to take part in campaigns.

One of the primary ways unions are actively reaching out online is through e-mail campaigns, which they use to generate knowledge of and mobilization around political issues and raise awareness about campaigns in support of workers. LabourStart runs several simultaneous campaigns, driving activists to get engaged in campaigns around the world. In one recent success, shop stewards had been fired from a South African paper company after standing up for a worker who refused to take part in unsafe work. Thanks in part to LabourStart’s e-mail campaign, the shop stewards were re-hired.

Another way unions are using media tools to mobilize is through SMS texting, taking advantage of widespread use of mobile phones around the world. One Australian construction workers’ union is using texting to send alerts to workers when outdoor temperatures are too high to work. A Botswana union utilized text messages to organize a strike.

Social networking tools are growing in importance for unions to get out the message. Richard Negri, a Teamsters (IBT) staffer who writes for UnionReview.com, says Facebook is a way to directly reach out to rank-and-file members. He says Facebook has been effective for driving turnout to events. Chris Garlock of the Metropolitan Washington [D.C.] Council says that followers of the Metro labor council’s Twitter account are the first to hear about new job postings, events and breaking news. Participants agree that the important thing is to not put all your eggs in one basket but to be ready to use a wide variety of social networking tools to reach members where they are. Different social networks are additive, not replacements for each other.

To add to this mix, LabourStart created UnionBook, a union-only social networking site, to contribute to union members’ ability to be active online. LabourStart founder Eric Lee said that UnionBook has an audience of nearly 4,000 union activists, and that it’s not limited by the same strictures as private entities like Facebook and Twitter, which can exercise control over activists’ content and even delete information.

The most important thing, moving forward, is to build on these individual successes and learn from them, so that new media campaigning is a vital and integral part of any union effort, and so unions are as up to date as possible in how they talk with and listen to their members.

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