Jason Pramas's blog

On October 16th and 17th, I organized a Digital Media Conference at Northeastern University under the auspices of the National Writers Union Boston Chapter - and my online metro news publication, Open Media Boston - to address a growing list of changes in the creative industries that are making it increasingly difficult for creative workers like writers to make a living. The situation is even worse for those many creators that are freelancers. Or to put it in labor terms, those creators that are contingent workers. Because one major problem that the labor movement has not yet been able to deal with in a comprehensive way is the resurgance of contingent work (a.k.a. contract work, indpendent contracting, temp work, day labor, etc.) in the modern economy. As labor's power has waned over the last 4 decades, our movement has lost the ability to control core labor markets enough to ensure basic labor standards for most workers. And we are being pushed to return to 19th century labor conditions by large corporations in ways that are very hard to defend against.

Many of the technologies I've discussed here at Communicate or Die over the last year are primary accessed as online services - available for free or cheap for use by the general public. This may seem like an odd thing to do on a company blog. Even one run by a unionized and pro-labor technology company like Prometheus Labor Communications. But the main mandate that my boss, Steve Dondley, gave me for CorD was to explore technologies of interest to the labor movement. And it's virtually impossible to do that without talking about various online services ... some, but not all, of which offer functionalities that compete with some of the services we offer our clients on the Drupal website we build for them. And most of which are owned by large corporations that we have serious problems with as a group of folks with strong labor backgrounds.

For several years, Google - the search engine giant - has been scanning books in major libraries around the world, converting the scans to searchable text, and allowing users around the world the ability to scan the content of what is now millions of books for free. Great you might think. More power to them.

But not from the perspective of union writers. Yes, you heard me right. Union writers. Many of you may not be aware that writers of all kinds have had a union in the U.S. since 1981 - the National Writers Union - which has been part of the United Auto Workers since the early 1990s as Local 1981.

The NWU is the main American writers organizations that approaches the publishing industry as an industry and writers as working people. As such, it takes positions sometimes at variance with other writers organizations. The Google Books situation is precisely one of those issues.

The Communication Workers of America just released their 3rd annual Speed Matters report on broadband upload and download speeds by state across the U.S. Like their last report - that I wrote about in these pages a while back - this year's report makes the rather obvious case that America needs better and faster broadband internet coverage. They indicate that we're only number 28 in the world in average internet connection speed - still a shockingly low number considering that the internet was primarily created by the American military together with American research universities with public money.

Just a note to the Communicate or Die community that we're cleaning up this site, and trying to get back to a regular publishing schedule. The growth of this blog's sponsor, Prometheus Labor Communications, has meant that all staff - including me - have been busily building websites for unions around the U.S. ... to the detriment of our ability to write regular commentary on labor and the internet. We'll see if we can get things back on track in the next few weeks. If our regular contributors are interested in kicking some posts in that would be great. There are certainly plenty of developments to discuss.

Recently the AFL-CIO launched a new site called Unemployment Lifeline that uses modern social media to provide a place for laid-off American workers to get some help and to connect - often for the first time - to the labor movement.

The surprisingly colorful and attractive site (sorry, but as someone involved in building labor websites, I notice that many union leaders ask for, shall we say, plain design concepts) offers a variety of ways for people to get involved with actions for national health reform and against giveaways to big business. It also provides forums where unemployed folks can talk with each other and compare notes, a calendar of relevant events nationwide, and a resource page where people can turn for human services and legal advice.

Last month, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters made cutting-edge use of the free streaming video service UStream - which I believe we here at Prometheus Labor Communications had turned them onto last fall - to a live broadcast of a debate between their aircraft industry organizers and leadership of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Organization. The event was called to help inform workers in an Oregon-based unit that is trying to decert from AMFA (translation for non-union folks: leave their old union) and join the Teamsters. Very interesting from both a technology perspective and a union democracy perspective.

The web is a funny place. For the first time in history all sides of pretty much any debate you can think of are present in the same medium with similar ability to ascertain what every other side is up to strategically at any given time. In English, I mean that for the first time in human history it is possible for working people to watch the watchers ... or more to the point, the bosses.

So as I trolled around my various social networking sites I happened upon an alert about an upcoming event at nearby Harvard Law School. It said that a bunch of corporate and military types descend on the place every few months for a special two-day session called "Dealing with an Angry Public" sponsored by Harvard Law's Program on Negotiation.

In my web-trolling for this blog, I happened upon mention on a Department of Labor Grant Program called Technology-Based Learning Grants in a Reuters release of a government press release. The purpose of the grants, according to (the thankfully) ex-Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, is to "increase workers' access to skills training through the Internet, video teleconferencing and other technology-based learning media." In the 2008 cycle, the DOL gave out $10,000,000 under the program.

But funny thing, not a plug nickel of that money seems to have gone to labor unions - many of which, I do hear tell, have just these kinds of skills training programs for their members and even for non-members in some cases.

ArsTechnica, one of my favorite tech news sites, has been reporting for some months now that the much-hyped One Laptop Per Child project has fallen on hard times. This is interesting news for labor techies ... although a little background is in order to explain why.

OLPC was announced at the ever labor-friendly (not) World Economic Forum in 2005. The concept was straightforward - create a small laptop that can be cheaply mass produced and sold to the governments of poor countries for $100 per unit to distribute to schoolchildren and help close the "digital divide."

A couple of months ago at a talk at MIT on social media, I made a point that in a down economy, we should not assume that all the nifty free services we've all come to expect on the web are going to remain free forever. After all, only 10 years ago we still had to pay to have simple listservs and forums. We had nothing like YouTube or Twitter or Facebook and so on.

Yet we know that the business model companies have built many of these major services on - and they are, alas, mostly corporate run at this point - has been advertising-based. That is, these companies offer a service to users like us for "free," but hope to turn a profit based on selling advertising to other companies.

As 2008 draws to a close, I just wanted to say that it's great to see Communicate or Die going strong. Part of the reason is that Steve and I post here regularly, and a growing group of members do too. However, there are lots of folks we haven't heard from yet, and we'd really like to in the weeks and months to come.

In an age when workers in all sectors are making ever more frequent use of mobile communications and computing technology, it is critical for the labor movement to devote a significant amount of time to thinking about exploring new organizing techniques that can take advantage of this development.

What does your union do when it's involved in a media-worthy event? Does it use its own public relations staff to get the union's perspective in the media's eye - and though them, the public eye? Does it hire a labor-friendly public relations company to do press work? And what about taking advantage of new social media technologies of the type we've engaged in an extended examination of here at Communicate or Die? Does your union make use of online social networks to get word out directly to large numbers of people in target markets? Does it have staff dedicated to this new and growing aspect of public relations work?

Oftentimes what's good for people as consumers is also good for people as union members - and vice versa. Case in point, consumers' expectations that quality goods won't, say, explode when they're not supposed to coincides nicely with the elan that union workers demonstrate as regards their ability to produce quality goods. Labor's explanation for this pride in a job well done is that union workers have decent benefits and make fair wages, and because of that are in decent health and spirits. Which all translates to being able to do their best on the job, and results in their production of quality goods.