Online union cards

The online union card is a simple form which invites a worker to provide her contact information to the union, so that an organizer can contact her about forming a union in her workplace.  This is perhaps the simplest way of reaching out to workers who might be interested in a union, and it is in wide use; examples include the AFL-CIO's Join a Union form, Change to Win's Join our Movement form, and the Contact UAW Organizing form.  There are dozens of others.

At first blush, these forms all look more-or-less the same; however, there are some important distinctions between them.  After reviewing severaly union "Join us" pages a couple months ago, I concluded that there are several things unions should do to entice workers to fill out these "join us" forms:

• Develop a Join Us micro-site, dedicated to the sole purpose of encouraging workers to fill out the contact form.
  
• Provide good, accessible, well-organized content, which gives workers the information they want, and entices them to fill out the contact form.
  
• Include a contact form; make it easy to find; prominently ensure confidentiality and follow-up.  Confidentiality and follow-up are very important in a union contact form - they help earn the confidence of workers who might fear on-the-job retribution for union activity.
  
• The site should be visually pleasing and fun.  It's surprising to me how many union websites are either poorly designed, or remarkably somber and serious.  Forming a union is serious work, but solidarity can be exhilirating, immensely satisfying and, dare I say it, fun.  There's a ton of union artwork and music which attests to this side of union life, and that kind of multimedia should be woven into "Join us" sites.
  

I happen to think UAW has one of the best Join Us websites around.  At Communicate or Die, Matt Noyes pointed me to the UE's organizing section, which is also excellent.  One of the easiest things unions can do, I think, is to improve their "Join Us" sections along these lines.

One of the most interesting "Join Us" websites around, I think, is Younionize, run by the New Unionism network.  This site is like a Join Us micro-site, except that it's unaffiliated with any particular union; the idea is that when a worker fills out the site's Younionize form, the organization will review the worker's information, and send it along to organizers in an appropriate union.  In the same discussion I linked to above, Matt Noyes also provided some interesting critiques of Younionize.  These are reasonable critiques, but I think Younionize is laudable because it makes an honest effort to recruit new individuals to the labor movement in a very non-threatening, accessible way.  I'd be very interested to see other organizations start similar efforts, and to see how the various efforts stack up; such experimentation might provide us with keen insights into the way workers experience "Join us" websites.

"Join Us" websites take on a new meaning entirely in the context of open enrollment unions.  Open enrollment unions, like the National Writers Union or WashTech, allow any worker to join the union, at any time, regardless of where the worker actually works.  Although these unions can't legally negotiate contracts on behalf of all of their members as a single bargaining unit, they can provide the worker with benefits, like health insurance, job boards, career advice, etc.  For these types of unions, a Join Us website can enroll new workers on the spot, in the same way that any membership association can enroll new members online.  Fortunately, it looks like open enrollment unions do understand this idea, as most of the ones I've looked at offer these kinds of instant sign up options.  Obviously, the power of this kind of instant sign-up is limited by the kinds of industries in which open enrollment unions are active, and at the moment, there are a very small number of such unions.  While labor law limits the bargaining power of open enrollment unions quite a bit, unions might be well-served by investigating new opportunities for creating open enrollment unions which can enlist new members online.

Regardless of how Join Us websites evolve, it's important to realize that they are, in many ways, of very limited use.  Relative to the number of potential new members available online, only a very small number will visit union websites, and an even smaller number will actively take the step of soliciting information about forming a union.  If unions are to reach out to workers who are not already keenly interested in unionization, they must do one of two things: create a platform for workers to talk about their worksite, or find the places where workers are holding those conversations already.

Creating a platform for worksite discussions

The web is a wonderful place to have a wide-ranging, long-term discussion, to air grievances and to hash them out with others who might have similar views.  Progressive bloggers have learned this lesson many, many times over, and the progressive movement is immeasurably stronger because of that.

Unions should take this lesson to heart, and apply it to discussions about worksites.  Indeed, in some cases, workers are ahead of unions on this score; for example, workers have coalesced around Mini-Microsoft as a place to chat about what's going on at Microsoft.

Unfortunately, I think many unions have not yet considered the kind of value they can derive from creating a platform for workers to discuss their workplace in an open, worker-to-worker way.  Compare, for example, the anti-Wal-Mart websites WalMart Watch, Wakeup WalMart, or WalMart: the high cost of low prices with WalMart's own pro-company blog, Life at WalMart.  Of these four sites, only two (WalMart Watch and Life at WalMart) have blogs at all, and only Life at Walmart has a a blog which is focused on workplace experiences.  Granted, the blog is heavily slanted and doesn't allow comments.  But why isn't there a pro-worker blog which tried to capture a realistic portrait of what working at WalMart is like, and which provides workers with a chance to talk about their own experiences openly?

I think workplace blogs can be an incredibly important platform for helping workers self-organize.  Workplace blogs can help workers collectivize their problems, and realize that the complaints they have about their workplace are shared by others.  Moreover, blogs are a good place to plot out collective actions and to begin to solve common problems together.  In other words, a workplace blog can be the seed to a successful unionization campaign, can help identify the issues likely to come up in a campaign, and might even help union organizers identify potential allies who might join an organizing committee or otherwise help out with a campaign.

Because blogs are relatively cheap to start, I think unions should experiment with workplace blogs.  They should create many new workplace blogs, each attempting to reach out to a different group of workers.  If each blog is equipped with a few sympathetic workers who will post about workplace issues from time to time, the blog could become an important platform for workplace discussions; with very little investment, it could become the kernel of a successful organizing drive.

Naturally, many of the blogs will fail, won't really garner a very large audience, and might die out due to lack of interest.  But even these blogs will contribute to success in other places, as they help unions learn lessons about online workplace discussions.  Moreover, blogs which don't lead to successful organizing drives might still inspire workers to think of their workplace problems collectively, and that will only benefit the labor movement in the long run.

Many of the failures will probably be due to internet access problems - that is, a blog will fail because not enough of the workers who might be audience members will have access to the internet, or will not be accustomed to using or participating in blogs.  In some cases, it might make sense not to bother trying in the first place.

On the other hand, there are some workplaces where a large bloc of workers are computer-literate young adults who are capable of, and customized to, using blogs to interact with one another; retail and restaurant workers comes to mind, as do a variety of creative industries.  Unions attempting to organize these kinds of industries should take a long look at blogging as a means of seeding an organizing drive.  The costs are low, and the potential benefits are quite high.

Find the conversation and join it

In many cases, a conversation about a workplace is already going on, and the task for unions is to find it, learn what the "word on the street" about the workplace is, and, if appropriate, turn the conversation towards collective action and organizing.

This task is devilishly tricky, because there are so many places the conversation could be happening.  For example, someone who normally blogs about her local sports team could post a workplace rant after a particularly bad day; or a group of disgruntled workers could form a Facebook group or MySpace profile to thumb their nose at an employer (in face, Maggie Mead already did); or workplace conversations could pop up in response to posts on Flickr or YouTube.  Moreover, these kinds of conversations can be very difficult to find via Google; after all, not every complaint about working conditions at Target is carefully labeled "Complaint about working conditions at Target".  It's easy to imagine a disgruntled worker placing a hypothetical complaint like that under any number of headings.

Making things more difficult still, not every workplace conversation will feature a disgruntled worker with a complaint that needs to be addressed.  Work can be fun, interesting, mildly frustrating, or simply mundane, after all, and workplace conversations are bound to represent all of these sides of work, although some sides are likely to be over-represented in the conversation.  And that is where tapping in to workplace conversations can be most thorny: union organizers are probably best advised to leave conversations that don't really revolve around problems in the workplace alone, and not to intrude on quasi-private conversations.

However, the web still contains a rich archive of workplace rants and discussions, which could be a promising entry-point for conversations about unionization.  Obvious places to start are Facebook groups and MySpace pages specifically dedicated to a particular company, like Target's Facebook page, which features a worker rant within the first ten wall posts (and that's just the tip of the iceberg - WalMart's Facebook page has a full-fledged ongoing revolt); blogs which are focused on chewing out a workplace; and other community websites which are company-specific.  It's possible that a well-placed comment in such a community could engender interest in a unionization drive - assuming, of course, that the commenter respects community guidelines.

The main obstacle, I think, to doing this kind of online outreach is the organizer's time.  Union organizers do not typically have a lot of time to go trolling around blogs and wall post threads, hoping to drop well-timed hints about organizing.  If unions are to take advantage of this potential source of new members, I imagine they will have to deputize volunteer activists to do this kind of trench work.  That's an entirely different type of endeavor, and I'll discuss it in more detail in a future post.

New organizing opportunities

Each of these approaches to using the web to communicate with workers who are not in the midst of an organizing campaign is, at the end of the day, about finding or creating new organizing opportunities, which otherwise might not be available, or readily apparent, to a union.  In a political and market environment which is hostile to unionization, this kind of aggressive expansion into new territory is absolutely necessary.  Moreover, considering the relatively low cost of this kind of online action, there's quite a lot of potential gain in membership to be made for a relatively small investment.